The simple response to that question is "it depends." Under the pretense of greater campaign efficacy and cost-effectiveness, Facebook Automation is primarily meant to induce increased advertising investment.

Consider campaign budget optimization.

According to Facebook "CBO automatically manages your campaign budget across ad sets to get you the overall best results. With CBO, you set one central campaign budget. This budget continuously distributes in real time to ad sets with the best opportunities, throughout the course of your campaign".

“Opportunities” is an obscure word used here. What Facebook fails to explain is that if you use CBO and have many ad sets with various audiences, the system will automatically start spending the majority of your budget on the ad set with the best probability of gaining the most impressions (i.e. the best chance of winning the auction).

The usage of Facebook's automation tools should be determined on a client by client basis according to how well the solutions can optimize different aspects of your campaign.

The use of CBO should be carefully considered - but on the other hand automated ads, generally, will improve the performance of your campaign by relying more on machine learning, such as automatically detecting locations, understanding when people are interested in your product, etc. so that you don't have to spend time determining optimal creative concepts, rotations and when ads are experiencing “burn out”.

The most well-known features of Facebook's automated ad tools, and arguably the most important, are Advantage Look-a-Likes.

Advantage Lookalike allows Meta’s system to reach a broader set of people than those defined in the advertiser's Lookalike Audience. For example, if Advantage Lookalikes identifies that better performance may be achieved outside of the defined lookalike size, we may expand the audience to take advantage of that opportunity.

Deep Text is a machine learning algorithm that focuses on the sentiment of messages that users send out which helps the ad algorithm understand how people feel about your product or service or what words they associate with certain images or even which emotions they are feeling at a given time. Deep Text is instrumental in determining customers within your Advantage Look-a-Like Audience who are likely to express interest or convert with your brand.

Overall, the automation tools are a mixed bag - some more impactful for conversion / response oriented campaigns, others for reach / frequency building awareness campaigns.

As you deploy your next Facebook effort across any objective, the criteria for deciding which automated tool to use should be:

• Total campaign budget (will you reach a broader audience then necessary?)

• Quality of the audience you are targeting

• Competition for that audience within the auction

• Value of the KPI you are trying to achieve

• Bid type and bid amount - determined by KPI value

If you still find yourself unsure then scroll through some of the content at engineering.fb.com where you will be able to piece together an “under the hood” look at the Facebook ad algorithm.