There is a big change coming to Facebook Ads which could have a profound effect on the performance of all new and existing campaigns from next month onward. You need to start getting your head around this now as the change is quite unpopular and the workarounds are all a bit… fiddly.

The new feature Facebook is rolling out is called Campaign Budget Optimization. You might have seen it in your account already. It's billed as a quality-of-life improvement, allowing you to simply nominate a budget for the campaign - and then hand the reins over to Facebook's friendly neighborhood AI, which will determine how it should be spent. And if you like the sound of that, you trust Facebook's system a lot more than me.

Campaign Budget Optimization has been
available as an optional feature for several months now so lots of
people have been experimenting with it and sharing data – which we'll get to.
The big change is this: from next month, it will start being compulsory.

To explain why this is such a big deal, and
why it will particularly affect authors, first we must quickly go over the
basic structure of a Facebook campaign and how things work right now
(experienced users can skip to the next section).

Facebook Ads – Campaign Structure

Facebook Ads have a three-level structure,
much like Google Ads: Campaigns, Ads Sets, and the Ads themselves. The last
level is the only thing that users see, and the other two levels are basically
settings behind the curtain for advertisers, if you like. It breaks down like
this:

Facebook Ads Structure - Campaigns, Ad Sets, Ads

The Campaign level is all about what kind of ad it is: Traffic (this is what you select when running a bog standard ad to your Amazon listing, for example), Leadgen (designed to boost your mailing list), or other types of ads like Awareness, and Video Views.

The Ad Set level is where you fiddle
with all the primary settings for your ads like budget (how much you are
spending), schedule, audience (who sees them), and placement (where your ads
turn up).

The Ad level is the public face: the image, the link you are sending people to, the accompanying ad text.

Taking the picture above as our example, I
might have a Campaign pushing a new release on Amazon, and then I might
have one Ad Set targeting my mailing list, another targeting those who
have Liked my Facebook Page, a third hitting a bunch of comp authors, and a fourth
re-targeting anyone who has visited my website in the last six months. And then
I might have two alternate Ad images inside each of those Ad Sets to see
which my readers respond to best. That's not the only way to structure a
campaign, of course, but a fairly common one.

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