Facebook dropped a small but interesting ads update regarding how they will spend your daily budgets at their recent F8 Developer Conference in July 2016.
Basically, they’re going to overcharge you. And that’s a good thing.
According to their recent 2.8 API update, you may be charged 25% more than you set for your daily budget. This means, for example, if you have your daily budget set to $100, you may spend up to $125 on any given day. To offset this, Facebook will look at your daily budget across seven days and spend only 7x your daily budget in a calendar week. In other words, you may spend more on a daily basis but over the course of a week, it will even out to be the same ad spend. This means some days you may spend higher than your daily budget while other day’s you’ll spend less. The average will work out to be your daily budget across seven days.
So why is this a good thing?
Imagine you have a great sales day and your ad is really killing it. Facebook sees this and says hey there are more impressions available and they’re working so well for you today, let’s spend a little more. We know Facebook is smart enough to do this (or, their algorithms are). We’re already trusting them with targeting and spend optimization, so why not trust them with 25% more budget, if they deem it worthy.
This is basically a built in scaling technique that is constantly monitoring your ads performance 24/7. If the traffic and conversions are flowing, you now have an automatic function that comes in and spends up to 25% more. It’s Marketing 101: when something is worker, show it to more, similar people. Facebook is doing this for you automatically now on a daily basis. When things are working, you’ll benefit further. That’s what this update is all about.