Facebook & Meta Ads
CBO
Campaign Budget Optimization — you set one budget at the campaign level and Meta distributes it across ad sets in real time.
CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) puts the budget on the campaign and lets Meta decide, in real time, which ad sets get the spend based on live performance. The alternative is ABO, where you fund each ad set by hand. On modern Meta, structure is not the lever that wins iGaming — the creative, the offer and the funnel are — so CBO mostly exists to give the algorithm room to do its job.
Our default test is CBO 1-3-3: one campaign, three ad sets, three creatives each, one hypothesis per ad set, with a standard launch around CBO $500 and a Cost Cap of $200-250. The common mistake is opening a fresh CBO campaign on a huge budget, because Meta reads early spend capacity and hands you a pricier auction. Start measured and pour budget in only once an ad set catches the spark-up.
In buyer speech
“Kill the ABO tests and move the winners into one CBO 1-3-3 — Meta allocates better than we do once the creatives are proven.”