Facebook Budget Restructure: What it Means for Auto Dealerships
Facebook announced that Budget Optimisation will be migrating to the Campaign Level in September 2019. This means that Facebook is essentially eliminating control of budget at the ad set level. While budget optimisation is a great way to increase campaign performance, this shift can have implications for dealership marketing campaigns which often require tight budget control at the dealership level.
In this blog, we break down the implications of the new Budget Optimisation for dealership marketing and give you actionable tips on how to prepare for the change.
What does Campaign Budget Optimisation mean for dealership marketing?
Dealership Facebook ad campaigns are often structured with an ad set for each dealer location under the same campaign. For example, you might have 25 ad sets within a single lead generation campaign. This allows for easy reporting and also means that the Facebook algorithm learns quickly from campaign level data across all dealerships.
For example, your dealership group might be running a Facebook ad campaign for a specific product range with a number of ad sets for each dealership or location. Normally you would assign a budget for each one of the ad sets to keep control over your budget for that dealership. Your campaign set up might look something like the diagram below:
With the new Facebook Budget Optimisation structure, you will only be able to set minimum budgets on ad set level. This means that some dealerships in the campaign might receive more of the budget. While usually, this is a good thing, if budgets are fixed for each location, it causes challenges.
In order to control dealer-level budgets, you’ll have to set up separate campaigns for each one of your store locations. Although this has some drawbacks, it does mean that you can add multiple ad sets per location and let Facebook optimise targeting. We illustrated how the new campaign set up could look like in the diagram below.
The new budget optimisation structure will require you to set a central campaign budget. Facebook will then automatically distribute the budget across your top performing ad sets in real time. Automatic and optimised budget distribution can make your life easier but you have to make sure your campaign structure reflects the new model.
With Driftrock’s local campaign management technology, at the moment you can create local campaigns with fixed budgets at both Campaign and Ad set level. After September, this won’t be possible. However, if you’re using Driftrock, it’s still just as quick to create all your local campaigns with campaign level budgets.
We’re working on some new solutions to make the most of Budget Optimisation, whilst not increasing your workload with reporting and optimisation. Stay tuned for updates via our Newsletter.
How to set up Campaign Budget Optimisation
At the moment Facebook offers Budget Optimisation at the campaign level as an optional function. This will become the only budget optimisation option in September 2019. Campaign optimisation is available for all goals and works best for campaigns with multiple ad sets.
If you still haven’t explored this option, now might be a good time to get familiar with the process and run some test campaigns.
Here’s how to get started with Campaign Budget Optimisation:
The budget optimisation option will appear in your campaign objective set up window and will look like this:
- Toggle the slider button to activate Campaign Budget Optimisation
- Next set a daily or lifetime budget for your campaign
- Select a campaign bid strategy. Facebook suggests using the lowest cost bid strategy for best results with campaign budget optimisation.
- Set up the rest of your campaign and push it live. Bear in mind that if you are running Facebook campaigns for multiple dealership locations you will need to set up a separate campaign for each one.
- Monitor your campaign performance and gather campaign learnings.
Find out more about Campaign Budget Optimisation.
The new Campaign Budget Optimisation model is an easy way to maximise campaign results and automate your budget optimisation. For dealership marketing campaigns the shift to the new model will require some advance planning and potentially a restructure of your campaigns. However, if you do your research and prepare now, you will be ready to see great results with the new Campaign Budget Optimisation once it’s here.
If you have any questions or would like to chat about budget optimisation, please get in touch.
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