Question · Paid ads
Should I use CBO or ABO for Meta ads?
Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
Base it on your creative win rate. If only a few of your new ads ever win, ABO testing just burns money and a CBO is the efficient way to test. ABO earns its place when you need control, like pushing budget behind a flash sale.
Quick translation first. CBO is campaign budget optimisation, where Meta decides how to split your budget across the ad sets in a campaign. ABO is ad set budget optimisation, where you set each ad set’s budget yourself.
My preferred structure is a CBO scaling campaign holding your proven, evergreen ads, plus an ABO for testing and time-based pushes. Ideally that’s one or two campaigns per country, and that’s it. Peak periods and sales go in the ABO, so you can put the money behind one specific ad set.
Testing in an ABO means forcing spend onto every new ad. If most of them won’t make it, that money is gone. A CBO pushes spend toward whatever’s working, so it can sort through a lot of volume for you.
If you’re stuck on CBO only and need to run a weekend sale, you might have to set up a separate campaign. It’s not ideal, because you end up competing with your own ads. But sometimes you just have to do it.