Prepare to say goodbye to Facebook ad set budgets

Update: This story was updated on February 8 based on revisions and clarifications Marketing Land received from Facebook.

Facebook announced on Wednesday, starting in September, new and existing campaigns will be migrated to Facebook’s automated campaign budget allocation system that optimizes the campaign budget across an advertiser’s ad sets. Advertisers will have limited control over budgets at the ad-set level, only able to set minimum and maximum spend limits.

Since the publication of this story on February 5, Facebook revised its Campaign Budget Optimization Migration announcement. Facebook’s original announcement reported that advertisers would no longer be able to define budgets at the ad-set level.

Why you should care

Facebook advertisers are currently able to set budgets by ad set within a campaign, but, starting in September, when ad campaigns migrate to campaign budget optimization, advertisers will only be able to set minimum and maximum spend limits at the ad-set levels. Facebook says that advertisers will set one central campaign budget for all ad sets, and it will “automatically and continuously” distribute budgets in real-time to top performing ads.

The change will apply to existing campaigns as well, so if you have long-term or evergreen campaigns with specific budgets and performance expectations at the ad set-level, start thinking about what this change will mean for those efforts. Take the same considerations for any new campaigns set to run beyond September.

The goal, says Facebook, is to give advertisers better results at a lower cost by distributing a campaign budget based on the best performing ads, but the move takes a certain amount of control away from advertisers.

“You’ll have the ability to set one central campaign budget to optimize across ad sets, and we’ll automatically and continuously distribute the budget in real-time to your top performing ad sets,” said the company.

It also means advertisers will have to have faith that Facebook’s automated budget allocations will deliver efficient results.

More on the news

1. According to Facebook’s campaign budget optimization help page, advertisers will need to gauge the system’s success “based on the total number of results for your campaign and the average cost per optimization event at the campaign level” rather than at ad set-level results.

2. Facebook previously stated on its campaign budget optimization help page that advertisers would not have access to metrics such as the total number of opportunities for each ad set or how much each result costs when campaign budget optimization is running. It has since told Marketing Land that advertisers will still have access to metrics at the ad-set level after September, but are encouraged to focus more on the campaign-level metrics.

3. Facebook said BuzzFeed has tested the budget optimization tool for its content ads and achieved greater cost efficiencies and easier budget management, along with more video ad views and clicks.