Myth: always use CBO from day one

Myth: always use CBO from day one

CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization, meaning TikTok spreads one budget across your ad groups for you) is popular, so people switch it on instantly. Let's think it through.

CBO works beautifully once you KNOW which audiences and creatives perform. Early on, you don't know yet. CBO will happily dump most of the budget into one ad group, and you never gather clean data on the others.

So for testing, manual ad-group budgets (called ABO) often teach you more.

Simple rule:
— Testing phase: set budgets per ad group yourself
— Scaling phase: move proven winners into CBO

Try this: name your current goal out loud, learning or scaling? That answer picks your budget mode. Don't worry if you've been doing it the other way, now you know.