Facebook advertisers will not be able to set budgets at ad-set level starting in September

Facebook announced on Wednesday that, starting in September, new and existing campaigns will be migrated to Facebook’s automated campaign budget allocation system that optimizes the campaign budget across an advertiser’s ad sets. This means Facebook advertisers will no longer be able to define budgets at the ad set level.

Why you should care

Facebook advertisers are currently able to set budgets by ad set within a campaign, but, starting in September, when ad campaigns migrate to campaign budget optimization, advertisers will only be able to set budgets on a campaign level.

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

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

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

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

More on the news

• Facebook says in the help page on campaign budget optimization that advertisers will need to gauge the system’s success “based on the total number of results for your campaign and the average cost per optimization event at the campaign level” rather than at ad set-level results.
• Advertisers will not have access to metrics such as the total number of opportunities for each ad set or how much each result costs when campaign budget optimization is running.
• Facebook said BuzzFeed has tested the budget optimization tool for its content ads and achieved greater cost efficiencies and easier budget management, along with more video ad views and clicks.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.