Predictive Budget Allocation vs. Campaign Budget Optimization

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Smartly's Predictive Budget Allocation (PBA), using world-class artificial-intelligence to improve campaign results, has existed since 2014. Facebook launched its Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO, currently known ad Advantage campaign budget) in 2017, later followed by Pinterest and TikTok releasing their own versions of CBO. 

CBO is fine, if you only have one campaign to optimize, and if you don't need to schedule your budget spend. But to optimize budgeting across campaigns, even ad accounts, and adjust your spend in customizable increments, you need Smartly's PBA.

Benefits of using Predictive Budget Allocation

Using PBA instead of CBO has multiple benefits:

  • PBA can optimize across multiple campaigns: You can include multiple campaigns into budget pools and optimize budgets across all of them with PBA. You can't do this by using the platforms' native CBO. 
  • Select your source of truth: With PBA, you can optimize towards your 1st or 3rd party data. This data can be pushed to Smartly via one of available data integration solutions. 
  • PBA can optimize for different goals: Customize your optimization goal using custom expressions and combine multiple metrics.  
  • PBA offers automatic Budget Scaling: With Budget Scaling you can automatically scale your spend while meeting target CPA/ROAS. Smartly automatically learns and adjusts for weekday performance fluctuations.
  • Schedule budget spend with PBA: You can set the target budget per period and schedule multiple budget periods in advance. This way PBA not only optimally allocates your budget across selected campaigns/ad sets, but also scales the daily budgets if needed to stay as close as possible to the target budget for the whole period. 
  • PBA can optimize across ad accounts: You can select campaigns from different ad accounts and optimize across all of them with PBA 
  • PBA can optimize across platforms (Alpha): You can select campaigns from multiple advertising platforms and optimize budgets towards your target goal with PBA.

Using PBA and CBO together

PBA and CBO work seamlessly together, too. You can use CBO to optimize budgets within individual campaigns, and at the same time use PBA to optimize budgets across campaigns.

PBA across multiple campaigns and CBO within individual campaigns

Platforms do a better job when optimizing native conversions, such as Pixel or App Events — but CBO can't optimize across campaigns. Let Budget Pools and PBA allocate the budgets optimally across campaigns. By adding your CBO campaigns to a Budget Pool, you can:

  • Optimize for your 1st or 3rd party data across campaigns.
  • Optimize towards a custom goal across campaigns.
  • Use Budget Scaling to automatically scale the total spend up or down to reach your CPA/ROAS goal.
  • Use Budget scheduling to plan your overall spend across selected campaigns per period.

PBA and CBO together in a single campaign

Even a single campaign can be added to a budget pool and PBA can be activated. 

There are two cases when there is an advantage of combining both CBO and PBA for a single campaign: 

  • Use Budget Scaling to automatically scale the total spend up or down to reach your CPA/ROAS goal.
  • Use Budget scheduling to plan your overall spend across selected campaigns per period.

Learn about platform Campaign budget optimization solutions in these articles:

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