THE ULTIMATE
CBO
COOKBOOK
The hungry Facebook marketer’s action-packed
survival guide to consistent profit and scaling with
Facebook Ads Campaign Budget Optimisation for
wildly profitable growth, right now.
Depesh Mandalia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
About The Author
PART 1: A Deep-Dive Into CBO
Scaling To $8M Using Structured Ad Sets
The CBO Engine Uncovered
Hack The CBO Algorithm
CBO Will Save You Time
CBO’s Your Money Maker
The Machines Are Already Here
Scale Fast or Scale Steadily?
Facebook Wants A Long Term Relationship - But It’s Not Complicated.
Key CBO Takeaways
PART 2: The GT-CBO Scaling Strategy
Priming CBO Via Testing
The GT-CBO Method
PART 3: CBO Recipes For Every Occasion
Recipe 1: CBO Testing
RECIPE
Recipe 2: CBO Prospecting
Running Smaller Budget CBO Prospecting
Recipe 3: CBO Scaling Recipes
CHEF DEPESH’S SPECIAL SCALING FORMULA
Scale Recipe 1: V-Scale
Scale Recipe 2: Nitro V-Scale
Scale Recipe 3: H-Scale Split
Scale Recipe 4: H-Scale Budget
Scale Recipe 5: M-Scale
Recipe 4: CBO with Small, High Intent Audiences
CBO WARM CAMPAIGNS
Recipe 5: DCO INFINITY RETARGETING
Recipe 6: DPA INFINITY RETARGETING
About The BPM Method
CORE-4
5W Avatar
3N Ads Formula
Graduation Testing
Account Calibration
Graduation Framework
4-Funnel System
FAQs - Curated From Facebook
About Campaign Budget Optimization
Turning On Campaign Budget Optimization
Spend Limits
Bid Strategies
Editing
Ad Scheduling
Reporting
Split Testing
Learning Phase
Further Reading
Selected CBO Case Studies, Wins & Challenges
Additional Links
Acronyms & Terms
Acknowledgements
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All rights reserved. No part of this book or ebook may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any
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piracy of copyright material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any educational or
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Introduction
If you’re currently advertising on Facebook at any level, this is for you. This guide
assumes a basic knowledge of Facebook advertising but has no ceiling - how you
use this will be determined by where you are right now and your goals based on your
ability to take this knowledge into your business.
CBO - or Campaign Budget Optimisation - which I define in more detail further on is
Facebook’s new budget management feature that is having a massive impact on the
7 million advertisers on Facebook - some good, but mostly bad.
Let’s turn this around into CBO being the best thing to happen to your business since
you started advertising on Facebook - deal?
There’s no requisite of knowing ​The BPM Method​ (my Facebook ads training
program), though there are multiple references to it. Those already on the course will
be able to stitch those pieces together however this has been designed to plug into
your existing campaigns.
This guide contains, facts based on information from Facebook together with
frameworks, strategies and tactics I gained from multiple millions in CBO ad spend in
Ecommerce and Lead Generation campaigns tested over a 12 month period.
These were run through my agency, SM Commerce which runs accounts for clients
and operates my own personal ad accounts in Ecommerce and Info Products. This is
tried and tested across industries and verticals, price points and funnels.
We’re constantly testing everything - new products from Facebook and what we
‘think’ we know works because it always has - it takes just one update from
Facebook to throw some strategies out of the water.
This is why I’ve focused on showing you the way you can make CBO work for you,
right now.
I’m revealing 12 months of test and learn with ad spends of all levels and numerous
calls and webinars with Facebook on this to show you the path to implementing it
successfully yourself.
Late 2017, I was not a fan - 12 months later we scaled an Ecommerce store to 21X
return on ad spend ($21 back for every $1 spent) with over $20M revenue - CBO
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played an important part in enabling this and since then we’ve never looked back
including a breakout
I’ve chosen the written format for this, rather than video, to support an international
audience to help as many people to achieve amazing results with CBO as I can.
This guide contains the why, not just the how, so you can learn, use and adapt the
knowledge to suit your business.
In February 2020 (at the time of writing), CBO will be the only way of managing your
budgets on Facebook. I’m lifting the lid on what’s in store, how to get CBOs working
now and to avoid the pit of despair during the CBO awakening.
This guide is split into 3 main sections; the first is my explanation of what CBO is and
how it works. The second part is a dive into how I use it, with a mix of ingredients and
recipes to implement right away. The final part contains further information I’ve
curated on a big list of common (and lesser known) areas of CBO from Facebook this guide is not endorsed by or affiliated with Facebook.
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About The Author
If I’m to earn your trust on the subject of CBO I should tell you why my advice is
relevant.
I’m D
​ epesh Mandalia​, an e-commerce ‘veteran’. Since Ecommerce only started in the
late 1990s and I started with it in the early 2000s, making me an old-timer - even if
the internet is still very young.
Beyond having experience of download speeds to make you cry, I’m a former web
developer that got lucky and fell into Ecommerce and in turn, fell in love with the
world of digital marketing.
In 2009 I helped an Ecommerce travel site take their online revenue from a few
million a year past 8-figures (that’s over ten million+ dollars) and through this, gained
valuable experience in the world beyond digital marketing, into TV advertising, direct
mail and outdoor advertising.
By 2012 I’d created my own revenue stream outside of the corporate world through
affiliate marketing whilst realising the rat race I was in was not the only way to earn
money. However in 2012, in need of a new, faster traffic acquisition tool away from
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SEO and PPC (organic and paid search which up to this point had been my main
traffic drivers), I fell into Facebook advertising.
A time unlike now, where advice and expertise was not readily available and a time
when I could not quite understand how people were generating sales through
Facebook. Boy, did I find out when in 2014 I helped a startup 10X revenue to $8M
then 3X that the following year to $26.5M!
This caught the eye of Facebook and ever since then, I’ve maintained a strong
relationship as an external advisor to the ads team - as both advocate and challenger
- promoting the platform as one of the fastest and profitable ways to grow to
8-figures, and challenging them to do more for advertisers like you and me.
This led me to create a Facebook ads agency, which has overseen more than $20M
in ad spend since 2017 and in launching my flagship training program in 2018,
collectively responsible for well over $100M in revenue generated by students.
Late 2018 we generated a 21X spending $341K to generate $7.1M profitable revenue
using these exact strategies including pushing $40-50K per day ad spends in 2019
with it right down to profitable $500 per day campaigns. This is a full spectrum CBO
guide.
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My mission is to bridge the gap between the Facebook ads platform and team, and
you, the marketer and business owner looking to profit more consistently with the
most powerful ads platform on the planet.
Oh, and I wanted to be a chef when I was as a teen for my love of cooking - I kind of
made it but in a different kind of way!
In 2018 I took to the stage in Bangkok dressed as a chef (as you can see further up),
delivering delicious recipes for Ecommerce scaling with Facebook ads - a 9-course
meal to last a lifetime.
For now, I’m cooking up our proven CBO recipes, together with ingredients and
methods.
Note: to avoid feedback on spelling and grammar, being from the UK this guide is
written in UK English - where parts are included from Facebook they are likely to be US
English. It’s intentional…
Enough about me, let’s turn it on to CBO. Shall we begin?
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PART 1: A Deep-Dive Into CBO
If you’re to conquer the beast, first study it, identify its strengths and weaknesses,
then plan your attack. In fact, a saying I live by is:
“failing to plan, is planning to fail”
Benjamin Franklin
It’s tempting to jump into new tools, features and products, which I’ve been guilty of
too. But as with anything with the potential to create big impact and change, it’s all in
the planning.
Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) was introduced by Facebook in 2017 as a way
of simplifying budget allocation together with real-time optimisation. It takes the
traditional way of managing budgets, at the ad set level (let’s call this ABO - Ad set
Budget Optimisation for simplicity) and moving this to the campaign level.
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Scaling To $8M Using Structured Ad Sets
At the time of writing, below is the typical campaign structure, where one campaign
can contain one or more ad sets and each ad set can contain one or more ads.
The diagram below is based on the ‘old’ way of managing budgets, for each ad set.
But, did you know that in 2014, things looked very different?
If you started advertising on Facebook from 2015 onwards, you’re probably not
aware that prior to 2014, Facebook simply had campaigns and ads - there was no
middle layer of ‘ad sets’, which was introduced in 2014 to simplify what was a
chaotic system which included targeting levels at both campaign and ad level.
So back then, budgets were handled by… ​campaigns​. Ad sets were introduced as a
container because it was really messy to manage your target and campaign
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PAGE | 8
structure effectively. Facebook then switched budgets into ad sets so really, CBO is
not new, it’s going back to what it was.
In fact, back when I scaled heavily in 2014 with my first Ecom success story to $8M
in revenue, creating a campaign structure that scaled with consistency was one of
my very first wins.
Up until then, I kept hacking things together - as many of us do when learning
something new - and if it worked great, if not, I hacked some more.
Kind of like how Facebook ads marketers run ‘micro ad sets’ - spreading low $1 to $5
budgets - good luck getting consistent 5-figure daily spends (great for dropshippers
and short-term marketers). I favour consistency, predictability, and profitability.
But on this one occasion, I took my lead from Google Adwords - I’d spent close to
$5M before jumping into Facebook ads - in 2014 Google did use ad sets (called ad
groups) - containers that held the ads together. This structure worked immensely
well because I could group ads for audiences better once I ported this over to
Facebook to create consistency, managing spend at the campaign level.
It’s what became the core part of Graduation Testing which I use to test and scale
my ads; a method by which my only goal is to see if an ad potentially works for an
audience. Like dipping bait into the ocean and seeing which fish bite at what bait so I
can serve up more of the same.
Things to consider:
- The ‘containers’ Facebook use, which are ad sets, campaigns, accounts and
business managers collect data and history.
- Ad sets contain the biggest impacting history and data - so when building up
for stability, your ad set stability (in terms of data) is crucial.
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-
-
Much of that history and data needs to pass to the campaign level campaigns are no longer just containers but active decision-makers - and the
campaign has as much weight as the ad sets.
Scaling can be high risk and stressful, or predictable and under control. CBO
generally favours predictable scaling which is explained further.
CBO aims to simplify by moving budget and bidding options to the campaign level,
leaving targeting, placement and optimisation at the ad set level and allowing
Facebook to decide which ad sets to share the budget to.
Why? It’s not as simple as making budget management easier - there’s an engine
behind CBO which does a lot more than just allocate budget.
The CBO Engine Uncovered
You want to know how CBO works right? This illustration below explains everything
you need to know about how Facebook designed CBO - our goal as hands-on, in the
trenches marketers, is to figure out how best to use this.
Oh, I did that, with millions in ad spend since mid-2018 on CBO - it’s worth noting
CBO was around for over 6 months before I decided to invest more heavily - rarely
will I go all in when Facebook adds a new tool - some work well, others don’t. I put
small budget aside for testing new Facebook products but if it ain’t broke… don’t risk
your ad account with shiny new objects!
The worst thing you can do is to destabilise performance when things are good.
If testing new products, for example when Story Ads came out, I’d run them with
small budgets that I’m comfortable burning with no profit. If you can’t afford to lose
the budget you set aside for testing, it’s not a true test budget - I’d often set aside
$500 to test new products Facebook add (unless I’m part of the early release in
which case Facebook often provide the test budget), with no expectation of
generating a profit, but to simply learn as much as I can. Set aside a small spend
anywhere from $20 upwards to test new products in a separate campaign to be safe,
if you want to test to see if they will work for you.
So how does CBO work?
Take a look at the following illustration:
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Here’s what you need to know:
1. Using ad set budgets on the left of the illustration, note the following:
a. Each ad set is allocated $10
b. Assuming this is n
​ ot​ using lifetime budgets (more on this later), this
instructs Facebook to try and spend $10 on each ad set, each day,
regardless of performance.
c. Each ad set works independent of each other, has no real-time
knowledge of the budget, performance or targeting of its neighbouring
ad set.
d. The campaign, therefore, acts mostly as a container and is passive in
terms of optimisation
2. Using campaign budgets on the right:
a. The campaign has a budget of $30
b. Facebook, through the campaign, control the allocation of budget at ad
set level
c. The campaign actively monitors performance of each ad set, targeting
and performance
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d. The campaign attempts to allocate budget to the best-performing ad
set based on the optimisation you have applied such as automatic
lowest cost bid, which objective/pixel event you’re optimising etc
e. This uses real-time data, every day, at the ad and ad set level to
attempt to place the spend in the most optimal way
That alone should give you food for thought, but let’s go a step deeper into what
Facebook wants us to take from this simple but deep illustration:
1. In the first example, $30 gets you 10 conversions, with the best ad set
providing a $2 cost per conversion (we’ll refer to this as CPA - cost per
acquisition) and the worst ad set providing a $5 CPA - overall a $3 CPA.
2. In the second example, $30 gets you 15 conversions - a 50% increase, with the
best ad set providing a $1.80 CPA and the worst $2.50 CPA. An overall $2
CPA.
In this example, CBO decided that in the time it took to spend that budget, ad set 2
was giving better performance and so made a real-time adjustment to which ad sets
received budget whereas using ABO and fixed budgets, you missed out on additional
conversions from ad set 2.
That’s the theory anyway… does it work? Yes - but there’s always a but - if the world
was plain vanilla it’d work 100% of the time. The variables? Your product, service,
funnel, expertise, data ability and more. So CBO, in theory, is great but there are a few
things you need to get right first.
Hack The CBO Algorithm
Before I go into what I believe is a complex system, let's just touch on AI vs ML artificial intelligence versus machine learning.
AI is the scary Terminator/Matrix films turned into reality where computers move
from passive slaves to masters of the human race by developing a thinking ‘brain’
beyond the human programming. Elon Musk says that is a real possibility, perhaps in
our lifetime - the proof is there, with some interesting AI developments happening at
the biggest tech companies in the world. And chances are whatever we know and
see its more advanced than we think.
ML is the passive computer that learns from its own programming to understand,
within the context of its own code, what’s happening and reacts to this. It’s contained
to its own programming so cannot become AI.
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As Facebook’s ML continues to improve across the platform, not just in CBO or ads,
Facebook believes they can manage your budget, daily, better than you so you can
spend more time on crafting great ad experiences.
This is probably true of 99% of the 7 million advertisers (at the time of writing) on the
platform - which by the way, if you take 1% of the 7 million advertisers, that is far
bigger number than the largest Facebook ads group in existence (around 100K+
members) to put those numbers into perspective.
Chances are, in fact, if you’re reading this article you’re in the 0.001% minority of
serious advertisers - go you!!
CBO has ML built-in which is the single fact you need to take away as to why it can
be more powerful than ABO for your business.
Down The CBO Rabbit Hole
A CBO enabled campaign contains coding which tracks ad set performance and
adapts during the day. If you’ve advertised on Facebook for any period of time you’ll
have experienced the ‘jumpy’ days of good and bad performance.
The one thing every advertiser craves is stability - consistently one of the most
challenging things with Facebook advertising no matter how experienced you are.
There are many factors that cause this, some in your control, some not.
As humans we don’t have full access to the data Facebook has on what exactly is
going on.
I recently shared deep insights at my mastermind event on troubleshooting
performance - for example when performance takes an unexpected dip - for me, it's
fairly quick to diagnose as I’ve been in the trenches of marketing so long, it’s quick to
spot an issue and find the fix. Now imagine you’re spending $10K per day and
performance takes an unexpected drop in 3 out of 5 ad sets running in your
campaign.
There are definitive steps you can take to analyse this and react, assuming you
caught this early - now imagine letting Facebook’s ML do this for you instead.
Facebook is tracking your ad set and ad performance in real-time with CBO. Whilst
running rules and automations are great, and at best (right now) they’ll fire every 15
minutes. Facebook is checking in more frequently.
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But it’s hard to trust the machines and even with my experience, I’m not happy to
leave full control to the machines, yet. Sure that day may come but right now we’re
not ready for that.
That is one of the hidden powers of CBO that, at the time of writing this, no one is
talking about and the majority are not aware of.
CBO allows you, once you’ve set up the right ingredients for the right recipe, to get
Facebook doing the dirty work for you - so you can spend more time on the bigger
levers that will grow your business.
“But I’m an advanced marketer that tracks performance like a hawk!!” said one of you
just now right?
Here’s what I say to that; you can manually track and adjust budgets and you can use
software to automate this too.
The question is whether you’re better at doing this than Facebook. Let me illustrate
that another way - where do you want to invest your time and money?
CBO Will Save You Time
Running CBO ads will save you time. In mid-2018 when we first figured CBO out, we
noticed that despite the performance being more stable and predictable, we were
checking our accounts less often and it reduced our stress on running CBO at higher
spend whilst scaling up.
It was a welcome ‘side-effect’ - less time optimising, checking rules, ensuring we
were hitting targets and keeping performance hot.
If used well, that time saved will mean more growth for your business, whether that’s
doing more with your creative strategy, website or testing new traffic sources.
I recall a conversation with an attendee at my San Jose Mastermind in May - his key
goal was spending less time managing his ad account. Sure, he was successful and
making good money, but became a slave to his ad account.
Everything I do is aimed at getting more, or making more, by doing less. That’s why
The BPM Method is a set of systems and why CBO should form an important part of
your systems.
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Below are some of the building blocks we use to build up for high profitability and
growth. CBO is hidden somewhere in the building blocks but is helping us right now
to make the process of ads management even slicker.
There’s a LOT that goes into creating stability and predictability in your ad account.
I’ve seen ‘experts’ come and go, not many stick around whilst their short-term tactics
fail on them.
You have to understand that CBO is a tool in your toolset and not a silver bullet.
CBO’s Your Money Maker
If saving time doesn’t appeal, how about making money? Let me be specific here
though as I’m not simply appealing to those that want to grow their business faster
or bigger.
I’m talking about reducing your stress by increasing predictability and consistency CBO plays a big part in this.
How this plays out depends on the ingredients you put in.
Did I mention I wanted to be a chef when I was younger? I loved that I could be given
a recipe, adapt it and create something similar but new.
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I see CBO as a set of recipes and ingredients which I will expand on but, along with
how an experienced chef might approach this, you can adapt and make this work just
right for your business. Take my ingredients, recipes and methods and make it work
for your business.
That’s why this guide is not a simple set of templates to follow, which would have
been quicker and easier for me to provide - because one size does not fit all.
I’ve gone into depth to show you the WHAT, WHY and HOW - what CBO is, why it
should be used and where, and then how we’re making it work.
Use the recipes and ingredients below and add your own experience, through testing.
Use CBO in the right way and scale your ad account!
The Machines Are Already Here
Evidence for this can be seen in how some advertisers have used Lifetime Budgets to
good effect - Lifetime Budgets allow you to set a start and end date/time for your
spend which has the distinct advantage of letting Facebook spend the right amount,
on a daily basis, to maximise your results over a period of time.
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PAGE | 16
The advantage over daily budgets with Lifetime Budgets is it allows Facebook to
react to daily changes in your performance and under or overspend to maximise your
results.
CBO is similar to Lifetime budgets in the old ad set method of budget management
except rather than setting a period of days, CBO is doing this DAILY.
Oh, you want to go even deeper than that? Y
​ ou can use CBO with Lifetime Budgets!
This means, every day and over the period of days you dictate, Facebook will
attempt to preserve budget if it cannot get you positive results.
It’s the ultimate sit back and chill approach - once you’ve given the CBO the right
ingredients - but it comes at a cost, which I’ll explain further below around
consistency and scale.
Scale Fast or Scale Steadily?
Now, if you’re reading this as someone that wants to scale fast, from $100 per day to
$1000 per day or $1000 to $5000 per day then using lifetime budgets isn’t going to
cut it because you lose much of the ability daily budgets give you in adapting in
real-time. For example, if by 11am you’re seeing amazing performance, you can’t
simply shift budget up using Lifetime budgets to scale fast, so you lose agility.
Bear this in mind however; the larger brands on Facebook with $1M+ budgets per
month are more likely to deploy Lifetime Budgets for stability and ease of use, as
they’re also less likely to visit Facebook ads groups for short-term hacks and focus
more on branding and customer experience - something which smaller or start-up
businesses don’t have the comfort when profit, revenue and cash-flow are of more
importance.
Facebook is not as keen as you in fast scaling - in fact it’s a warning sign for the
system that something is wrong. Try opening a new ad account and scale to $5K
spend fast, see how quickly your ad account gets flagged for manual review. Why?
Facebook Wants A Long Term Relationship - But It’s Not Complicated.
Here’s the thing; Facebook wants a 3-way relationship with you, for the long-term.
Just you, the advertiser, the user and Facebook.
Facebook knows the type of advertiser that keeps users happy are also in it for the
long-term.
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Here are a few examples; c
​ ompany 1​ has just started advertising on Facebook and
by installing the pixel, Facebook knows your site receives very little traffic (as they
can see total visits each day once the pixel is installed). They launch ads at $500 per
day and quickly ramp up to $5000 per day in ad spend over a period of 2 weeks with
a good ROAS. How cool? They then go further and in another 2 weeks are pushing
over $10k per day.
It might be a legit business with great infrastructure, with great customer support
and fulfilment and happy customers. But, in all reality, it probably isn’t. Because
Facebook operates on probabilities. Low-quality Ecommerce stores, black-hat
affiliate marketers and inexperienced business owners that don’t highly value
customer experience are likely to scale too fast for their business to keep up.
This results in a poor customer experience and, in many cases, those customers
blaming Facebook, leading to lower ad engagement. A disaster for Facebook and for
your business!
Let’s take ​company 2​ - they scaled but in a more ‘expected’ manner, launching their
ads at $500 per day and gradually growing their traffic and performance, whilst
ensuring their customer experience remained as good as they could get it. In fact, the
purchase experience was so seamless that customers don’t associate Facebook
with their purchase at all, it’s almost invisible to them that they saw an ad and
purchased. They’ve also scaled to $10k/d spends but they’ve grown their ability to
fulfil orders, respond to customers fast and keep refunds low. Guess which business
Facebook will favour?
Facebook essentially introduced M
​ onthly Satisfaction Score​ to deal with this.
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CBO can support both growth strategies but, if consistency and predictability are
important, scaling your ad account faster than you can maintain customer
satisfaction is a short-term gain for long-term pain.
Choose your path with Facebook - are you a friend or foe? I’m not here to judge your
path but only to give you insights into what lay ahead from the choices you make
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Key CBO Takeaways
1. CBO is a learning system which improves over time.
2. CBO requires, in my opinion, m
​ ore of a Learning Phase​ than a standard ad set
budget campaign and so needs time, spend and patience.
3. Higher budgets allow for wider testing and more stability because CBO
manages more variables than ABO.
4. Too many campaigns fail due to poor pixel implementation or tracking - get
this right else both reporting and CBO optimisation can go out of the window here’s an example of pixel auditing​.
5. Grouped audiences by size + quality provide more stable results because it
minimises variances.
6. Performance gets better and more stable over time and after more budget is
spent. Facebook advise on 50 conversions per ad set per week for stability; if
you’re running 5 ad sets that’s 250 conversions per week. But remember a
conversion is relative to your Objective; a Video Views campaign conversion
could be someone watching X seconds of your video (depending on what you
are optimising for) or a Page Post Engagement campaign conversion could be
50 ‘engagements’ a week, which is not a lot.
7. Setting minimum budgets is still preferable to override parts of the self
learning especially with new ad sets being introduced or tests run.
8. It’s a complex beast and Facebook are still tweaking and improving it.
9. Pre-testing ads and ad sets gives CBO the best chance of success.
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PAGE | 20
PART 2: The GT-CBO Scaling
Strategy
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a
day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed
him for a lifetime.”
Lao Tzu
Now you understand what CBO is about and why it’s important lets go into how I and
my team use it.
I showed you the inner workings in Part 1 in order to help you make better decisions,
take the recipes below and make them work even better for you.
See this guide as your ongoing companion to understanding and navigating CBOs.
It’s one of the biggest changes Facebook have made because of the underlying
impact on buying traffic in the auction.
If you skipped Part 1 in order to ‘get to the meat’, you’re missing a lot of knowledge
that will help you better understand and apply CBOs for your ad accounts. Do take
the time to read it.
The G
​ T-CBO Method​ is my stress-tested method of getting the best value from
CBOs and is driven from T
​ he BPM Method​ training program, containing our proven
frameworks and strategies for Facebook ads marketing.
I’m laying it out here for you in this guide as a way of creating highly scalable,
predictable and profitable ad campaigns.
So what is it and how does it work?
The method itself is focused on ​finding winning audience and ad combinations​,
then preparing them for scaling. There’s more that goes into optimisation,
retargeting, funneling etc however the GT-CBO Method is our way of finding profit,
scale and stability using CBOs.
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PAGE | 21
GT stands for Graduation Testing. After months of testing various ways of getting
CBOs to work, and if you read the earlier sections you’d understand, CBO right now
works best with pre-tested ads and audiences. It was designed to find you the best
users in your audience, based on your targeting and ads. So it stands to reason that if
you help CBO along, it will deliver.
Priming CBO Via Testing
Part of the Graduation Framework, G
​ raduation Testing​ (GT) is focused on testing ads
to match them to the right audiences, before looking to scale or stabilise.
The analogy is this: imagine each ad is a hook on the end of your fishing rod; each ad
set is a boat in the ocean and the part of the ocean your boat is focusing on, is your
ad set’s audience. What kind of fish you’re after and how hungry they are depends on
your rod and bait.
With this in mind, G
​ T focuses on dropping bait (ads) to find the right bait for the
right audience and importantly, aims to send multiple boats into multiple parts of
the sea​.
Once we’ve done this, we move those ad sets and ads into a ‘scale’ campaign and go
for a wider net on the audience once we know what resonates with them.
So now you understand the concept of GT, here’s how we use that to power up our
CBO campaigns…
The GT-CBO Method
1. Run CBO Testing​ - we want the best ad/ad set combinations, ready for scale.
2. Run CBO Prospecting​ - we use this stage to validate that the ad/ad set
combination will work. Our data shows around 95% hit rate of ads making
their way out of testing, working in the pre-scale phase (we’re after stability
first and foremost).
3. Run CBO Scaling​ - once we have 5-7 days of stability in CBO Prospecting, we’ll
move into scaling phase using one of the various scaling strategies below
depending on how and where we’re running this.
Simple right? Our entire CBO system contains 3 steps to make CBO work effectively.
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Above are results over a period of 8 weeks (results split 2-weekly) showing scaling
with GT-CBO and The BPM Method. Simple, but effective, reliable and predictable (as
far as Facebook allows you to be).
I’ve spent many hours, days, weeks and months trying to perfect this to be able to
distill it to you in as simple a format as possible. In fact we’ve spent the last 12
months using this same system before putting this guide together.
It’s dynamite!​ But how you choose to use it will determine how successful it will be
for you.
The following sections break down the exact ingredients and recipes that go into
making The GT-CBO Method work.
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PART 3: CBO Recipes For Every
Occasion
“No one is born a great cook,
one learns by doing.”
Julia Child
CBO is planned to be the only way to set budgets for Facebook ads campaigns. So,
well, I guess you’re going to be using CBO everywhere right?
For some of you, you’re all-in with CBO - and why not since it will be the only way to
manage budgets.
For others you’re not seeing the same success, so what do you do?
My advice is this; continue testing with CBO and use this guide to properly understand
and then to structure your testing and scaling around my experience with CBO.
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Recipe 1: CBO Testing
Here are some don’ts for you to consider when it comes to testing with CBO​:
- Don’t throw random ad sets and ads into a CBO campaign and see what
sticks, without researching avatars, audiences and angles
- Don’t stack lots of ad sets into a single CBO with high budgets and pause
losers expecting CBO to magically give you sustained results
- Don’t be overly restrictive on ad set level budgets via MIN and MAX spend
- Don’t overly optimise a CBO like you would an ABO - at least for the first few
days explained further below
There’s a lot of good and bad advice out there - all I can share is what has
consistently worked for us over the last 12 months with millions in ad spend. There
are those advocating using CBO as a food blender, pushing in ads and ad sets,
pausing losers, using duplications and more. This introduces a lot of wastage, which
if your budget is not a concern and you like to gamble, go ahead and try. It also
makes stability more difficult.
In fact most of the ‘hacks’ are short-term because Facebook either shut them down
or their algorithm adjusts to make them relevant.
As someone that values money and profits, whether I’m spending $100/d or $50K/d
on my campaigns, I prefer stable, repeatable results and logic over ‘spray and pray’
techniques.
I want to know WHY something worked so I can repeat it and know it’ll work again
with a high probability.
This comes from spending my own money back when I started with Facebook ads,
as well as handling client spend. It’s all the same to me - ‘treat others like you want to
be treated’ rings true in life and in business and is a core value at our agency.
Anyway, back to CBO domination; ultimately, you should ALWAYS test strategies for
your own business and ad accounts without assumption - and if you are going to
test, then go all in!
If you’ve not been through the introduction to CBO, there are a few things you need to
recap on:
1. CBO is a learning system and is different to ABO - the decisions made on
which audiences and ads to focus on change during the day.
2. If you’re constantly using a single CBO for testing, pausing out ad sets and ads
as your testing cycles end, this causes issues with the ML (machine learning) Copyright material of SM Commerce Limited (UK). Written and compiled by Depesh Mandalia. All copyrights reserved.
PAGE | 25
the clever nerdy stuff that Facebook implement to help you achieve your
goals.
3. CBO gets better over time, with stability - meaning the fewer edits you make
on ad sets and ads, the better the CBO learning algorithm becomes. Stability
on average should be there within 2 weeks but it highly depends on the
various factors I cover here.
4. CBO does not completely, yet, replace the need for ad and ad set level
optimisation to pause/replace bad performance.
5. CBO gives faster results with qualified ad sets and ads - which means if they
are pre-tested as ‘working’ then you’ll get stability and strong results faster.
So how do we go about testing with CBO? We use ​Graduation Testing​, our tried and
tested formula created many years back and adapted as the Facebook platform
evolves.
Let’s dive into our Recipe!
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CHEF DEPESH’S SPECIAL CBO TESTING FORMULA
INGREDIENTS
-
-
-
5W Avatar​ - we begin by building out the inner details of our
ideal customer so we can build audiences and angles in our ads to
cut-through the newsfeed. For example if I’m targeting dog owners
with a bereavement print on demand product, targeting dog owners
and picking the angle of personal loss is one thing, selecting a
particular breed as an interest and using that in your image is a
whole other level to relevance.
3N Ads Formula​ - we create ads that trigger the only 3 things you
need a user to do (explained further down within thee BPM Method
section)
Plan of audiences to test - at least 5 to start with, more
depending on budgets.
Plan of creatives to test - ideally at least 3 angles, each with at
least one copy angle and multiple visuals.
Minimum budget of at least $20 per ad set.
- if a CBO contains 5 ad sets, a minimum budget of $100 in the
CBO during testing phase.
- you can test at lower spends however it will take longer to
test and you won’t be able to test as much.
- ideally, I want to broaden my testing so I take my test
budget, divide by $20 and decide how many ad sets to run.
- Also bear in mind, I usually run 3 live ads per ad set so $20
is still a small test budget spread across 3 ads, hence it’s
a minimum.
RECIPE
1. Optimise for the pixel event or objective goal you want to achieve.
This might be Purchases or Registrations, for example. We use a
method called ​Account Calibration​, which allows us to identify the
most efficient pixel event or objective to test for, within ​The BPM
Method​ - however you can alternatively choose the end goal pixel or
objective for simplicity.
2. Create a CBO campaign with the grouped audiences you wish to test.
Set the budget for your CBO as above. As per the image below, we
create a ‘container’ campaign for groups of audiences for testing
in general. The image is a guide for testing purposes.
a. LAAs (Lookalike Audiences)​ - by 1-3%, 4-7% and 8-10% splits
in general if you’re using them - this is due to the relative
‘quality’ of the audiences.
i.
Note: whilst in test phase I keep LAAs nested - meaning
I test 1%, 2%, 3% in separate ad sets - this allows you
to test boundaries and see exactly which one is
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PAGE | 27
working, then to bundle them for scaling. I’d create a
3% LAA and exclude 2%, create a 2% LAA and exclude 1%
then run 1% alone.
ii.
For example, if 1-4% worked (as 4 separate ad sets),
I’d bundle theme into a single 4% audience for scaling.
iii.
We often start with a 1% audience first, see if it
works, then move upwards.
iv.
Caveat: if 1% is smaller than 500K then for testing I’d
consider bundling into larger LAAs so testing 1&2%
together for smaller audiences.
b. Interests​ - these are usually less targeted than LAA
audiences - meaning that side by side, your best quality LAA
should always beat an interest. Why do LAAs often fail?
Because the seed custom audience is not good. For this
reason, I split interests away from LAAs in testing - so I
would have one campaign with LAAs and one with Interests.
i.
For testing, split the interests and once you find your
winners, merge them into a single ad set UNLESS you see
very different ad level performance for your interests.
I’m not concerned at interest size as I’d test them
individually, the aim to merge when in
prospecting/scaling mode
c. Broad audiences​ - broad audiences work!! At time of writing,
by way of example, we tested strong LAAs as the Ecom site had
a large existing database yet the broad audience beat all
LAAs and interests, meaning we had larger audiences to play
with. For us, a broad audience is one without interests,
behaviours or LAAs.
i.
Broad audiences can work better than interests,
especially since FB introduced more data capture from
their pixel to collect and understand the content and
context of your website.
ii. We see and hear from a lot of advertisers still using
iii.
the narrow interest options to find winning ​audiences
- we’ve found greater success with larger audiences
coupled with great ads.
I usually aim to split broad audiences by a unique
segment, where relevant. Examples:
1. A broad audience targeting a specific age 18-30
in the US, split into an ad set for male and
another for female
2. A broad audience targeting the UK, where our
market is women 25+, split into 4 ad sets of
25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55+ because our ads appeal
to those segments in different ways
3. A broad audience targeting the US, split by age
and gender, into 2 separate CBOs: one is for Male
and split by the same age group above, the other
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PAGE | 28
is for Female with the same age splits where we
are delivering ads specifically by gender and age
4. If I have a single broad audience, say women
25-40 and that’s my only target, with the same
creative for them all with no further split, I’d
duplicate the ad set 3-5 times (budget dependant)
so I can spread my bets wider and pause out any
ad sets under performing (detailed later in this
guide).
Naming convention: 1_COLD is our stage of the funnel from the ​4-Funnel System
utilising COLD, WARM, HOT audiences that we’ve made popular through ​The BPM
Method​. WC is our objective (website conversions) and UK the country this test is
focussing on. The rest should be self-explanatory based on the above breakdown.
3. Create your ad sets. A few tips:
a. I’d keep the number of ad sets (and thus audiences) in line
with my test budget - if your budget cannot stretch to a
large number of ad sets, keep the ad sets in test mode small
and queue the rest up.
b. Research put into your audiences will go a long way - if you
don’t have LAAs yet, then research your avatar to find
interests. Also consider testing broad audiences since
Facebook’s ability to find people is at the best it’s ever
been - as long as you have a good idea of your avatar and
marketing.
c. If we don’t have any proven audiences yet, once we’ve
implemented the ​5W Avatar​ to understand who to target and
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PAGE | 29
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
how, we’ll draw up 4-5 primary audiences to test and set them
up in their own CBO campaign.
d. Use 1 day click optimisation. When in the test phase and
because of how CBO makes daily and intra-day budget
decisions, this works best for us. My theory is this: CBO
shifts budgets every day and is basing decisions on a mix of
the history of the ad set, history of the CBO and today’s
auction conditions. Because of this, using the previous day’s
conversions helps build up momentum faster, combined with us
pausing out ads as required to help the system learn faster.
e. Use excludes based on people that have engaged with/clicked
on your ads so that you’re targeting proper COLD audiences.
Set a MINIMUM budget for each ad set - because we want the spend to
be fair across ad sets and override the budget allocation to an
extent for testing purposes.
a. This is optional but I prefer to use it in the TESTING phase
to ensure spend is even and CBO doesn’t optimise too fast on
which ad sets take budget - a trade off between the old ways
of fixed ad set budgets and CBO’s dynamic budget allocation.
b. Use this calculation for MINIMUM budget: [Total budget /
number of ad sets] / 2
c. If our total CBO testing budget is $500 for 10 ad sets, then
[500/10]/2 = $25 min budget.
d. I don’t use a MAXIMUM budget in general as I use Rules &
Automation to automatically pause and grade my ads which is a
more advanced feature outside the scope of this CBO guide as
part of ​The BPM Method​. In short I’ll aim to pause based on a
number of impressions based on what kind of baseline data I
get from my account. A general rule is I’ll need 2500-5000
impressions for a significant test
I prefer to test in the Facebook newsfeed first before expanding to
other placements (personally I prefer FB & IG in prospecting and
All placements beyond that) but this will depend on your audience
and how good your creative is. I don’t include audience network or
messenger placements for testing due to limited real estate to
advertise and get your core message across.
Our first goal is to find the best audiences - if we have 5 ad
sets, each ad set with 3 of the same ads (using shared post IDs)
running, then we’d expect at least one audience to work with at
least one ad (as we’ve put the effort in ahead to research avatar
and audience).
Find the best audiences first, by using the same ads in each ad set
in use during the test phase. If no ads show good performance,
we’ll rotate ads (pause, restart, pause if bad, restart) in 3 daily
cycles before giving up on the audience. We restart ads between 6am
and 9am each morning.
The diagram below shows our general setup to finding winning
audiences first. The Campaigns are for illustrative purposes to
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PAGE | 30
show different test campaigns, running different ad sets and ads to
show the structure.
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PAGE | 31
9. Then use the best audiences to iterate and find more winning ads in
test mode - in this case I would shift those ad sets into a new CBO
- specifically for testing creatives. The below helps illustrate
this. Effectively in Phase 2 (below) our ad sets don’t move any
further (as they’re also in Prospecting/Scaling by this point) and
they become home to ad testing
10.
The diagram below demonstrates Phase 2 with our winning ad sets
from Phase 1.
a. How many ads and angles do we test before giving up on an ad
set? ​I’d usually aim to test 3-5 angles and a few variations
of copy/creative, so give or take it might be 10-15 ads
before giving up on an audience.
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PAGE | 32
11.
We take the best audiences and ads and move them into
Prospecting mode (see the CBO Prospecting Recipe below) to test
with higher budgets.
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PAGE | 33
12.
If the testing has successfully spit out new successful ads but
you don’t need them in your main prospecting campaigns yet (as
you’re getting a backlog ready), copy them into a social proofing
campaign - specifically created as a keep-warm Page Post Engagement
(PPE) campaign, with a single broad audience
a. Create a PPE Campaign.
b. Use the largest related audience you can for example a broad
or large Interest or LAA - one ad set only required because
we’re only after social proof - expect some sales to trickle
in too!
c. Exclude site visitors and purchasers.
d. Budget of $5 min. multiplied by the number of ads, with all
ads active accumulating social proof/running.
e. Copy ads from phase 1 or 2 testing in via their post ID (to
share social proof)
f. When you need them from scaling, copy them, again via post ID
into the scale campaigns.
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PAGE | 34
This has the distinct advantage of pre-testing ad sets and ads, before we let the CBO
algorithm go deep into the learning phase,
allowing us to give the CBO campaign more time
and stability in the process.
In addition, keeping our spend low in our tests
and using an optimal number impressions on
average before calling a winner, ensures we use
Facebook’s ‘​discount pacing​’ to continuously
find the best users in an audience whilst testing.
But how do you call a winner?! I​ hear you - there are 2-3 training videos on this in ​The BPM
Method​ program and it’s out of scope of this CBO guide to explore every detail so I’ll
simplify for this document. Focus on the objective you’re optimising for and benchmark
what a good result looks like. And the further away in your funnel the event is you’re
optimising for, the more impressions you’ll need to run.
So if I have a $100 AOV product I’d likely test the Purchase pixel to 5000 impressions and
make a judgement call on funnel metrics: in particular cost per add to cart, cost per
initiated checkout, cost per payment info and cost per purchase as typical funnel metrics
for Ecom.
Bench-marking is account specific however:
1. If it’s an existing account, look at CPA/ROAS and mark down what a good cost per X
looks like based on the paragraph above when you hit target
2. If it’s a new account and you have no data I’d use this simple calculation to
determine what a good cost per ATC looks like for a typical Ecom funnel
a. CPA x 0.15 (where CPA is your CPA target and 0.15 represents 15%, which is
a ‘ok level conversion rate from someone adding to cart and purchasing
For lead gen I’d likely need much fewer impressions, often as low as 1500 impressions and
judge my cost per leads/registrations.
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PAGE | 35
Recipe 2: CBO Prospecting
As you’ve seen with the CBO Testing Recipe, our testing process, Graduation Testing,
allows us to pre-qualify ad sets and ads, to give CBO the best chance of success.
What I will say is this - focus on actually testing ad sets and ads MORE than focusing
on which testing strategy to use. I prefer to test new audiences and ads within the
process above as it works for us as the backbone of generating well over $100M in
Ecommerce revenue.
Graduation Testing is our tried and tested method used by thousands of other
Facebook marketers in a world of SEVEN MILLION… whilst I’d love everyone to adopt
it, I know some of you have your own ways of testing, others want to create their own
paths, others need to be convinced of the virtues of testing - eek!
If you’ve understood the research on CBO from earlier in this article you’ll understand
the need for proven audiences in a CBO - way more than how much an ABO relies on
this.
So you’re probably wondering what our ‘scale’ setup looks like right?
Before going into this, it's worth noting that the Graduation process migrated fairly
easily from an ABO setup to CBO.
However, this part of getting CBO working took longer - whilst ABO is still an option
until Facebook switch over to CBO exclusively, the fact it’s going to happen has
meant we worked hard on updating all our strategies ready for CBO.
Here’s something to think about from the millions of dollars we’ve pumped into CBO
v ABO:
- ABO works better and is more stable with smaller budgets below $250 per day
than CBO is
- CBO works better and is more stable with larger budgets than ABO is ($500+
per day)
Whilst we’ve found running smaller budgets with ad set budgets provides better
results, faster. CBO takes too long with smaller budgets (based on the ratio of ad
sets to ads and the budget formula explained below) because of the learning
required and becomes unstable over time.
Let’s go into our CBO Prospecting Recipe before we explore lower budget options.
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PAGE | 36
CHEF DEPESH’S SPECIAL CBO PROSPECTING FORMULA
INGREDIENTS
-
-
Pre-tested ad sets (specifically audiences) based on the Test Phase
Pre-tested ads (angles, offers, 3N Ads Formula elements)
Grouped CBOs as mentioned above which apply to prospecting too
Minimum budget: CPA x 3 x number of ad sets
- Eg. CPA target of $30 with 5 ad sets would mean a budget of
30 x 3 x 5 = $450
Patience!
RECIPE
1. Drop your ad sets into the right CBO (by its audience grouping as
discussed earlier with how I group campaigns by audience type) and
set the right budget as mentioned within Ingredients- if there’s
one reason CBO will fail on you it’s setting too low a budget for
the number of ad sets and ads you’re running.
2. Ensure you exclude engaged audiences, site visitors and customers
to focus on cold prospects only
3. Use 1-day click optimisation - 9/10 times this works best for us
with CBO - test for your own ad account but there is logic behind
this - CBO shifts budget daily and, whilst getting 50 conversion
events a week per ad set is important, CBO seems to work well when
there are at least 50 conversions overall for the CBO itself. 1-day
click optimisation helps to keep the data fresh and allows the CBO
to react better to daily fluctuations.
4. I generally don’t set MIN or MAX budgets in my scale CBO ad sets as
I want to give CBO full control on decision making when in scale
mode - however, when graduating, it’s a good idea to have a MIN
spend in place for at least 3 days to kick-start them into life,
especially if adding to an existing CBO.
a. FB have advised that right now, removing MIN during/after the
learning phase will not reset learning
5. I do use rules to pause ads, but where possible I’d cut ads in the
first 3 days if the spend on any given ad set is 3 X CPA with no
sales to give it a chance to perform whilst tracking early signs of
success, or failure, such as CTR, CPC, cost per ATC etc - this
varies on the AOV, product funnel we’ve setup and more that we
discuss in more depth in ​The BPM Method​.
6. If I pause an ad, I’ll restart it after 6am local ad account time
to give it another try - sometimes Facebook simply drops your ad
into a bad ‘pocket’ of your audience. Pausing too early can
actually do more harm than good, so in the first 5-10 days we use
more relaxed rules for new prospecting CBO, tightening as you see
more stable performance. The key here is, taking Ecommerce as an
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PAGE | 37
example, if my end goal is ROAS or CPA, I may give an ad more time
to perform if a metric like Initiate Checkout or Payment Info is
showing signs of promise, for my retargeting to kick in and close
the sale.
7. When in this phase of Prospecting (when we are ‘scale testing’),
we’ll often copy the same audience/ad set into a single CBO 3-5
times and copy the same ads into both - it’s to do with being able
to cast a wider net in your ocean to increase chances of hitting a
good pocket of users in your audience.
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PAGE | 38
Our goal for this phase is to prove the winners with increased budget. We’re looking
for stable and consistent results before we consider scaling.
If you’re unable or unwilling to increase budgets with CBO then you need to consider
how many CBO/ad set/ad combos you can run.
Some of you will be budget limited, others will want to maintain profitable results
over a period of time.
Running Smaller Budget CBO Prospecting
Ok so we’re not all keen to join the scale-high club like it’s going out of fashion - so if
CBO needs high budget and lots of data, what’s on the table for you?
Well here’s a few things to consider:
- Want to run ABO style campaigns? Run a SINGLE ad set in your CBO
campaign. ​Shock! Horror! ​Long live ABO! It’s messy, sure, but you could go old
school and run one ad set per campaign and essentially override the mystical
CBO algorithm. This is also a good method for those that don’t want to adapt
to how CBO operates
- Run few ad sets; CBO spreads budgets across ad sets so the obvious way to
make a lower spend go further is to use a smaller budget with fewer ad sets
- Run fewer ads; the same applies here. If you want stability quicker don’t over
reach the number of ads you’re running which will stretch your budget too far
- If running Lead Gen and you’re running lead ads (where you capture leads
within Facebook direct to your CRM) or leads into a lander, CBO hits stability
faster and with smaller budgets than Ecommerce.
You may be wondering at this point… what about WARM and HOT audiences? Those
smaller but higher intent audiences? What’s the deal with CBO here? Great question,
glad you asked because CBO needs DATA - did I mention that?
CBO NEEDS QUALITY DATA
If you’ve read between the lines you’ll have seen that CBO needs proven audiences
and ad sets. When I talk about CBO needing data, CBO needs QUALITY DATA. Those
smaller ad sets with higher intent? They fill CBOs with juicy, high quality clicks and
actions so it makes it easier for the CBO to stabilise.
So yes, CBO is often seen as a friend of high scalers but it’s also the friend of the
clever marketer.
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PAGE | 39
Recipe 3: CBO Scaling Recipes
Now the fun begins - when I asked people what they really wanted to know about
CBO it was scaling!
Like asking a new entrepreneur what their goal is; some might say ‘to earn one
million dollars’ - but how many want to understand the process behind it AND put the
effort into applying it?
That’s the same with Facebook ads - everyone wants to grow their business that’s
running ads - everyone wants extra dollars back for every dollar they invest - but its
those that put the effort in to the process and testing that reap the results.
Are you willing to do that? I’m specifically talking to you right now - the ones that
literally skipped past huge sections of this guide straight into scaling. Sorry, it does
not work like that.
If all you want to do is find out the ‘secrets’ to scaling, then you’ve missed 50% further
up - I’m serious about wanting you to achieve massive results with this guide.
But I need you to go all in - understand how CBO works, see how we implement it
then test it for yourself. Some of you will crush it following our exact process
(especially those on ​The BPM Method​ program) and others will take this, test, adapt
and then make it work.
No one size fits all and it’s ok to detour once you know the fundamentals.
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PAGE | 40
Before we go into the details, let’s recap what we’ve learned about CBO and sprinkle
in a dash of seasoning for flavour:
-
-
CBO is a self-learning system which decides where to place your budget in a
given day, using both history and recency of performance AND today’s auction
conditions
CBO needs time to get into gear - time can be bought with bigger budgets so
you can test faster
CBO is more likely to deliver positive results when you’re working with proven
ad sets and ads (hence we use Graduation Testing to pre-qualify ads)
There are many ways to scale a CBO - which relies on budget, ability to take
risk and your experience level
CBO budget decisions include ad set, age, gender, device, placement, time, ad
and more - thus it needs both time and money to get this right for you
Whilst not confirmed by Facebook, we’ve found stability with CBO, when
running on average up to 5 ad sets (up to 7) and 3 ads live at any given time what influences this?
- Budget​: the higher the budget the more Facebook can test your ad/ad
set combos to find the winner today (because results may likely
fluctuate)
- Optimisation event​: If optimising for PURCHASE, you’ll need higher
spend and more impressions, to find stability, than optimising for
something like ADD TO CART (ATC) - not that ATC is a better event to
optimise for, but if your spend is low you need to strongly consider
whether you’re able to allow Facebook the space and time to test
- Audience size​: the larger the audience, the more stable CBO seems to
be - for example ‘broad’ targeting has often resulted in faster and more
expansive growth - we have a bumper list of audience ideas in The
BPM Method training but it’s important to refine down your best 5 to
start with and build from there - the more consistent larger spending ad
accounts we’ve run have had fewer, larger, high quality audiences and
LOTS of creative cycling. For scaling, audience sizes under 1 million are
more difficult to stabilise. If you cannot get your prospecting
audiences higher then you won’t be able to scale as much as you’d like.
- Audience intent​: this is more to do with how well you’ve primed users no matter how good your targeting is, if you can’t get them interested
then you’ll struggle - in ​The BPM Method​ we use the ​5W Avatar​ and ​3N
Ads Formula​ to break through the noise. For WARM and HOT
audiences further down your funnel, as the intent increases, smaller
audiences catch on to stability too with CBO
- Funnel setup​: we use the 4
​ -Funnel System​ within The BPM Method to
split audiences based on touchpoints (COLD, WARM, HOT, EXISTING).
Getting this right goes a long way to creating stability by speaking to
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PAGE | 41
the right person at the right time with the right message - the 3Rs of
Direct Marketing - Relevance, Rapport and Relationship
The above is an example of GT-CBO Method in play - ensuring it’s working down the
funnel alongside your funnel strategy is crucial - referencing our 4-funnel system,
we’re priming users down our funnel.
Notice how ROAS is lower in our COLD (prospecting) campaigns and increases
further down the funnel? That’s how to deliver a blended, highly profitable ROAS.
CBO supports this extremely well.
I’ve split the Recipes below down based on risk and skill level to help you make an
informed decision that’s right for you - I take no responsibility for any irresponsibility
you might take with your budgets and understanding here.
I encourage you to test, learn and apply whilst being honest about your ability to
interpret results and act. I’ve run ads since 2005 and have a muscle memory when it
comes to analysis and decision making, so I’m often likely to take far higher risks
than many of you.
Hence the below scaling strategies for CBO include risk level and ideally what
experience level they’re designed for.
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CHEF DEPESH’S SPECIAL SCALING FORMULA
Scaling is not so much about how fast and
where to put your budget; it’s as much about
how well your ​CORE-4​ is primed and ready for
you to pump the gas.
I’ve generated ROAS numbers that you’ll think
are quite unbelievable, because I have a system
that is intentionally designed to buy my traffic
cheaper and convert higher. Facebook is a
customer acquisition tool and the more you
simplify Facebook for your business the more
profitable and scalable your accounts will
become.
The steps below are simple, but contains many moving parts which The BPM
Method goes deep into. This CBO guide is aimed at arming you with everything
needed to make CBO work for you.
So what’s my preferred recipe? What is it that makes ​The BPM Method​ one of the
most sought after Facebook ads growth frameworks out there?
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INGREDIENTS
-
-
Stability in results through CBO Prospecting
Your audience size goes some way to dictate ability to spend. As a
rule of thumb this is good for audience size 500K upwards - below
this it can still work but you will then need to cycle more
creatives more frequently as you’ll otherwise exhaust the audience
out too quickly.
Your risk level and experience
RECIPE
1. Ensure your ​CORE-4​ is primed with a strong product, offer, audience
and funnel
a. Ensure you’ve implemented CBO Testing & Prospecting as
defined above
b. Ensure your sales funnel is fast and slick - this has far
bigger impact on scaling than many realise.
i.
Speed test your lander
ii.
Run split tests on your funnel steps to improve
conversion rates
c. Ensure you keep testing for new creatives, ready for
potential ad fatiguee
2. V-Scale to test how far you can push your scaling over 5-7 days.
I’ve expanded on ​V-Scale​ further below. The goal here is to ensure
your CBO is ready for scaling:
a. If you suffer from instability and unexpected results when
scaling it means you’ve not primed 1 or more parts of your
CORE-4​ properly.
b. 20-30% vertical budget increases are the safest way to scale.
3. If I need to scale fast I’ll choose between:
a. Shifting to ​M-Scale​ (explained below) to see if I can dig
into profitable audiences, faster
b. If I’m in a high buyer focused market like Valentines or
Black Friday, I’ll use ​Nitro V-Scale​ (explained below)
c. If I’m campaign planning I’ll use ​H-Scale​ (explained below)
to build more CBOs to spread the risk with audiences and find
more opportunities to spend more money - I’d use this to
de-risk scaling with multiple audiences, especially with a
super audience of over 25 million people.
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We’ve covered Testing & Prospecting, below are scaling methodologies we use, when
and why. Some are ones we use based on my preferred recipe, others we switch in
as needed. Like any great chef, you need to learn to adapt!
Scale Recipe 1: V-Scale
(Low-Risk, Beginner to Intermediate level)
For those that want a simpler life, lower risk and more predictability.
My view​: always start with this method as a low-risk stress test on whether your
campaign is ready for scaling.
I use V-Scaling as a simple, risk-free method of scaling. It’s slower but steady. Not
everyone needs to 10X their spend and results within days right? Facebook
recommend you increase budgets no more than 40% per day so it doesn’t impact the
learning phase. Personally, I’m comfortable with 20-30% to play safe.
1. If you’re either inexperienced or want lower stress levels, start
with 20% budget bumps.
a. I prefer to do this, ideally, between 8-10am ad account
timezone. Too early you might hit bad pockets of your
audience early. Too late and you may impact the way Facebook
allocates your spend for the remainder of the day causing
overspend on poor audiences.
2. Don’t jump into automating this if you’ve not done it before or are
inexperienced with ads analysis and decision making - do this
manually and get comfortable with your results before automating you carry your own risk here with setup:
a. Create custom columns in your reporting. At the very least,
load up Spend, ROAS, Result Rate (%), Cost per
Result/CPA/CPL/CPR (whichever is your key result) to measure
for your Campaign.
b. Check the results each morning anytime between 8am and 10am
local time (because you don’t want to make your decisions too
late)
c. Use the rules below to decide
i.
If an action is required
ii.
The action to take
d. Once you’re comfortable with it over a period of weeks,
automate
3. Here are the rules we use (do it manually or via a tool):
a. If your CBO is performing consistently well for 3 days (which
means you’re at or within your CPA/ROAS targets)
b. AND yesterday’s performance is also within range
c. then​ increase budget by 20% or 30% (depending on your
decision above)
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Scale Recipe 2: Nitro V-Scale
(High-Risk, Advanced level)
For the high roller, happy to carry risk and less predictability with a far higher payoff.
My view​: use with caution! Only implement this when your CORE-4 is primed and
ready!
Who has time for 20-30% per day bumps right? The most aggressive CBO budget
increases we did were last November - a time when we were scaling an Ecom store
aggressively, had proven large audiences and were happy carrying the risk as our
team of media buyers and automations were very much in control.
Also, the store’s C
​ ORE-4​ was ON POINT, scoring highly on Product-market fit, strong
messaging and creative, proven audiences and a pretty slick sales channel.
So if you’re confidently ready for scale why not hit the Nitro?
I mention November, because for the Ecommerce store we scaled aggressively on:
- We wanted to max spend profitably as fast as possible to land-grab sales
- November is one of the most predictable months for scaling for many
Ecommerce stores so we took advantage of a frenzied buyer market
So how much were we pushing the budgets? Some days 100%, others up to 500%.
The key was we followed the path of the ​GT-CBO Method​.
1. Once you’ve found stability with your Prospecting CBOs over a
period of at least 7 days and you’re confident you have a strong
audience, with a good size (1M+), a strong funnel and backup ads
(for ad fatigue) you can test larger budget bumps
2. For anyone who’s worried about the ‘learning phase’ there are 2
things to consider:
a. The more history you’ve built up, in spend and conversions
within your ad set (in particular consistently getting well
over the 50 conversion events per week - and over 200 for the
lifetime - per ad set) the more likely the learning phase
won’t matter as much. Because your audience is so strong,
conversions high and Facebook knows your prime user, you ad
set will survive going back into learning phase and come back
as before (potentially with a small blip but your volume
should be able to ride it out)
b. We’ve found on some occasions resetting the Learning Phase to
be a good thing at scale, when performance has been drifting,
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PAGE | 46
batch replacing ads, dropping budgets and forcing the system
to realign often kick-starts things especially if the
audience saturation is high. This is also why duplicating a
previously good performing ad set can be a way of
kickstarting results as Facebook has a tendency of getting
caught in a smaller net of users that saturate and
performance drops.
3. When I’m confident in the above, I’d push higher budget bumps
upwards of 50% to 500%.
a. Bump up your budgets after 6am no later than 12pm - any
later and the Pacing Algorithm (which uses a 24-hour clock
to plan your spend) can go a little haywire and overspend. I
choose 6am as an average, since resetting at midnight often
brings buyers from the previous day, so 6am is a clean break
of a new day.
b. Ensure at this stage you’re using automated rules to
minimise losses - we use ​Revealbot​ (​30% Discount for the
first 6 months with code depeshmastermind)​ for many reasons,
including checking performance every 15 minutes instead of
Facebook’s 30 minute checks and its ability to push alerts
into Slack which helps our process flow.
c. Set rules at the ad level, pausing out bad ads fast that go
beyond your ROAS/CPA target +25%
d. If by 3pm you have negative performance, drop budgets by 10%
and if they don’t recover within 2 hours, drop the spend back
down to the original budget (even if it pauses everything
out). The 10% drop is part of The Punisher Method which is a
proven way of course correcting performance fully explained
in The BPM Method program - for now, test it and thank me
later.
e. The next morning there will be a high chance, if your budget
starts considerably larger than the day before, the morning
will suffer - this depends on how aggressive you’ve been so
you have 2 options here:
i.
Reset the budget the next day (using rules) at midnight
to the previous day’s start budget, plus 20%. So
essentially you’re still moving the needle forward but
catering for Facebook overspending in the early hours.
You can then follow the high scale step above
ii.
Leave the larger budget because you’re happy with the
risk, for the chance of higher rewards
f. My approach to this method is more moderate unless:
i.
I’m in a highly seasonal period (eg Black Friday) or
limited sale period and need to max out sales, fast, in
which case I’d scale as aggressively as I can, pushing
budgets 100-1000% depending on my base, implement
automated rules and be prepared to cycle ads as needed
whilst watching my account like a hawk
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PAGE | 47
ii.
I want to scale up in a more staggered way, in which
case I’d test the standard V-Scale with 30% bumps over
3-7 days THEN move up to 50%, 75%, 100% whilst
maintaining stable results.
4. This is very high risk but it does work - we would not have been
able to push $7M in sales last November without being aggressive
with scale - knowing our 5W Avatar, CORE-4, Graduation Framework,
GT-CBO and rules were dialled in actually made it predictable and
easier for us to manage. The groundwork goes a long way to easing
the scaling process.
Scale Recipe 3: H-Scale Split
(Moderate rIsk, Intermediate level)
For those that want to override the CBO engine and focus budgets better by splitting
ad sets.
My view​: use with caution! Not as reliable if stability and low maintenance are
important to you.
Whilst we’ve explored V-Scaling (vertical, as in budget increases) we’re now exploring
H-Scaling, or sideways scaling. The easiest and most obvious is to go into your
Breakdown report in Ads Manager, break your performance down by Age, Gender,
Placement, Device, Country, Region and find pockets of opportunity where Facebook
is giving great performance but you can see the opportunity to push more spend
there.
Now before you rush in and implement this let me share a story with you about
Sharon.
Sharon shops online, falls into the 25-34, female demographic. The first thing she
checks in the morning is Instagram as she loves visuals and to see what could
inspire her today. On her way to work she checks out what’s happening with her
circles on Facebook and again at lunch she’s back on Instagram. She’s checking
Facebook on the way home whilst browsing the web too and later that evening she’s
on her laptop in front of Netflix.
Now here’s the thing - she bought your product whilst watching Netflix later that day what was her journey like? Well, she saw your ad on Instagram in the morning but
didn’t pay attention. At lunchtime however she saw the IG Story ad and watched the
video and clicked out of curiosity. Later, on her commute home your DPA ad on
Facebook really got her excited but she didn’t have time to click. Later that evening
she typed your brand’s name into search and bought.
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PAGE | 48
This fictitious story demonstrates a hidden path to purchase - if you looked at the
data, mobile did not convert and neither did Instagram. Facebook will have attributed
the sale to Instagram Stories so guess what, you pull IG Stories out into its own ad
set and ram that budget sky high expecting a flood of sales. It doesn’t happen.
Because you missed the impressions on the Instagram Feed and Facebook Mobile
Feed.
Note​: at the time of writing this, duplicating winning ad sets is working far less than it
used to pre-2019, so use with caution. Especially as it can cause instability with the
already well performing campaign(s).
This is why automatic placements make sense - but, here’s how to make it work:
1. Use H-Scale on completely unique paths for example if your audience
is 25-50 generally yet 25-34 consistently performs well, then I’d
say with high confidence pulling out 25-34 year olds is safe and a
good decision to push more spend here, depending on audience size
2. The same applies to Gender, Country, Region - people don’t change
these during the day in general
3. However with Placement and Device, these are interchangeable during
the day, so they’re the last things I H-Scale into
4. When H-Scaling there are a few primary scenarios:
a. Gender: you can run them in the same CBO, split into M & F
depending on number of ad sets (I’m trying to keep them up to
7, ideally 5) though you can split them into separate CBOs
(my preference)
b. Age: as above though in this case depending on performance
and splits I end up with I may split into their own CBOs
c. Country: generally as this is a higher level ‘split’ I’d
always put my top countries into their own separate CBOs and
then group countries where I have smaller volume and spend
d. Region: I’d generally include into the same CBO grouped by
country - it’s not often I split this especially if I want to
scale
5. Now, when splitting by Placement and Device it gets more
complicated - my advice here is, where possible, to not split these
out for scaling as it’ll come back to bite you later if your
attributions don’t align - one example of splitting is taking your
single best audience and splitting by Placement and Device into a
single CBO, with the theory CBO does the same thing of putting them
all back into the auction but giving you more flexibility. This can
work but again for scaling I prefer fewer ad sets and giving larger
audiences in each ad set. 1 million audience sizes are great, 10
million even better.
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PAGE | 49
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PAGE | 50
Scale Recipe 4: H-Scale Budget
(High risk, Advanced level)
For those that want to push growth faster and manage the associated risk.
My view​: use with caution! Not as reliable if stability and low maintenance are
important to you. Carries risks and not my preferred way of scaling.
Now that you understand how to split H-Scale, let’s look at another fast-growth
method of scaling - duplicating into higher budgets.
Up until early 2018 this was one of my favourite scaling methods - right up until
March 2018 (some of you will have this month etched into your memories because
of the impact on your ad account.
Facebook made a significant change, verified by their Auction Insights team when I
asked, favouring ad set history and minimising ​auction overlap​ of identical
audiences.
Have you tried it recently? Simply duplicating to higher budgets? How did that work
out for you? The majority of what I’ve seen it has not worked as well. However the old
method was to run your new higher budget duplicate alongside the existing
campaign.
Why? Because if your $500/d CBO is doing well, logic would say leave it running and
go with $1000/d, wait until the new CBO is performing well then switch off the
$500/d CBO.
That’s kind of what worked pre March 2018 but now this causes instability, often
impacting the original too.
So if you have a winning CBO and it has amassed a good amount of data and history,
you need to get that for your new duplicated CBO and here’s the risk and why I’ve
marked this as Advanced.
If you replicate a $500 CBO to $1000 you need to give it enough data to stabilise
over 3-5 days. That’s potentially a $5K loss if you don’t manage it well.
Here’s what I do:
-
I often pause the original - this is because running the original
and duplication can otherwise cause conflict; especially now as
Facebook seems to perform worse when 2 or 3 ad sets targeting the
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-
-
-
-
-
-
same audience are active, even if the audience is into the 10’s of
millions.
However if the original already has stable delivery, over 50+
conversions per week at the campaign level and it’s been running
for a few weeks (and so has stability) I’m less likely to pause the
original.
Duplicate your proven CBO with a higher budget and start it around
9am when ready to launch, ideally Monday to give it time to settle
in the week
Run rules at the ad and ad set level during the day. The following
are examples of what we run but the caveat is it depends on what
funnel and product AOV (cost) you’re running. For example if
you’re selling a $150 product, you might not produce many sales top
of funnel and so your CPA/ROAS target might be much lower as you
need to prime users better. Example rules:
- Pause ​ads​ with no sales after 2X your CPA target (depends on
AOV as to how I’d use this rule and any variant I build - for
example on a higher priced item I’d use cost per ATC or
Initiate Checkout as my ‘CPA’ rule)
- Pause ​ads​ that are higher than 2X your CPA target or half
your ROAS goal once they’ve hit a spend level of 3X your CPA
target
- Pause ​ads​ that are higher than 1.25X your CPA target or half
your ROAS goal once they’ve hit a spend level of 5X your CPA
target
- Pause ​ad sets​ that are higher than 2X your CPA target or half
your ROAS goal once they’ve hit a spend level 10X your CPA
This double buffer balances giving FB enough data and minimising
your losses - you may need to play with the thresholds based on
tolerance for risk and how your sales perform during the day
Restart ads/ad sets the next day ideally with rules, at 6am and run
this cycle up to 7 days. Unless you’re happy making large losses,
cutting the fat daily will help keep budgets in control whilst
letting the CBO learn.
Your goal is to feed it enough data to stabilise as fast as
possible
If by the end of day 2 (roughly 48 hours of running) results look
seriously bad, duplicate the CBO and go again
This is higher risk with CBO so I don’t generally use it or recommend it - it’s included
here for reference as one of our scaling tools.
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Scale Recipe 5: M-Scale
(Moderate to high risk, Advanced level)
For those that want to scale using manual bid and are experienced in analysis/decision
making
My view​: use with caution! Manual bid is not a fixer for a poor product, targeting,
creative and funnel. It requires a certain level of expertise to interpret and react to the
data.
M-Scale focusses on manual bid scaling. It’s an awesome way of combing budget
increase with boundaries for Facebook to work within, because, think about it, how
does Facebook really know what a good CPA/ROAS is to you unless you tell them?
There are a few ways of cutting this and I won’t explain the inner workings of manual
bid here, except for how we use it - again we have a few sections in T
​ he BPM Method
that go into the inner workings that I wouldn’t be able to give justice to here.
What I will say is that manual bid should, in my experience, be introduced under these
conditions:
- Your product has been tested and proven - for me that’s 25+ on-target or
below conversions, meaning if you’re selling, you’ve done it profitably,
consistently, or if you’re generating leads, you’ve generated 25+ profitably.
This means you have a decent audience + ad + funnel that shows potential.
- You’ve tested V-Scale successfully; for some, they’ll find a ‘winner’ and try
scale with manual bid too early and fail. Manual bid is a way of forcing an ad
into a specific part of your audience that you might otherwise not be able to
reach.
Important note:​ you don’t have to manual bid, if your CORE-4 is dialled in, meaning
your Product, Offer, Audience and Funnel are high performing such that you’ve been
able to scale successfully with V-Scale - in this case I’d personally choose V-Scale
(and Nitro Scaling) and go vertically since Facebook seem to be penalising ad set
duplications much more.
If you don’t know what manual bidding is, ​read it up here​ which includes a breakdown
of what each bid strategy is that I’ve mentioned below.
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PAGE | 53
BID CAP RECIPE
Should you run bid cap? ​This is my preference for manual bid scaling however, I
usually turn to manual bid when speed of scaling is most important. Bid cap bidding
is the most reliable as I can control the auction bid, and works best with a proven
audience, ad, funnel and offer. Without this, you could end up wasting away a lot of
budget.
1. Duplicate your best audience into a CBO manual bid test - set the
BID CAP for as 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X your CPA target as bid caps,
duplicating the same ad set in your new CBO. I go wide on bid
levels then narrow down. Some prefer to start with one bid, perhaps
lower, then work up but I speed of results matters
2. Total CBO budget = (BID 1 CPA x 5) + (BID 2 CPA x 5) etc - so if
your CPA target is $30 your total budget = (30 x 5) + (60 x 5) +
(90 x 5) + (120 x 5). What we’re doing here is ensuring the ad
sets are given enough spend power to test the bid caps
3. Set a MIN budget so that each gets enough of a push initially - you
can optional set a MAX to ensure, to an extent, during the early
phase one ad set doesn’t run off with all the spend too early:
a. MIN budget = CPA x 2
b. Optional: MAX budget = CPA x 5
4. Run normal ads, not DCO ads as DCO generally works better once the
ad set is stable
5. Monitor during the day pausing out ad sets based on the following
a. LOW RISK: Pause ads if:
i.
Spend at ad level is 2X your CPA with no conversions
ii.
Spend at ad level is 4X your CPA and CPA over 50% of
your target
iii.
Spend at ad level is 6X your CPA and CPA higher than
25% of your target
b. HIGHER RISK (though giving more data and spend to increase
chance of finding a positive audience pocket): Pause ads if:
i.
Spend at ad level is 4X your CPA with no conversions
ii.
Spend at ad level is 6X your CPA and CPA over 50% of
your target
iii.
Spend at ad level is 10X your CPA and CPA higher than
25% of your target
c. We track rules manually until we’re confident on performance
before building the rules into software
d. Cycle the ads over 3 days until performance settles - it
should be quickly obvious which ads are performing best in
which ad set - it’s usually between 2X and 3X bids that work
well on average. If you have a single winner, use that on
your other audiences by pushing them into a new CBO
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PAGE | 54
e. Split your ad sets by age, gender, country, region (as
relevant) to see if bids differ across those primarily. Then
also see if bids differ by placement and device.
COST CAP RECIPE
Should you run cost cap? ​I would only run COST CAP if I’m confident in the product
converting well and consistently, with well over 100 profitable conversions already.
COST CAP is based on Facebook consistently delivering your CPA target. I’m not a
huge fan yet for Ecommerce in particular as the ‘conversion’ event we’re usually most
interested in, purchases, is so far from the click which makes it more difficult for
Facebook to predict and control costs for.
1. Run the same as BID CAP (all steps) except your COST CAP bid should
be 75%, 100% and 125% of your CPA target run in 3 separate ad sets
- so if your CPA target is $100, then you test $75, $100 and $125
cost cap bids
2. I go wider with ranges as a boundary test to see what Facebook
will deliver as it’s a balance of performance and reach with COST
CAP bidding, unlike BID CAP which I prefer due to the nature of
being able to scale more aggressively
3. Run the same pause/restart rules and I’d expect the winner to sit
between the 75% and 100% bid. You can refinee this further if you
wish based on results
4. Note: COST CAP will aim to get close to your CPA target but will
fluctuate to give you more volume
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PAGE | 55
TARGET COST RECIPE
Should you target cost cap? ​I only generally run this on funnels with short conversion
paths, like Lead Gen (click from ad > view lander > sign up) due to the lack of volume
you’ll often find with longer funnels (like a typical Ecom funnel).
1. I test the TARGET COST in a similar way to COST CAP using the 75%, 100%,
125% method.
2. Note: TARGET COST is less likely to fluctuate so it’s great for those wanting
the easy life, with a loss of volume and potential ad set stalling (zero delivery)
so use with caution.
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PAGE | 56
ROAS/VALUE BID RECIPE
1. This is a pretty awesome addition from Facebook to bid for a combination of
higher AOV and lower CPA by targeting a ROAS - you need to have multiple
purchase values sent through to use this
2. In practice I’ve found using Highest ROAS/lowest cost combo to work best, so
I don’t manual bid here as there are 2 variables Facebook is balancing (cart
value and acquisition cost). That said, it’s worth testing against manual bid
and lowest cost auto bidding.
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Recipe 4: CBO with Small, High Intent Audiences
If one of your questions after reading the above is how does CBO fair with smaller,
‘WARM’ audiences that have engaged but not necessarily clicked into your site then
it’s a good one.
Whilst much of what I’ve written discussed CBO as a system that requires large
audiences, let me contrast this:
1. If the audience ‘intent’ is low, CBO needs large audiences, generally. Intent is
how likely is the prospect going to convert in YOUR Funnel. With COLD
audiences this is pretty low. So CBO needs larger data to find those ideal
customers
2. If the audience intent is high, CBO doesn’t need large audiences.
Ultimately if I can hand off daily budget allocation and performance optimisation to
Facebook further down the funnel, I can concentrate more effort top of funnel, on my
marketing and on my sales funnel.
Let’s take a few examples.
CBO WARM CAMPAIGNS
In this example we ran a video views retargeting campaign, retargeting people that
had viewed a certain percentage of the video. The audience sizes were in the
hundreds of thousands and we had different ad sets for those that had viewed 50%
of video 1, 50% of video 2 and 50% of video 3 over 7 days.
So:
-
3 ad sets of similar size
A single WARM CBO using the Conversion objective optimised for Purchase
Starting CBO budget of $50 per day
Excluding site visitors and purchasers
Auto-bid, 1-day optimisation window
3 ads, duplicated using Post ID into each ad set
What occurred was that Facebook would shift the budget around daily based on
performance. We’d see fluctuations at ad and ad set level, however the overall CBO
level ROAS remained positive. To the extent that it became a fairly hands-off,
automated campaign, since the top of funnel COLD campaigns were continually
bringing in new audiences every 7 days so ad fatigue was never really a thing.
We often also test adding DCO ads into the WARM campaigns, explained below to
further add automation.
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PAGE | 58
Recipe 5: DCO INFINITY RETARGETING
In this example, we’re actually using DCO - Dynamic Creative Optimisation to
automate our retargeting ads with CBO - and to spend far less time worrying about
ad rotations and optimisations.
What is DCO?
DCO allows you to add variants within a single ad, including text, images, videos and
buttons. The intent is that you can test on the fly. It does come with limitations such
as not currently being able to share post ID, not currently being able to pause out bad
variants (Facebook are supposed to do this but it doesn’t always work out) and not
being able to add multiple DCOs into an ad set (though this is due to change in the
future).
Here’s our setup:
-
Ad sets based on time since visit such as 0-3, 4-10 days etc since adding to
cart
A single HOT CBO using the Conversion objective optimised for Purchase
Starting CBO budget of $100 per day (depending on how long you’ve run your
top and middle funnel ads and how big your retargeting audience is)
Excluding purchasers
Auto-bid, 1-day optimisation window
1 ad using DCO with ‘elements’ pre-tested using Graduation Testing
The powerful thing here is that the small audiences are constantly refreshing and so
are the ad variants they’re seeing. Because we add the various audiences into a
single CBO campaign, we don’t need to manage ad set budgets based on
performance and leave Facebook to do it, leading us to effectively reduce our
optimisation at the bottom of the funnel.
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Recipe 6: DPA INFINITY RETARGETING
Dynamic Product Ads​ (DPA) use a product catalog to surface ads to your COLD or
HOT audience based on what Facebook thinks they’ll be interested in, or that they
clicked on in your site.
This method is primarily reserved for Ecommerce, Airline and Travel sites.
Using CBO with DPA and fairly fixed audiences like ‘those who visited the cart page in
the last 3 days but didn’t buy’ or ‘visited 2 products didn’t add to cart” is we can split
the audiences in the same CBO with the same DPA ads running in each AND let
Facebook decide where the budget goes each day.
Example CBO:
- Audience 1: Visited product page in last 3 days, didn’t add to cart
- Audience 2: Visited cart page in last 3 days, didn’t visit initiate checkout page
- Audience 3: Visited initiate checkout page in last 3 days, didn’t purchase
- Pixel: Purchase
- Additional Excludes: Purchasers
- Placements: All
- Budget: depends on top of funnel but if in doubt take COLD + WARM ad spend
and use 5% for this campaign so if spending $1000/d top and mid funnel,
theen $50/d is about right for site retargeting
With this, the 3 audiences themselves don’t change in terms of targeting (even if the
people within it refresh every 3 days as people enter and exit the 3 day period).
I would load the same DPA ads in each of these (where the products are dynamically
inserted and I’d use 3 copy angles in each ad, testing testimonials, benefits,
promotions etc) and allow CBO to manage the budget between the 3 ad sets.
This way it’ll react better than I can in the auction, day by day and cycle budget
towards the ad sets and ads that show better performance in the day.
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PAGE | 60
With DPA for HOT audiences, the intent is high so audience size matters less. We
follow the same general config as above but replacing out the Conversion campaign
and DCO.
We further extend the same methodology to our EXISTING audiences (that have
purchased) using CBO to manage our post sale ad campaigns (thank you
campaigns, cross sells, etc).
Using DPA for COLD/Prospecting audiences (Facebook call this ‘DABA’ - Dynamic
Ads for Broad Audiences) can work and is something that can be tested as an ad
variant in your CBO Testing phase. It works by Facebook calculating products that
stone cold or warm audiences that haven’t touched your site might be interested in.
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About The BPM Method
Many references here relate to ​The BPM Method​ - so what is it and how does CBO fit
in?
The BPM Method, or ​Brand-Driven Marketing Method​ is based on the middle ground
between the power of brand marketing and measurable growth of performance
marketing.
Brand marketing does a great job of building connections between a product or
service and the outcome for the potential customer. Think about how Coca Cola
focus ads on having a great time, contrasted with Red Bull who are all about high
octane. Both are sugary drinks but with a very different audience in mind, and quite
possibly a high overlap.
Brand marketing builds that appeal and keeps repeating that in the consumers mind as the saying goes, your brand is what people talk about when you’re not present. It’s
not what you say it is, but what people perceive it to be.
I learned from various expert brand marketers, from top ad agencies and senior
marketers, but found their strategies were lacking something fundamental..
What really excited me about marketing was the data and our ability to create shifts,
measure and improve. What I found many brand marketers lacking was the payoff - I
recall discussing ROAS with a traditional media buyer that was explaining their $5M
brand media plan, based on what kind of CPM (cost per thousand impressions) they
could get the client; “but what about the ROAS? How much do you think you can
make back” I said.
That’s the core of The BPM Method - bringing brand-marketing together with
performance, or data-driven marketing, right now, on an ad platform that plays well
with both of those.
The following sections are terms referenced in this document and aim to expand on
what they are and why I value them.
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PAGE | 62
CORE-4
The CORE-4 Principle boils down the 4 key areas of success that a typical Facebook
ads driven business needs to succeed, This is based on running or auditing over
1000 ad accounts since 2012 which we use within our Facebook ads agency (SM
Commerce) to grade clients’ readiness for scale:
1. PRODUCT
2. OFFER
3. AUDIENCE
4. FUNNEL
We use an internal grading system to score each area from 0-5 and tally up the
score. A score between 15 and 20 suggests to us the business and ad account is
ready to scale!
Below that and we hold off to ensure when we move to scaling we’re optimised for
success from the start.
5W Avatar
The 5W Avatar concerns itself with 5 fundamentals of building ads, copy, creative,
targeting and funnels: who, what, the emotional why, rational why and why not of our
target prospects.
I learned from David Ogilvy, the ad and direct response copywriting genius, on how to
build attack and defence strategies to leave your prospects with very little choice but
to convert through your funnel.
The 5W Avatar therefore is one of the first parts of The BPM Method to determine
our ad angles and how to cut through busy social feeds and create shifts in the
user’s mind into your world.
3N Ads Formula
This is our method of creating cut-through ads using the simple objectives of:
1. Get users to stop and take notice of our ads
2. Engage users with the ad content
3. Lead customers into taking an action
The BPM Method goes into detail to explain how to achieve each of these, with
examples explaining the psychological drivers behind engagement, copywriting and
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PAGE | 63
funnel inception - creating mini-funnels in your ad, lander and funnel to ​nudge​ people
through.
Hence this is called the 3 Nudge Ads Formula, or 3N for short.
Graduation Testing
If there’s one thing that helped create breakthroughs whilst working with smaller
budget accounts and in particular bootstrapped businesses, it was this.
GT is a way of testing in bite sized amounts to find ad and ad set matches before we
push them into our main prospecting campaigns.
Regardless of total test budget, I aim to keep my per ad set budgets relatively small,
to spread my testing and to run more tests. I generally find more value in testing 4 ad
sets at $25/d than testing one ad set at $100/d, if that’s all I have to play with.
Account Calibration
Account Calibration is a core part Graduation Testing by building a list of CPM costs
for each optimisation event we’re working toward and deciding which to use for
Testing vs Prospecting and Scaling.
Here’s my rationale: if my goal is to find audience and ad matches, I only need to see
if the audience is interested in my ad (and thus product) and how interested they are
(how far they go down my funnel).
Prior to 2018 I primarily used Page Post Engagement (PPE) for this, however, in
particular in the US, PPE began generating many bot and fraudulent links so we
switched to testing using Website Conversion (WC) - PPE still works in many other
countries for testing. I’d test to find the pixel event that brought us the cheapest data
for the best insights so I can maximise the ads and ad sets I’m testing and minimise
wastage.
Graduation Framework
If Graduation Testing allows us to test fast and efficiently, the Graduation Framework
is the machine within which our testing passes into prospecting and scaling. It
includes ensuring our prospecting is profitable, against our goals, offers are fully
tested and our funnels slick including in-depth work on Conversion Rate Optimisation
which forms a backbone of Facebook ads success.
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PAGE | 64
4-Funnel System
The 4-Funnel System is a simple split of a standard funnel:
- COLD audiences, which are those that have not clicked or engaged
- WARM audiences that have engaged but not clicked
- HOT audiences that have clicked not converted
- EXISTING audiences that have converted (and you can increase lifetime value
with)
Fundamentally the system teaches how to pitch your message to the right person at
the right time, to build profitable campaigns that are scalable and stable for any
price point of product or service.
Ready to learn why so many Facebook marketers swear by The BPM Method?
You can learn more about T
​ he BPM Method​ here to build the next part of your growth
journey with Facebook ads.
It’s a complete do-it-yourself system and framework used by Ecommerce marketers,
business owners and agencies for predictable and consistent growth, with course
life-time updates and includes a mix of video and written content, over my shoulder
ad account build and analysis to equip you to stay ahead of the game.
If you’re interested in my personal coaching support you can reach out to the team
hello@depeshmandalia.com​ depending on what suits your needs and our availability.
For agency enquiries, if you want us to implement The BPM Method, grade your
CORE-4 or create a tailored 3-month strategy, reach out to i​ nfo@smcommerce.co.uk
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FAQs - Curated From Facebook
The below was provided directly by Facebook on some of the factors that impact
CBO to supplement this guide.
About Campaign Budget Optimization
Can I use CBO on Reach and Frequency campaigns?
No, but Campaign Budget Optimization works for all objectives and all optimization
goals.
What optimization goals and objectives are eligible with budget optimization?
Reach & Frequency is not eligible, otherwise, Campaign Budget Optimization works
for all objectives and all optimization goals.
What factors does Facebook consider when deciding how to spend my budget?
The advertiser's chosen bidding strategy, optimization goal, and bid amount (if not
Auto) are the settings Facebook uses to determine the best way to spend the budget
across ad sets.
How can I tell Facebook what to optimize for?
Facebook will use the ad set optimization goals to determine which results are most
important to advertisers. For example, if the advertiser has a “website conversions”
objective campaign, and chooses to optimize for “purchases” at the ad set level,
Facebook will spend the budget in ad sets that provide the lowest cost per purchase.
Can I set different optimization events for ad sets in the same campaign?
Yes, if you're using bid caps or target cost bidding. If you choose to use lowest cost
bidding, you must use the same optimization event across all campaigns, because
Facebook won't know how to prioritize spend. For example, if one ad set is
optimizing for add to cart and a second is optimizing for purchases, the delivery
system will assume add to carts and purchases ​are worth the same value to the
advertiser​ and will distribute spend to the lowest cost result, which is likely to be the
add to cart ad set. In this case the purchase ad set would get lower spend, even if
there may be “good” opportunities from the advertiser's perspective. With bid caps,
Facebook will use the bid cap amount and optimization goal (e.g. purchase, add to
cart, clicks) to find the lowest cost results based on the value that the advertiser sets.
Will budget optimization pause ad sets?
No. You may notice that some ad sets spend significantly more than others because
there are better opportunities in those ad sets, but an ad set is never paused or
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PAGE | 66
excluded from budget optimization. All ad sets are eligible to receive budget
throughout the entire campaign flight, and budget will be distributed to ad sets as
needed to capture the best opportunities.
How often are budgets changed and at what time?
Unlike some similar budget allocation products from Facebook Marketing
(software/service) Partners and other platforms, Facebook budget optimization does
not choose a specific time to “check in” on ad set performance and shift budgets
between ad sets. The budget is continuously distributed to individual ad sets at all
times during the campaign. Each dollar of budget flows to the best opportunities,
regardless of which ad set they are in.
Turning On Campaign Budget Optimization
How do I turn on campaign budget optimization?
You can toggle on CBO at the campaign level screen of any new or existing
campaign.
Can I switch a live campaign over to campaign budget optimization?
Yes. This functionality rolled out in July 2018. You currently have until February 2020
(at time of publication) to test this.
Should I switch an ad set budget campaign to CBO or create a new one?
The learning phase WILL reset however ad set history will remain so there is an
advantage to this. However performance may drop temporarily until the CBO
campaign has collected enough data.
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PAGE | 67
Spend Limits
What are ad set spend limits?
These are OPTIONAL controls at the ad set level to provide additional input on the
spend per ad set. A minimum spend limit is a goal, and is not guaranteed. A
maximum spend limit is guaranteed. We'll never spend more than the total campaign
budget you set, regardless of spend limits settings. Spend limits should only be used
if advertisers have hard constraints for spend at the ad set. When spend limits are
used, advertisers trade off maximizing the efficiency of their CBO campaigns.
What is an ad set minimum spend limit? Why isn't minimum spend guaranteed?
If you set this, we will do our best to allocate this amount of budget to the ad set.
However, this is not guaranteed. Similar to budgets today, we can't guarantee an ad
set will spend a minimum amount for reasons like low bids or narrow audiences.
What is an ad set maximum spend limit?
We guarantee that this ad set will not be allocated more than this amount of budget.
Regardless of spend limit settings across all of your ad sets, we will never spend
more than what you've entered as your campaign budget.
Do I need to use both minimum and maximum spend limits?
No, spend limits are optional. You can use a minimum or maximum on their own or
together. However, for advertisers looking to control spend similar to how they used
ad set budgets in the past, we recommend using maximum only.
Is there a limit to how close the minimum and maximum spend limits per ad set
can be?
There needs to be a 10% difference between the min and max spend limits.
If I add a min or max spend limit mid-flight, will it cover the full budget, or only be
inclusive of what hasn't been spent so far?
Regardless of when the spend limit is applied, we try to reach that at the end of each
pacing period. If they are using daily budgets, we try to reach that at the end of each
day. If they are using lifetime budgets, we try to reach that at the end of the ad set
schedule. Keep in mind that min spend limits are not guaranteed.
Bid Strategies
Can I use different bid strategies for each ad set?
No. All ad sets are required to use the same bidding strategy. We're working to allow
mixed bidding strategies for H1 2019.
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How does campaign budget optimization work with bid caps?
If you choose lowest cost with bid caps, we assume your goal is to maximize profits.
Hence, we try to maximize the difference between what you bid, and the price at
which you could win the auction. Our optimization system allocates budget to the ad
sets that have ads where this difference is maximized.
How does campaign budget optimization work with lowest cost?
If you choose the lowest cost bid strategy, we assume that your goal is to maximize
volume. Our optimization system, will allocate budget to the ad sets that have ads
with the cheapest opportunities. For now, if you choose lowest cost, you must also
choose the same optimization goal across all ad sets (e.g. conversions, link clicks,
impressions etc). We're considering how to allow mixed optimization goals with
lowest cost bidding in H1 2019.
How does campaign budget optimization work with target cost?
If you choose target cost, we assume that your goal is to meet an average CPA
target. We will deliver ads such that each ad set meets its CPA target, and we spend
your budget as best on schedule.
If I use different optimization goals, but the same bid amount, how is delivery
prioritized?
For bid caps, delivery will go to the ad set that has the higher marginal value. Ad sets
using lowest cost without a bid cap can't have different optimization goals currently.
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Editing
Can I add a new ad set or ad to my campaign after it goes live?
Yes. When you add a new ad set to the campaign, the system will begin exploration
for the new ad set immediately and will factor that ad set's schedule into the total
campaign budget. In some rare cases, it's possible that the new ad set will not get
delivery, including if the ad set's duration is less than 1 day or if there is not enough
budget left in the campaign to deliver to the new ad set.
Can my ad sets have different start/end dates within the same campaign? Can I
increase/decrease my bid cap? Can I change my bidding strategy?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Can I edit my campaign budget after the campaign goes live?
Yes, you can increase or decrease the budget. However, you can't Change from
Lifetime to Daily (and Vice Versa).
Can I change back to manually updating budgets within the ad sets if we don’t
want to use campaign budget optimization anymore?
Yes. You can switch from ad set budgets to campaign budget or vice versa.
When I switch a CBO campaign to an ad set budget campaign mid-flight and it's a
lifetime budget, will it continue pacing the spend as it was before or will it reset
the budget/pacing from square one?
When you switch mid-flight, the system will consider the historical spend and will
continue to pace it the remainder of the budget to spend across the scheduled dates.
Is it possible to switch budget type (from lifetime budget to daily budget and vice
versa) during run time?
No. You will need to duplicate the campaign in order to update the budget type.
What happens to my budget when I switch from a campaign budget to ad set
budgets and I've already spent some of the budget?
For lifetime budgets, the remaining (lifetime) budget is distributed proportional to
how the ad sets have been spending with CBO (e.g. if an ad set-A is spending 2x of
ad-set-B, then the remaining budget is divvied up 2:1). For daily budgets, we just
evenly distribute the daily budget across all the ad sets. The advertiser can adjust
the default/suggested ad set budget amounts.
How long does the initial "learning" process typically take for ad sets with
campaign budget optimization?
It'll take the same time as ad set budgets.
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PAGE | 70
Will campaign budget optimization cause ad sets to reenter the learning phase as
it distributes budget?
No, ad sets within the campaign won't reenter the learning phase as budget is
distributed.
Will making a significant edit to one ad set (meaning the edit is made at the ad set
level) cause other ad sets within the same campaign to reenter the learning
phase?
No, as long as the edit is made at the ad set level, other ad sets within the same
campaign won't reenter the learning phase.
Will adding a new ad set to the campaign cause the rest of the ad sets to reenter
the learning phase?
No, adding an ad set to a campaign with campaign budget optimization won't cause
other ad sets within the same campaign to reenter the learning phase.
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Ad Scheduling
Does CBO factor in ad sets that are scheduled to start on different dates?
Yes. CBO does factor adset schedules for spend allocation across different ad sets.
Spend allocation will depend on the opportunities available on the different ad sets. If
there is a significant disparity in the audience sizes, delivery will tend to skew
towards the adset with the larger audience size given there are more opportunities to
deliver.
How does ​pacing​ work when ad sets are on different schedules?
A lifetime budget will pace the budget across the schedule of all ad sets in the
campaign. If all ad sets in the campaign follow the same schedule, the lifetime
budget will pace fairly evenly per day. H
​ owever, when ad sets are on different
schedules, the daily spend may not pace evenly across every day​. This is important to
call out to those who are used to even daily spend from lifetime budgets. When there
are ad sets scheduled at different times throughout the flight, the pacing will follow
the # of opportunities available on each day.
Example:
- Let's say you set a campaign budget of $1100. There are 2 ad sets in the
campaign. Ad Set 1 is scheduled for Mon-Thurs. Ad Set 2 is scheduled for
Mon-Sun. As long as the ad sets are scheduled, the system will make sure
there is enough budget to spend all the way from Mon-Sun, as expected.
- The difference in CBO lifetime budget vs ad set lifetime budget appears in the
daily spend amount. Let's say that the audiences for the 2 ad sets are
mutually exclusive and they are both made up of 1MM people. From
Mon-Thurs, when both ad sets are live, there are 2MM people in the target
audience. From Fri-Sun, when only Ad Set 2 is live, there are 1MM people in
the target audience.
- The delivery system will see that there are more opportunities (2MM) from
Mon-Thurs and will pace the budget to spend more on those days. By
increasing spend on the days where there are more opportunities (and
therefore lower prices), we can return the most value for the advertiser.
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PAGE | 72
Reporting
Will we still be able to see delivery (spend, impressions, etc) at the ad set level?
Yes.
My ad sets with a higher CPx had more budget allocated to them than ad sets with
a lower CPx. Is this a bug with CBO?
Reporting may show a lower CPx in ad sets with a lower total spend. This is expected
and a normal outcome of FB's delivery system. When this happens, it's important to
know that ad sets with a lower CPx did not receive additional delivery because they
had a higher marginal CPx. If that ad set had received additional spend the total CPx
of the campaign would have been higher. This is known as the breakdown problem
or breakdown effect.
What is the Breakdown Problem or Breakdown Effect?
This “problem” originally appeared with placement optimization. When clients view a
reporting breakdown by placement, they may notice that the placement with the
lowest average cost per result did not get the majority of the budget. And sometimes,
the placement with the highest average cost per result received most of the budget.
Although a client may interpret this as a problem with our delivery system, this is an
expected outcome.
Discount pacing + lowest cost bidding guides delivery to the cheapest opportunities.
Once those “cheap” opportunities are exhausted in one placement at a certain spend
level, the system will move to the next cheapest opportunity in another placement. If
the budget had continued to spend in the first placement the average cost per result,
would have increased. See below for a link to Help Center content with thorough
explanations.
- Help Center Article​ on placement optimization. Look at the “automatic
placement” heading.
- External The breakdown effect
How does the Breakdown Problem/Breakdown Effect show up in CBO?
In the context of CBO, the “breakdown problem” is when the most budget is
distributed to an ad set that does not have the lowest cost per result. If your client
sees this, make sure to explain that this is expected, and point them to the Help
Center for further explanation. CBO is meant to provide the cheapest average cost
per result at the campaign level, so that is where clients should evaluate
performance.
Help Center Article​ that explains CBO reporting with a thorough explanation and
example of the breakdown problem
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PAGE | 73
Split Testing
Can we use split testing to compare performance for budget optimization vs ad
set budgets?
Yes! Now available externally in the Test and Learn tool!
Learning Phase
What is the learning phase?
The learning phase predicts when our delivery system needs to learn more from an
ad set's performance before it can provide more optimal delivery. During the learning
phase, our delivery system is still identifying the best means for maximizing an ad
set's performance, so delivery can be less stable. Making significant edits to an ad
set during the learning phase can delay our delivery system's ability to learn.
Is the learning phase triggered when CBO dynamically distributes budget to ad
sets?
All ad sets in a campaign will go through learning phase at the start of the campaign.
However, the learning phase is not triggered when CBO is dynamically distributing
budgets across ad sets. This differs from non-CBO campaigns where manual shifts
in budgets from the advertiser will trigger the learning phase.
Will adding a new ad to an ad set within a CBO campaign reset the learning phase?
Yes, adding an ad to an adset within a CBO campaign will trigger learning.
If we significantly increase/decrease the campaign budget, will it trigger the
learning phase?
At this point in time (Summer 2019) significant budget updates will not trigger the
learning phase for CBO. However, we are expecting this to change in the coming
months.
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PAGE | 74
Are other “significant edits” applicable to ad sets under a campaign using CBO?
E.g. if we update creative, change targeting
Yes, any significant edit made to an ad set that is unrelated to budget will still trigger
learning phase. The same rules apply. Learn more about significant edits ​here​.
Does CBO change the minimum volume of conversions required to leave the
learning phase?
No, CBO does not change the number of conversions required to leave the learning
phase. As a general rule, 50 conversions are needed to leave the learning phase.
However, due to learning phase dynamic exit, it is possible to exit quicker since we
can shift budgets to the best performing ad sets.
What happens to the ad sets that have less than 50 conversions after 7 days? Are
they continuously in the learning phase until they are deemed the best performing
at that specific time frame?
If 7 days have elapsed since a significant edit and an ad set has still not exited the
learning phase, then that ad set is not delivering. In this situation, the 'Active
(Learning)' status no longer appears. Advertisers should modify the ad set to improve
delivery if needed.
Does CBO work with dynamic ads? DCO? DLO?
Yes!
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Further Reading
Selected CBO Case Studies, Wins & Challenges
I asked those in my ​Facebook group​ about their experiences with CBO, which you
can ​check out here​ (​join first​ if that link doesn’t work). Here are some selected
insights:
- Blake Driver​: duplicates a winning audience 3-5 times into a $300-500 CBO
campaign to find the best pockets and scale
- Ryan Kovach​: runs something similar, seeing success with audiences up to
10%
- Chantel Carnes​: has had success ensuring she runs different creatives in her
CBO ad sets and separating LAA and Interest based ad sets
- Nick Chermemeff​: scaling to $2500 per day in ad spend using Graduation
Testing and V-Scale for stability and growth
- Josh Burke​: his most successful ad format in CBO has been collection ads
together with 10% LAAs
- Marko Sekulić​: success with CBOs of around $300 and using the 4-Funnel
System
Read more about those c
​ ase studies here​ (​join first​ if that link doesn’t work).
Additional Links
-
-
Facebook’s Help Center
- Help Center - Overview About Campaign Budget Optimization
- Help Center - Controlling Ad Set Budgets with CBO​ (Spend Limits)
- Help Center - Understand Reporting and Interpreting Results with CBO
- Help Center - CBO Best Practices
- Help Center - Lowest Cost Bid Strategy
- Help Center - Test and Learn with CBO​ - Step by Step Guide
API Documentation
- API - CBO
- API - CBO Bid Strategy
Copyright material of SM Commerce Limited (UK). Written and compiled by Depesh Mandalia. All copyrights reserved.
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Acronyms & Terms
CBO​ - Campaign Budget Optimisation
ABO​ - Adset Budget Optimisation
CPM​ - Cost per Thousand (Mille) Impressions
GT-CBO​ - Graduation Testing Campaign Budget Optimisation
SEO​ - Search Engine Optimisation
PPC​ - Pay Per Click
CPA​ - Cost Per Acquisition
ML​ - Machine Learning
AI​ - Artificial Intelligence
CRO​ - Conversion Rate Optimisation
ROAS​ - Return on Ad Spend
CPx​ - Cost per X
DCO​ - Dynamic Creative Optimisation
DLO​ - Dynamic Language Optimisation
GT​ - Graduation Testing
LAA​ - LookAlike Audience
PPE​ - Page Post Engagement
AOV​ - Average Order Value
CPL​ - Cost Per Lead
CPR​ - Cost Per Registration
DPA​ - Dynamic Product Ads
DABA​ - Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences
Copyright material of SM Commerce Limited (UK). Written and compiled by Depesh Mandalia. All copyrights reserved.
PAGE | 77
Acknowledgements
With huge thanks to those in my team that contributed (Kate, Arnas, Rey, Sol) for
your help with various tests, many of which failed, some of which worked and made
it into this guide. And for helping get this guide in place ready to share with the world.
Big thanks to Ayah, our ever supportive and excellent Facebook Partner Manager
(aka ‘rep’) and others at Facebook for giving us access to insights and information
not otherwise available to be able to keep ahead and push forward with enabling CBO
growth for our clients and our own ad accounts.
Thanks to our clients and students that place their trust in us and our systems.
Thank you to those that contributed to this guide, in proof-reading and providing
valuable improvements: Samir Bendida, Kai Ravariere, Blake Driver, Lenny Ramirez,
Ghadeer Rahhal, Mark Watson, Denton Hopkins, Jason Portnoy, Jeff Shapiro, Chantel
Carnes, Dave Huffman, Nabeel Dada, Satinder Kassoana and Bernard Opoku.
And finally a big thank you to my business partner and crutch, Shalina, for supporting
my world so that I can help others in achieving their greatness.
Ways to continue the growth journey
1. Join my free Facebook community
2. Join The BPM Method training program to build consistency and predictability
3. Join my coaching program or let my agency do the heavy lifting for you
Copyright © 2019 Depesh Mandalia
All rights reserved. No part of this book or ebook may be reproduced, scanned or distributed
in any print or digital form, without written permission from the author. Please do not
encourage or support piracy of copyright material. Your support of the author’s rights is
appreciated - the mammoth task of running experiments, failing, learning and winning, then
compiling this up requires time, patience and effort.
Any educational or press use can be requested via ​hello@depeshmandalia.com
Made with love from London, UK via North America, Europe, Africa, the Far East and Australasia
for you. Share your findings, results and wins ​in the community​ - spot prizes for the best wins
and case studies shared!
Copyright material of SM Commerce Limited (UK). Written and compiled by Depesh Mandalia. All copyrights reserved.
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