In previous articles we have seen how a campaign is structured and its levels:

• Campaign, in which we decide the main objectives and which contains our adset.
• Adset, a level at which we choose the target audience to go after and the optimization events against the targets we have chosen at the campaign level that contain the ads to show to these people.
• Advertisements, the ads that are within each individual adset.

In what, then, is the choice between a CBO and an ABO?

The choice is whether the budget should be managed by the campaign (CBO) or whether it is best managed at the individual adset level (ABO).

Why choose one or the other

ABO

If we choose budget management in ABO, then at the level of the individual adset, we have the ability to better control the spending of the individual adset and thus the individual targets we have chosen. This allows us to do test campaigns with the goal of figuring out what works best.

If, for example, I want to test which target audience responds best to my ads, I can create an ABO campaign with two adsets containing two different targets and allocate the exact same budget. This way I will be able to figure out which audience to target.

Same can be done for testing creativities, the process does not change. Perhaps in this case the two adsets have exactly the same audience but different creatives within it, so I have the opportunity to test as objectively as possible which message, angle or format works best with the target audience.

In short, thea ABO allows a spending control that enables the advertiser to test and understand what works and what does not. Conversely, it does not allow Facebook’s Machine Learning to be fully exploited.

CBO

In a CBO campaign, on the other hand, the budget is managed from the top, by the campaign itself. This allows the algorithm to decide where it is convenient to allocate the budget depending on the possible outcomes, going to decrease the CPA. In this case we are going to take full advantage of Facebook’s Machine Learning, optimize the results and decrease our errors. Conversely, it becomes more complex to go and have more control over the spending of individual adsets, leading to greater complexity of overall setup.

In a nutshell, the CBO will distribute the budget among the various targets according to an overall view of the users and their behaviors within all the campaign adsets, and will do so by sending more impressions to the targets that are likely to send more results, optimizing delivery from day to day by stabilizing results.

Considerations

There is no better or worse setting, there is a more useful setting depending on the goals to be achieved.

CBOs usually take longer to stabilize and usually do so only when creativities are performing.

It is usually best to start with ABO to find what works, and once you get the winning creatives from all those tested, you can move on to CBO so that the algorithm decides which audiences get to see them more or less.

When we work in CBO we need to be patient and leave it active until the learning is finished. It can usually take up to weeks, so consider well when to use it and when not to. In addition, one must be careful to increase the budget so as not to destabilize performance. It is always best not to increase the budget by more than 20% each day, I recommend increasing by 12.5/15% per day and not on consecutive days.