Solved: Scaling Facebook CBOs and ABOs side by side - Need Expert Advice

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your scaling questions. It’s a good position to be in, having found some winning adsets so early on. But the way you scale from here is probably the most important decision you'll make for the long-term health of your brand.

Honestly, the whole ABO vs CBO debate and the specific tactics you've mentioned are a bit of a distraction from the real issue. You're thinking about tactics, but you need a strategy. Let’s unpack that.

We'll need to look at your current scaling plan...

First off, your question about ABOs – increasing budgets by 20% every couple of days. Is it acceptable? Yes, it's a textbook method that people talk about online. It’s 'safe'. But it's also incredibly slow and inefficient. You're treating each adset like a delicate flower, when you should be building a robust system that can handle much larger, faster budget increases. If you stick with this method, you'll be spending all your time making tiny adjustments across 10 different adsets, and you'll probably hit a ceiling very fast when your ROAS starts to wobble. It’s a lot of work for very incremental gains. It's managing, not scaling.

Now, your CBO question. This is where things get interesting. I'll be blunt, both of the options you laid out are flawed and based on some outdated thinking.

Option A, creating 10 separate CBOs, one for each winning audience, and then creating 'pockets' of identical adsets inside them... that's a recipe for disaster. It’s unbelievably complicated. You’ll be creating massive audience overlap, where your CBOs are essentially bidding against each other for the same users, which will drive your costs up. Managing ten CBOs would be a complete nightmare, and it fundamentally misunderstands how the algorithm works now. It wants broader audiences and simpler structures, not a hundred tiny little boxes to play in. A few years ago people were obsessed with this kind of hyper-segmentation, but the platform has moved on. It’s an easy way to burn money and lose your mind trying to figure out what's actually working.

Option B, putting all 10 winning adsets into one CBO, is much closer to the mark. It’s simpler, and it gives the algorithm more control to find the cheapest conversions within those audiences. But just dumping them all in together is still a bit messy. It doesn't give you a proper framework for growth. What happens when you want to test new audiences? Do you just keep throwing them into this one big CBO? What about retargeting people who have visited your site but not purchased? Where do they fit in? You see, you've found 10 adsets that work for cold traffic, but that's only one peice of the puzzle.

The real goal isn't just to spend more money on the audiences you've already found. It's to build a full-funnel machine that acquires new customers, nurtures them, and converts them systematically. That requires a totally different way of structuring your account.

I'd say you need to simplify and structure your account properly...

Instead of thinking in terms of "winning adsets", you need to think in terms of the customer journey. We structure all our eCommerce client accounts this way, and it’s how we get results like a 691% return for apparel brands or a 1000% ROAS for subscription boxes. The secret isn't some magic scaling trick, it's a logical structure.

You need to think in three stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

-> ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting): This is where your 10 winning adsets live. These are cold audiences – people who've never heard of you before. The goal here is to find new potential customers at the lowest possible cost.

-> MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Engagement/Warm): This is for people who have shown some interest but aren't ready to buy yet. They might have watched one of your videos, visited your website, or engaged with a post. The goal here is to keep your brand top of mind and move them further down the path to purchase.

-> BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot/Retargeting): This is your money-maker. These are people who have shown strong buying intent – they’ve added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, but for whatever reason, they didn't complete the purchase. The goal here is to get them over the line with a targeted offer or reminder.

So, instead of one ABO campaign or a messy CBO, you should have a structure that looks more like this, all using CBO:

With this structure, you scale the CBO budget at the *campaign level*. You give Facebook a big budget for prospecting and a smaller, separate budget for retargeting. The algorithm then does the work of finding the best people within each stage of the funnel. This is a much more stable, scalable, and professional way to run your ads. You're not just throwing money at something that worked yesterday; you're building an entire customer acquisition system. When you want to scale, you primarilly increase the budget on your Prospecting CBO, which feeds more people into your MoFu and BoFu campaigns automatically.

You probably should rethink your audiences...

Okay, let's talk about the audiences themselves. You mentioned an audience like "furniture lovers." This is a classic mistake I see all the time when I audit client accounts. It sounds logical, but it's actually a terrible way to target.

Why? Because that interest category is gigantic. It includes interior designers, people who just bought a house, people who are dreaming of buying a house in ten years, people who just like pinning nice pictures on Pinterest, and your competitiors. It's incredibly broad and unfocused. You're asking Facebook to find a needle in a haystack the size of a country. A lot of people are testing audience's that dont align with their target customer at all.

Forget demographics and broad interests. You need to define your customer by their pain. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a nightmare. What specific, urgent, expensive problem does your furniture solve?

-> Are you selling space-saving furniture for people in tiny city flats who are sick of feeling cramped?
-> Are you selling ergonomic office furniture for people working from home who are developing back pain?
-> Are you selling unique, handcrafted pieces for people who are bored of the same generic stuff from big box stores and want their home to reflect their personality?

Once you define the problem, you can find the people who have it. The person with back pain isn't just in the "furniture lovers" bucket. They might be following chiropractors on Instagram, reading blogs about WFH setups, or using apps for stretching. The person who wants unique furniture might be following specific indie designers, magazines like Architectural Digest, or even competitors who have a similar aesthetic. This is the work you need to do. It's harder than just typing "furniture" into the interest box, but it's the foundation of ads that actually work at scale.

Once you have data flowing through your new funnel structure, your targeting gets even more powerful. You can stop relying so much on flawed interest targeting and start using your own data to build powerhouse audiences. Here’s the priority list I give to all my eCom clients:

You start with what works (your interests), but as soon as you have enough data (at least a few hundred purchasers), you build a Lookalike audience from them. This audience is infinitly more valuable than any interest group because it’s made of people who are statistically identical to those who have already given you money. For instance, we helped an eCommerce client selling cleaning products achieve a 633% return on ad spend and a 190% increase in revenue by focusing on a structured funnel that heavily prioritised lookalikes of their existing high-value users. That's the power of this aproach.

You'll need a better offer and creative strategy...

Let's assume you get the structure and targeting perfect. There's still one more peice. Your campaigns will eventually fail if your offer and your ads are weak. The number one reason I see campaigns fail, especially for new brands, isn't the targeting—it's the offer. You could have the best ad setup in the world, but if you're driving traffic to a weak product page or showing people boring ads, you're just setting your money on fire more efficiently.

At $150/day, you're getting some sales, which is great. But when you try to scale to $500/day, or $1000/day, the algorithm has to find customers who are less and less likely to buy. Your ads and your offer need to be incredibly persuasive to convert these more reluctant buyers. You need to be constantly testing new things:

-> Creative Formats: Are you just using static images? You need to be testing video (even simple user-generated style videos shot on a phone can work wonders), carousels showing off different product features, and collection ads.

-> Messaging/Copy: Are you testing different hooks? You should have ads that speak directly to the 'nightmare' we talked about earlier. You should test ads focused on social proof (like customer reviews). You should test ads focused on the product's unique features. You can't just run one ad and hope it lasts forever.

-> The Offer: Is your offer compelling enough? Sometimes a simple free shipping banner isn't enough. Could you do a bundle deal? A first-time customer discount? A limited-time offer? This is particularly important for your BoFu retargeting ads. Someone abandoned their cart – what can you offer them to come back and finish the job?

This relentless testing is what separates brands that scale to 7-figures from those that get stuck. For one eCommerce client selling maps, we generated $71k in revenue by building a solid funnel structure and then constantly testing new creative angles to find pockets of new customers. The structure is the engine, but the creative is the fuel. You need both.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Implementing this kind of strategy is a significant shift, there's no doubt about it. It means moving from being a reactive ad-tweaker to a proactive marketing strategist. It’s a lot more work upfront to define your ICP's pain points and set up the funnel correctly. And it requires ongoing work to analyse the data, manage the budgets between the funnels, and crucially, feed the machine with a constant stream of new, persuasive ad creative.

This is, frankly, why businesses hire experts. Building and managing a system like this is a full-time job. It's the difference between having 'ads that are running' and having a 'growth strategy that's working'. You've done the hard part of creating a brand and getting those initial sales. Now it's about building the professional framework around it to take it to the next level.

If you'd like to chat through how we could implement a structure like this for your brand and manage it for you, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can have a proper look at your account together and map out a precise plan. It might be helpful to get a second pair of eyes on it.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh