If you’ve ever used Facebook, they have stored everything you have ever done: every picture, every time you checked in, everything you’ve ever liked or stopped to watch, every comment…
You get the picture.
It’s not controversial to say that Facebook has too much data on all of us. It’s a double-edged sword, though.
We help attorneys advertise on Facebook—and lots of lawyers love advertising on Facebook. If you can tap into the absurd data that Facebook keeps on its users, there is money to be made. Facebook uses one of the world’s most advanced machine learning algorithms to try to get your ads to the right people at the right time.
Love it or hate it, the algorithm is everything when it comes to Facebook advertising.
We’re always looking for ways to “massage” the algorithm to get it working better for our clients. And this article is all about one setting that every lawyer advertising on Facebook needs to investigate: Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO).
What is CBO?
Put simply, CBO extends the Facebook algorithm. When you run a group of ads, Facebook has always determined which of those ads will get you the most consistent cheap results. From there, it would spend different amounts on those ads. So, for example, if you set an ad set to spend $100 / day, Ad #1 might spend $20, Ad #2 $7, and Ad #3 the remaining $73.
With CBO, this logic applies beyond the ads to entire groups of ads (known in Facebook as ad sets). This means that Facebook’s algorithm will determine how to distribute your entire campaign budget to get you the cheapest, best results. Like with our ads example above, these ad sets may spend very different amounts.
Why should I care?
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: yes, Facebook will eventually require you to run your campaigns using CBO. This may be as early as 2020 for some ad accounts. This is the future of Facebook advertising, and Facebook is acting accordingly.
We’re pretty smart human beings, but we are still squishy and fallible. Facebook’s machine learning algorithm is smarter than even the best marketers at identifying all the little data points that lead to better ad results.
That’s why simply making a few changes and implementing CBO could drop your Facebook costs significantly. For one client, we saw leads plummet from $12 / lead to only $4 / lead.
One of the main reasons for this is an issue known as “audience overlap.” Normally, if you deliver Facebook ads to 2 different audiences, you run the risk of bidding against yourself. In other words, your ads are competing not just with your competitors but with your own ads.
CBO stops audience overlap issues in their tracks. You can have 2 ad sets with the exact same audience in a CBO campaign, and Facebook will ensure that the ads from one ad set do not compete with ads from the other ad set.
It does this by basically “turning off” and “turning on” your ads dynamically, moment to moment. This is the kind of thing that good Facebook advertisers do regularly, but we could never be as nimble or responsive as Facebook’s algorithm.
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This also helps address another key problem with Facebook ads: “ad fatigue.” Over time, your ads will be seen by the same audience members multiple times. This decreases how responsive they are to your ads, which increases your costs. With CBO, though, your ads naturally ebb and flow through all your different ad sets. Facebook will never be a “set it and forget it” platform, but CBO can slow down ad fatigue significantly.
Okay, so how do I do it?
Turning on CBO is a simple toggle on the campaign level. You can find multiple tutorials online if you Google it.
The difficult part is figuring how to use CBO to decrease your costs. Which campaigns should you run with CBO? What’s the best setup?
One technique that can be successful for lawyers is to separate out all your “cold” (never heard of you) and “warm” (familiar with your firm) audiences into 2 campaigns. Then, within each, group all your different marketing approaches.
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For instance, you could have one CBO retargeting campaign for auto accidents with your organic website traffic, your PPC traffic, and your Facebook page engagement. Then, you could have another CBO campaign targeting cold audiences with a variety of different approaches, such as a free auto accident e-book.
One caveat: within a CBO campaign, your ad sets need to either have the exact same objective (download that e-book) or objectives with basically the same value (such as 3 different e-books, all of which are equally useful for you to have leads from). CBO won’t work if it’s trying to optimize for one objective worth $10 to you (such as an e-book download) and another objective worth $100 to you (such as a contact form lead).
We also recommend going back to some of your older advertising approaches and reconsidering them in light of CBO. CBO is ripe for a “greatest hits” type approach to advertising, where you combine multiple different approaches from the past and present. In fact, CBO is at its best when it has LOTS of different ad sets to work with.
Another tip is for when you are promoting something your firm has produced (e.g., a blog post, video, webinar, etc.). By combining website retargeting, Facebook page retargeting, and a lookalike audience in a CBO campaign, you can let Facebook figure out how to get the most traffic for cheap.
Ultimately, our advice is to just test, test, test. All of your existing campaigns might be able to benefit from switching over to CBO. You never know until you test.
Takeaways
1. CBO is one more tool to help you harness the power of the Facebook algorithm.
2. Use CBO to group similar goals.
3. Test, assess, tweak, and test again. ◆
