Facebook have, yet again, pulled a fast one and changed the game on us marketers.
But don’t worry, whilst a significant change it’s one that’s relatively easy to adapt to.
We’ve got all the details on Facebook’s mandatory change to campaign budget optimisation below.
Facebook’s announcement on campaign budget optimization
Facebook is changing the way you’re able to set the budget for your ad campaigns.
In short, all campaigns – existing and new – are being moved to Campaign Budget Optimisation this September.
There wasn’t the usual full announcement for this. Facebook simply updated the help article on the topic to include the below opening.
What does this mean for you as an advertiser?
Well, quite simply, all budgeting will be set at the campaign level and not at the ad set level.
Facebook will then automatically decide how that budget should be best split between ad sets.
Here’s a visual on the difference.
In theory, this should help you better optimize your ads.
The Facebook algorithm will make on the fly decisions regarding which ads should be featured and which should have their budget reduced due to poor performance.
As Facebook put it in the above-mentioned help article, you’ll benefit through:
- Getting more value from your campaigns
- Reducing the time spent optimising campaigns
- Having a simplified campaign management
- De-duplicating your audiences through removing overlaps between ad sets
- Avoiding restoring the learning phase
- Having a more efficient spend across your ad sets
However, I know a lot of marketers out there who might bemoan the lack of granular optimization they can now employ.
Fear not, there’s still a way to control spending at the ad level.
How to still control ad set spending
Whilst you’ll no longer be able to set the budget for each ad set, you are able to set bid caps for the ad sets themselves.
That means you can set a minimum spend for each ad set which facebook will try to hit.
And if you add in a maximum budget for an ad set, Facebook will not exceed it.
Facebook words it as “desired/non-guaranteed minimums and/or guaranteed maximums”.
This isn’t quite the same as setting your budget for each ad set, but it does go some way (quite a long way really) to mimicking that functionality.
You’re not losing full control over your ad sets. The control is simply moving to a slightly different model.
One which, if Facebook continues to optimize their algorithm, should result in more effective campaigns and better performing ads.
What does this mean for advertisers?
This is a relatively big change.
The habits, processes, and expertise of some marketers will be thrown through a loop.
It’s going to take a little while for all of us to adapt to this forced change.
However, it also appears it’s our only option. Facebook isn’t going to go back on this decision so we have two options.
- Become indignant and rail against something that won’t change
- Embrace the shift and learn how to make the most out of it
And honestly, embracing this change isn’t going to be too tough for many marketers.
Because the ability to control bid caps at the ad set level is staying, you’ll still have a decent level of control.
And you should be exercising that level of control for one primary reason.
Facebook’s algorithm, whilst sophisticated, has its own goals.
Depending on how you set up your ads, those goals will be to get you the best engagement/impressions/clicks at the cheapest price.
However, unless you’re using a social selling solution like Jumper that drives sales directly on social platforms, Facebook isn’t going to be able to track purchases within the platform itself.
That means that whilst you might be getting cheaper clicks, you might not be making more sales.
The algorithm might optimize for cheap clicks which drive poorly qualified traffic.
You’ll need to keep a close eye on how the cheaper engagement is translating to sales and use the ad set bid caps to add that level of granularity back into your advertising.
What we’re doing at Jumper for this
We’re working on a more detailed integration with Facebook. When live, it’ll allow you to track Jumper social sales through your Facebook ad account dashboard.
This should bring closer alignment between the ads you’re running and the sales you’re making through social.
Which, we believe, will make it easier and clearer for this new campaign optimization algorithm to better understand how to impact the metrics for your business that truly matter.
Revenue and profit.
If you’ve not yet signed up for Jumper but want to take advantage of this, sign up for a free account now and be one of the first to leverage this deeper level of integration.