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What should I do when ads with good metrics are getting no spend because one ad is eating all the budget?

CBO budget distribution frustration — extremely common in testing phase

This is the core limitation of CBO during testing: Meta allocates budget to the ad it believes will perform best, which starves new or different creatives of the data they need to be evaluated fairly.

  • Option 1 — Use ABO for testing: This is the right structural fix. In ABO, you set a fixed budget per adset, so every angle gets equal spend and clean comparative data. Switch to CBO for scaling once you have proven winners.
  • Option 2 — Use minimum spend limits (CBO): In CBO, each adset can have a minimum spend set. This guarantees that your test adsets get at least some spend even when the algorithm wants to concentrate on one winner. Use sparingly — the whole point of CBO is to let Meta optimize, so constraining it too much defeats the purpose.
  • Option 3 — Separate campaigns by phase: One CBO campaign for proven winners (let it run and eat spend), one ABO campaign for new creative tests (fixed budget, structured data). This separates your scaling and testing infrastructure.
Tactical FixFor testing: one CBO campaign, one ad set, all creatives inside at $50–$100/day. Meta allocates spend across creatives — no budget starvation fight because you're not splitting across multiple adsets. If you want to test a new angle that you suspect might get starved, create a new ad set within the same CBO campaign (not a new campaign) — this preserves pixel data while isolating the angle test.

See this in practice: Image Ads

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