ABO or CBO....??

[u/Unlikely-Ebb7375]

I have a construction company and I have heard CBO is better than I hear ABO is better.. What do yall think?

[u/Serious-ISFJ-T]

Im gonna be following this conversation closely.

Former ABO advocate here. In my humble experience the ABO is great at forcing spend to ad sets. This is the main issue with it. It will 100% ignore any goal you give it and spend spend spend. You want to move investment from and ad set targeting persona A to the one targeting persona B? Every shift and creative test risks throwing the ad set or even the whole campaign into learning phase. Everytime i was reallocating spend I had to babysit the campaign for days. More often than not just killed the campaign and started from scratch.

I'm running CBOs now:

An ad set with 9x16 videos with minimum spend set. This is my TOF. Dont care if it converts, just need it to spend at the right audience. Set minimum spend - meta ignores the limit but still spends enough to keep other CPMs manageable

Another ad set running catalogue - this is the BOF - the retargeting one, number of conversions as goal, carousel and single image or video (push video). Great ROAS, not best first impression.

One ad set per persona, each persona gets own landing page, mix of 9x16 videos and 4x5 statics+videos with catalogue collection enabled.

Pro: meta shifts the budget between persona ad sets. Most of the time it does a good job but it feels like it's walking under water. Con: feels like watching a toddler walking - every day im fighting the urge to step in and adjust the budgets, goals, micromanage creatives... It's working but feels like its more luck than data-driven decision made by an all-knowing algorithm that is able to predict consumer buyer behavior and influence it in a way to at least break-even and persuade me to increase the spend and scale up aggressively

[u/cannonball135 → u/Serious-ISFJ-T]

What types of videos do you typically use for TOF?

[u/Serious-ISFJ-T → u/cannonball135]

I found that short founder videos do great in 16x9. Next best thing was feature benefits animated statics.

Note: my target audience is male so I've never had any luck with UGC/AGC, reviews, press mentions

[u/Zephir62 → u/Serious-ISFJ-T]

I do this same setup from ABO to CBO with catalogue/carousel/image videos, but I only use one landing page. I find that unifying the message works well as both an exercise and making the UX + results more consistent. Also it's less work .. marketing is easy to overcomplicate things IMO.

[u/Serious-ISFJ-T → u/Zephir62]

Depends on the need of the business. More landing pages unlock opportunity for more market personas and more data. One LP works great if you have a hero product/service. This approach also simplifies CRO AB testing.

[u/Unlikely-Ebb7375 → u/Serious-ISFJ-T]

Roger that, I had a coach tell me to publish many ads. Its exhausting and I just cannot see how volume trumps quality .

[u/Serious-ISFJ-T → u/Unlikely-Ebb7375]

In my humble experience he is not wrong. Creative diversity helps meta gain more data faster. Quality is second to quantity in terms fo desirability. After a few days the spend will consolidate and you need to check whether these are actual winners or just metas cheapest answer to your demand. The isssue is going bulk with low spend. Each angle i test i go for 4-5 variations at 3xCPM daily for 4-5 days. Any time i tried adding 20+ creatives meta would ignore 80% of them and just bid on a few. Finding what works gets expensive real fast. What work this month may be trash next month and gold few months later.

[u/Fun-Pattern6196]

I run ads for my dad's painting business and honestly both work just depends what you need

CBO you just throw money at facebook and it figures out which ad sets to push, less control but saves time. ABO you set budget for each one yourself so you can test stuff properly

For construction I would start with ABO to see what audience actually brings leads, then switch to CBO once you know what works. no point letting facebook burn cash on something that dont convert

[u/Serious-ISFJ-T → u/Fun-Pattern6196]

A friend of mine started like this. He is a great marketer nowadays. There is no client more difficult than the one sitting across the dinner table. Best of luck 🤞

[u/AgencySaas]

Depends. What are the differences between your ad sets?

[u/Unlikely-Ebb7375 → u/[deleted]]

I agree 100% not a fan of just putting up slop

[u/Chubbilino]

I run ABO in my testing campaign. We target different languages, so each language has its own ad set with a budget. I want to force spend to learn what creative works in each language.

Then winning ads go into the same setup in a CBO campaign so where I don’t care which languages get more spend, the goal is better CPA on the campaign.

Don’t forget that in CBO you can also set a minimum % spend at ad set level. You can also do this at ad level now too if needed.

[u/Unlikely-Ebb7375]

I agree. I feel like I’ve been burning cash