Maximizing Facebook's Campaign Budget Optimization

Louis Guerrero, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Social @ Kenshoo

July 09, 2019

Learn how Facebook’s campaign budget optimization capability is even more powerful when paired with the Kenshoo Social platform

On November 8th, 2017, Facebook introduced campaign budget optimization (CBO). This capability enables their algorithm to manage an advertiser’s campaign-level budget across ad sets to improve results.

While CBO initially launched as optional, Facebook later announced that it will be mandatory for all advertisers on Facebook ads manager as of September. Despite this new mandate, CBO is still optional for Kenshoo clients. This gives you additional lead time to better understand and slowly transition to automating your Facebook ads campaign budgets.

What is Campaign Budget Optimization?

Campaign budget optimization enables Facebook advertisers to maximize the results of their campaigns with ad set-level budget optimizations. CBO distributes budgets across ad sets automatically to maximize results for the top-performing ad sets in real-time. This frees advertisers from making manual budget shifts across ad sets and allows Facebook to algorithmically optimize campaign budgets for them.

While campaign budget optimization is still optional, thousands of advertisers are exploring this capability. Facebook advertisers like Freebird, Helix, and easyfinancial have experienced success. According to Joshua Popsie, Head of Digital Marketing at Icelandair, “Facebook has not only helped us reach the right audiences in markets we fly from but has also increased the number of potential customers who are coming to our website and searching for flights.“

How Kenshoo adds value to Campaign Budget Optimizations

In addition to supporting Facebook’s ad campaign budget optimization capability and providing additional lead time before the feature is mandated, Kenshoo gives advertisers even more ways to scale their automated budget optimizations.

Automate budgets and bids based on conditions

Since budgets are controlled at the campaign level with CBO, optimizations must be executed from this level as well. Leveraging industry-leading technology, Kenshoo’s automated actions can trigger campaigns to adjust budgets or ad sets to adjust bids, statuses, update creative or send alerts based on various rules and conditions. Think of automated actions as a layer on top of CBO. While CBO is optimizing your budget between ad sets, automated actions are leveraging signals to help improve the relevancy of these campaign optimizations.

Beyond optimizing campaigns when click-through rate reaches a specific number, you are also able to optimize campaigns based on performance trends. Let’s say you don’t know what a low CTR is for your new campaign. You wouldn’t know what CTR limit to set before turning off an ad. With Kenshoo, you can automate a decrease in budget if the CTR has declined by 5% every week for the past month.
Kenshoo’s rule-based alerts and optimizations leverage signals outside of your Facebook advertising that may be impacting your campaigns. For example, you can have your bids increased when your competitor’s commercial airs, or automatically lower your budgets by 50% when it’s raining outside.

Adding flexibility to your campaign bids

With campaign budget optimization, advertisers on Kenshoo allow Facebook to take the driver’s seat on all budget and bid changes to drive performance. But what if you know what you want your ad bid to be? What if you know that you want to bid lower for people in certain cities and higher for your audiences between the ages of 18-24? Kenshoo offers a solution for enabling advertisers to set unique bids for different segments within a single ad set.

Advertisers currently have the data to identify who their best customers tend to be, who purchases the most products throughout their lifetime, and who would benefit the most from their promotion. By defining a unique bid against age and gender, Facebook advertisers can apply these findings to their campaign optimizations.
By defining bids based on operating system, device or placement, advertisers are able to offer an even better experience to their potential customers. With the ability to apply bids based on where the user is consuming the content within the same audience group, advertisers can offer more unique experiences to their prospects.
Without having to segment audiences and create more work with additional ad sets and bids, advertisers can set one default bid for all users within the ad set and a separate, much higher bid for their audiences that show signs of travel intent based on length of stay and time until travel. Kenshoo’s bid multipliers enable advertisers to pay more for higher purchase intent without the legwork non-Kenshoo users are used to.

Shift budgets across campaigns

As Kenshoo continues to evolve the way Facebook advertisers accomplish their goals, we are also adding even better ways to optimize marketing budgets. As campaign budget optimization maximizes performance for a single, determined campaign, Kenshoo is on its way to enabling you to shift budgets from campaign to campaign, which is currently not a CBO capability. Stay tuned for more on this!

We continue to see social advertisers marry CBO with Kenshoo and experience strong success. If you too are looking to maximize your Facebook results and learn about how Kenshoo adds value to Facebook’s capabilities, contact us for a demo today!