Nick Theriot@nicktheriot_
We used to run ABO for testing with a separate CBO for scaling.
Ran that setup for about a year, then went exclusively CBO for the last 4 years.
Saw results improve almost immediately because we stopped wasting ad spend on tests that went nowhere.
What changed:
1. Speed to scale got way faster: If we launched a new ad in the CBO and it worked, it would steal budget from the losers almost immediately and we could start scaling the campaign next day. With ABO, we'd have to run tests for 3-4 days, then manually move winners to the scaling campaign, that delay killed momentum.
2. We could launch way more tests without burning money: If I'm running ABO with $100/day per ad set and I launch 10 tests, I just committed $1,000/day to things I'm not sure will even work. With CBO, I can launch 20 tests in one campaign and Facebook only spends on the ones that are actually engaging people. The rest get $5-$20/day and die naturally without eating my budget.
We just switched 2 clients from ABO to CBO last year and their profits increased because we stopped hemorrhaging money on forced spend to ads that weren't working.
And yeah, one of our new ads just beat a 3-month winner with massive engagement for one of those clients too, happened in a CBO within 48 hours of launch.
Now the biggest objection I always get: "If an ad gets little spend in CBO, how do I know Facebook isn't making a mistake and killing a potential winner?"
I used to have that exact same thought.
So I tested it.
Pulled every ad that didn't earn significant spend in CBO and threw them into a separate campaign with forced budget to "prove Facebook wrong."
100% of those ads burned money. Not one of them converted profitably.
That's what gave me the confidence I have today to trust the algorithm.
If you're just starting with CBO and you need training wheels, add $5-$10/day minimum spend to new ad sets so they get a chance to prove themselves.
But I'm telling you, if an ad can't earn spend organically in a CBO, it's probably not going to work with forced budget either.
So what determines which ads "earn spend" in a CBO?
One thing: engagement.
Every ad in your campaign has an engagement ratio.
Number of engagements ÷ Number of impressions = Engagement rate
Example: Ad gets 50 engagements with 1,000 impressions = 5% engagement rate.
Let's say all your ads average 5% engagement.
Then you launch a new ad that hits 6%, it's above average, and that signals to Facebook that people WANT TO SEE this ad.
Facebook has to keep users on the platform.
If you create ads that everyone scrolls past, Facebook penalizes you with higher CPMs.
If you create ads people actually want to see and engage with, Facebook rewards you with more reach and lower costs, and in a CBO, that ad steals budget from everything else because it's helping Facebook achieve their goal of keeping users engaged.
(This isn't official Facebook logic…this is my own observation after running this structure for nearly 5 years and analyzing hundreds of ads that earned spend vs. ads that died with $10 total.)
So what makes an ad "engaging" to Facebook?
It's not just comments and likes.
Engagement includes:
⦁ Scroll stop %
⦁ Shares
⦁ % of video watched
⦁ Length of time someone stares at your ad
⦁ Screenshots
⦁ Reading through comments
Facebook uses the collective average of ALL of these signals to decide what to spend more on.
How do you create ads that are engaging?
After analyzing hundreds of winning ads and viral posts, it always comes back to the purple cow effect.
If you drive past a pasture full of cows, the purple cow catches your attention.
Your ad needs to be the purple cow.
How to reverse-engineer purple cows:
1. Call out a desire no one else is marketing to Everyone's saying "scale your Facebook ads", you say "empty your warehouse so fast your manufacturer begs you to slow down production."
2. Call out a group of people no one else is marketing to Black Rifle Coffee didn't create better coffee, they created coffee FOR MILITARY. Gym Shark didn't create better activewear, they created activewear FOR GYM CULTURE. Find the subset of your market that's being ignored and own them.
3. One-up your competitors in an obvious visual way Your competitor drops an iPhone from a desk to show their case is indestructible? You drop it from a roof. They show a before/after photo? You show a time-lapse video. They use a talking head? You use a split-screen comparison.
The ad that's different in an obvious way gets the engagement, earns the spend, and scales.
The ad that looks like everything else dies with $66 total spend and you're on Twitter asking why CBO doesn't work.
CBO works. Your ads just aren't purple cows.
