Why you are missing out when ignoring the Facebook Ad Set Spend Limits
What is the first thing coming to your mind when you hear the word ‘limit’? It’s not what you think in Facebook Advertising. Suppose you ever use campaign budget optimization (and I bet you do) on your paid social campaign with multiple ad sets that target different audiences. In that case, I recommend looking at the Ad Set Spend Limits feature.
Time to get hands-on! Many advertisers ignore this feature because the spend limit is a hidden option in the Budget & Schedule field. Only if you click on Show more options, the feature with the confusing naming comes to light. The fact that it calls itself spend limit is misleading, to say the least. If you edit the setting, the ads manager reveals that you can set a lifetime minimum and maximum for the specific ad set. Besides having an added layer of cost control, the overlooked part is the Lifetime minimum spend. But what is its use case?
Don’t leave it all to the AI, if you want to create more A/B learning
The simple answer is that it overrules Facebook ads’ algorithm to some extent when using campaign budget optimization. Have you ever experienced this: you set up the campaign with, e.g., three ad sets, turn the budget optimization on, and wake up 48 hours later with one ad set having spent only a handful of dollars while your other sets deliver like crazy? This happens because of the optimization signals. If you leave it all to the Facebook AI, it will limit your learning if there is potential in the audience you target in the ad set. That might be right, but just because the audience is maybe significantly smaller than your other sets and drove very few results, it doesn’t mean that it cannot provide ROI. In other words, the results from a few dollars are not reliable enough for you to make decisions.
Instead, force the ad set into spending a lifetime minimum of, e.g., 5% of your total budget by setting a lifetime minimum spend. You won’t waste money as it is not a huge share of your budget, but it will create more tangible learnings if this specific ad set drives ROI or not and give you a more accurate comp of the performance vs. any other ad set.
If it doesn’t perform, fair enough: pause the ad set manually. If it gets you results in the expected range, increase the limit and keep spending, even if the machine learning per se does not. It’s a little human hack of the powerful algorithm of Facebook advertising that puts you more in control and can trigger additional results.
Have fun experimenting with it!
