The importance of budget techniques in Meta Ads
A comprehensive guide to mastering financial strategies for advertising on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Old Social Techniques But Not Outdated
Meta always has a new feature or technique that is being pushed for consultants to try and grasp or master as soon as possible for the benefit of their client base. But not all new features are made equal, and some of the oldest features of Meta give the greatest insights.
Features as simple as Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) and Ad Set Budgeting (ABO) can cause arguments between even the most veteran of consultants. A lot of questions arise when asking, what is the best way to use one of Meta’s oldest features:
- Do we run a campaign with remarketing audiences, interest pools, and lookalikes split at the ad set level but using CBO?
- Do we cram all of the clients relevant audiences into 1 ad set with CBO running the spend?
- Do we do individual campaigns with individual audiences using CBO?
- Do we create individual campaigns with individual audiences across ad sets running ABO?
- Do we create a gigantic campaign with multiple variations of audiences broken down by specific key traits and budget paced by ad set budgeting?
Why Meta Advertising Budget Techniques Matter
The answers to these questions correlate with the level of management required for the clients. If a client gets great results with Campaign Budget Optimisation using multiple audiences in one campaign, that is brilliant but this also requires the least amount of management. The management of the client comes in at the amount of controllable parameters necessary to foster results. The larger the need for manual control, the more management that is necessary and thus the more parameters needing to be controlled.
Many national clients may float between Campaign Budget Optimisation with individualised ad sets based on creatives and funnel stage, or Ad Set Budgeting with a campaign breakdown for the same reasoning. ABO gives you the capability to double down on the highest performing audiences and move budgets away from audiences not currently performing.
Campaign Budget Optimisation falls under the same trap that Meta consultants give advice for other features: automation, so that the ‘Meta AI’ can facilitate best use of the marketing spend. While this can work when managed correctly with partly controlled parameters, what you will tend to find is if you expand ad set quantity in campaigns the budget will be spent across the cheapest auction cost impression (on the standard setup) rather than spread across the campaign. Meaning you may have one or two audiences over spending in relation to the others added into the campaign, requiring consistent pausing and unpausing of ad sets to test spend changes. Having long term performing CBO campaigns will also push spend in audiences previously getting larger spends, preventing new audiences added at the ad set level from gaining any traction.
Ad Set Budgeting on the other hand allows you to float budget between these audiences as you see fit, this though will require you being in the account more often as auction costs being higher for impressions can lead to good or bad results dependent on the consumers level of engagement with the brand or product.
Meta Advertising Budget Techniques Consequences for Small Business and Agencies
Ad Set Budgeting requires large amounts of management time due to the amount of parameters available for manual tinkering. This is best suited to larger accounts with clear goals for each campaign they want to launch. This is a highly time consuming strategy and needs to be reflected in management fees to clients, it would not be a good idea to be too specific with new brands as this is best used with large data sets of previous insights. ABO is also great for reporting, making it extremely clear where budgets were being spent, and when understood can be a great way to teach clients the reasoning for actions on the account.
The only other pitfall of ABO is the timing of optimisations, with Meta switching to a ranging budget model (max spends elapsing the daily limit set), consistent flips of budgets between ad sets can lead to overspends when not managed correctly. With all of the moving parts required for a large scale ABO campaign build out in a nation client, you can have too many plates spinning without adequate management hours allocated. To prevent overspends it is always best to optimise budgets at the start (before majority of spend is made) or end of a day (for the coming day), with budget movement not being too excessive in daily spend values.
Campaign Budget Optimisation requires less management dependent on its level of audiences per campaign. If one campaign has 10 audiences, pausing and unpausing ad sets will allow for spend to float and work to optimise the results for clients but can require more management and possibly limit opportunities as ad sets are paused. If each campaign has one ad set with key audiences for the messaging being used, this is similar to using ABO without the audience split. CBO can be a great way to limit management amounts required by the agency and thus giving a lowered management fee for clients (as long as results remain good).
As consultants we need to remember that these are options for how we see spend being used in the account. CBO can basically become ABO if you split your 1 ABO campaign with 20 ad sets into 20 CBO campaigns with 1 ad set each.
The decision of using CBO or ABO is completely dependent on both the agency’s and client’s situations. I hope that this article was helpful in identifying the use cases for both, leading to longer term growth of either your agencies or your business’ results.
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