The Main Points to Remember When Using CBO

1. Launching CBO campaigns

First thing first – how do you launch a CBO campaign? What setup should you give to it?

From our practice, we have identified the BEST setups to use for CBO campaigns on different levels:

– Campaign level – this is the most OBVIOUS ONE yet it’s CBO in its essence.

Use the auction buying type and conversion objective.

When determining a daily budget, start with the default $100/day. Per our practice, default setups WORK UNEXPECTEDLY WELL, as they give Facebook the most room for optimization.

– Adset level – schedule your CBO for the next-day morning (~7-8 AM), as it needs time to optimize during the day. Plus, the night-time poor traffic will distort your first-day results.

Use your best available custom audiences for warm traffic and best-performing lookalikes for cold one. DO NOT FORGET to exclude the people who already purchased your product.

When going for interests targeting, use only one interest per adset. You will not know your winning interests if you mixed them up. Make sure that the “expand audiences” checkmark is off (with the same efficiency, you could just use broad targeting 😉)

FIGS placement – Facebook/Instagram feeds+stories – is the placement method that has been working best for us so far.

Use the default 7 d click/1d view conversion window and conversion for optimization.

– Ad level – use both Facebook and Instagram pages for placement.

MAKE SURE that you use the existing post and its ID and NOT create duplicates of same ads many times, with different IDS.

You want to gather as much social proof as possible for your running ads.

2. Optimizing CBO campaigns

*Remember that optimizing gets harder with EACH adset created inside your CBO. We recommend that you keep the number of adsets between 3-5 inside one campaign.

First of all, determine the values for your major KPIs for the campaign:

– ROAS – Return on Ad Spent

– CPR – Cost per Result

– CPATC – Cost per Add to Cart

– CPIC – Cost per Initiated Checkout

As long as your CBO meets all the minimums/maximums for your KPIs, go ahead and scale it.

Otherwise, you must optimize it.

Check the same KPIs for different adsets and turn off losers while keeping only winners. Then, continue running the CBO campaign to see if it’s stabilized. Yes? Go ahead and scale it.

If after some time your CBO started performing worse, you must optimize it.

In most cases, this is the ads fatigue that causes such problems. You can fix your CBO in two ways here:

– Duplicate your best adsets and add new creatives into them. In this case, turn off the old adsets with old creatives;

– Add new creatives directly into your best-performing adsets.

*  Make sure that you do not change the text of your ads – they have proven to be working well. You are only looking for new images/videos/headlines!

3. Scaling CBO campaigns

Overall, If your CBO has been working consistently well within 5-7 days, you can start scaling it up.

– We recommend that you do not scale your CBO at one time bymore than30% of its budget. However, if it is performing REALLY VERY well, you can go aggressively and scale by 50%.

– If you have scaled it up several times to 1-2k already, and your ads are still performing well, with low frequency, simply duplicate your CBO!

– Test other interests/lookalikes/audiences on the background. When you have gathered enough winners again, go ahead and put them inside a new CBO.

If they are proven winners already, do not start with $100 – to for higher daily budgets (at least $300/day)

*REMEMBER: each campaign and product isunique, and you should use our advice as the basis for your own concept. Do not take them as the ultimate truth.

4. Testing and improving CBO campaigns

1. Scale your lookalikes for purchases only.

– Test your Pixel purchase lookalike audiences on 1 to 10% rates (take US, CA, UK, and AU as lookalike audience locations).

In case you are not sure what is lookalike audiences and how to use them, you might want to check this great Facebook article about it.

Otherwise, you go ahead and try starting from there – take your Facebook Pixel data, select the recommended setup, and create the 10 different lookalike audiences.

– Pay attention to the volume of your audience. Ideally, it should be around 5M people or more for one lookalike. You can stack several lookalike audiences into one if the numbers are lower.

– Pick up at least 3, at most 8, lookalikes that performed best for you as the winners and kill the rest of ad sets. CBO will adjust the budget for you.

2. Test and scale lookalikes for purchases, initiate checkout, and added to cart visitors.

– Again, you create around 10-15 ad sets with 1-10% lookalike audiences, this time for not only purchases but also initiate checkout and added to cart events.

It’s best to set up your CBO campaign budget to at least $300 at this point.

– Take the 5 winners out of the tested lookalikes and duplicate them into the new CBO with a 2x budget.

– Again, continue scale them as long as your income gets higher.

3. Add interests for broader audience.

– If you have the interests that worked well for you in the past, take them and use for your CBOs.

This will give the Facebook algorithms more space for the maximum optimization.

– You can use Facebook suggestions and Audience Insights as well to get even more ad sets for testing inside your CBO.

Useful Tips:

– When testing different audiences, isolate them in different adsets;

– Duplicate ONLY ads with that “Use Existing Post”;

– Use Audience Insights and spy on your competitors to get the MOST RELEVANT targeting data;

– Avoid overlapping – if you have several similar campaigns, shut down the one that performs worse. This will improve your eventual results;