If you’ve ever run more than one Facebook campaign at a time, you know it’s easy to burn through budget without clear results. One campaign gets all the attention. Another barely spends. Some drive tons of clicks but zero conversions. And suddenly, your "strategy" feels more like guesswork.
Managing Facebook ad budgets across multiple campaigns isn’t about spreading your spend evenly. It’s about aligning each campaign to a stage in your funnel and funding them accordingly.
Let’s break down exactly how to manage your Facebook ad budgets across TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU campaigns and how to create a system that adapts with your business.
Why budgeting across campaigns is so much harder than it looks
When advertisers talk about “budgeting,” they often focus on a single campaign: tweaking daily spend, monitoring ad set performance, or testing a new creative. But when you're managing multiple campaigns at once, the challenge isn’t micro-adjustments — it’s the macro view.
Each campaign has its own:
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Objective (awareness, traffic, sales, leads),
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Target audience,
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Budget,
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Learning phase,
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Creative assets,
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Timeline and pacing.
Without a structure in place, your campaigns can start working against each other. For example, your top-of-funnel campaign might be bringing in great reach, but your retargeting campaign is consuming 70% of your total budget even though it only has a small audience to serve. Or worse, one campaign underdelivers because another with the same target audience is winning all the impressions.
The key is learning to think strategically across campaigns, not just within them. When each campaign plays a specific role in a broader funnel and your budgets reflect that role, performance improves across the board.
Build your strategy around funnel stages: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU
The most reliable way to manage Facebook ad budgets across multiple campaigns is to anchor your strategy to the customer journey. That means building campaigns for each stage of the funnel:
1. Top-of-Funnel (TOFU)
This is where you generate brand awareness and attract cold audiences who’ve never heard of you. The goal here isn’t immediate sales — it’s attention.
Examples:
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Video view campaigns,
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Reach or awareness objectives,
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Engagement-focused posts,
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Lookalike audiences based on page engagers or customers.
Budget tips:
TOFU campaigns often have higher CPMs and lower CTRs, but they set the stage for downstream performance. They typically need the largest share of your total ad budget (60% is a strong baseline) to reach enough new people consistently.
Want to learn how to dial in your cold targeting for TOFU campaigns? Check out our guide to Facebook interest targeting for practical tips on segmentation and messaging.
2. Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU)
Now you're speaking to users who are aware of your brand. Maybe they watched a video, visited your site, or engaged with a post. MOFU is where you deepen the relationship.
Examples:
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Traffic or lead-gen campaigns,
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Free downloads or webinar signups,
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Clicks to blog content or case studies,
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Messenger campaigns to start conversations.
Budget tips:
MOFU needs enough budget to nurture interest, but not so much that you over-saturate a smaller audience. Allocating around 20–30% of your overall budget here tends to work well, especially for businesses with longer buying cycles.
3. Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU)
These are your warmest audiences — people who abandoned carts, visited product pages, or engaged multiple times. Now it’s about sealing the deal.
Examples:
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Retargeting with conversion objectives,
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Discount or urgency-driven campaigns,
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Dynamic product ads,
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Cart recovery reminders.
Budget tips:
BOFU campaigns usually convert at the lowest cost per result, but they also serve the smallest pool of users. If you overfund BOFU, you’ll quickly run into high frequencies and audience fatigue. That’s why a modest 10–15% budget allocation is often more than enough.
The 80/20 rule: Don’t let retargeting eat your entire budget
A common trap for advertisers, especially those early in the journey, is to see the strong performance of a BOFU campaign and immediately shift more budget toward it. After all, that campaign is getting purchases at half the cost of your awareness campaign, right?
Here’s the catch: BOFU campaigns only work if you’ve done the work to fill the funnel upstream.
If you over-invest in retargeting, a few things happen:
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Your BOFU audience burns out — people see your ad too many times and stop engaging.
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Your overall sales start to drop because you’re no longer bringing in new people.
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You end up paying more per conversion over time.
Instead of chasing the cheapest conversions, spend more on your future prospects. Awareness and engagement campaigns are slower to show ROI, but they’re essential to creating a healthy and consistent sales pipeline.
Here's one smart framework to follow:
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TOFU: 60–70%,
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MOFU: 20–30%,
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BOFU: 10–15%.
This gives you the volume at the top, the nurture in the middle, and the precision at the bottom — exactly how high-performing ad systems are built. Keep in mind that your framework might look a bit differently depending on what's your current priority.
If you're unsure whether to focus on broad acquisition or retargeting, this comparison of retargeting vs. broad targeting breaks down which strategy delivers better results based on your funnel goals.
Align campaign budgets to purpose, not performance alone
It’s easy to fall into the habit of adjusting budgets based purely on what’s working, but not all campaign results are created equal.
Let’s say your TOFU campaign is generating clicks at $1.80 and your retargeting campaign is bringing in conversions at $6. Your instinct might be to double your retargeting budget. But doing that ignores context: the only reason BOFU is performing is because TOFU is doing its job.
Each campaign’s budget should match its role, not just its surface-level performance. Here’s how to frame it:
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TOFU campaigns are like planting seeds — they require reach and patience.
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MOFU is about growing and nurturing that attention.
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BOFU is harvest time — you reap what you’ve sown.
So before shifting spend, ask:
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Is my TOFU campaign expanding my remarketing pool?
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Are MOFU efforts pushing warm traffic deeper into the funnel?
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Does BOFU performance depend on these campaigns continuing?
Making budget decisions without this full-funnel view leads to short-term gain and long-term loss.
Organize campaigns around funnel stages for better budget control
Here’s a practical tip that can make all the difference: group your campaigns by funnel stage in Ads Manager. While Facebook doesn’t give you native funnel categories, you can use naming conventions or labels to build your own structure.
Example naming strategy:
TOFU_VideoView_JuneLaunch,
MOFU_LeadGen_PromoQ2,
BOFU_Retarget_AbandonCar.
Then, when you're doing your weekly budget check-in, you can quickly scan:
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How much budget you're spending on each funnel layer,
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Where overspending or underspending is happening,
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Whether your funnel is balanced for long-term growth.
Advanced advertisers use spreadsheets or dashboard tools to group spend by funnel stage and track results weekly or monthly. But even at a small scale, this structure creates clarity and helps you make smarter decisions faster.
For a full walkthrough of how to structure campaigns around the funnel — from audience setup to conversion — explore our complete Facebook ads funnel strategy.
When to reallocate budget and when to hold steady
Facebook Ads can tempt you to react quickly. Your retargeting campaign outperforms your lead gen campaign for three days? Pause the lead gen, boost the retargeting. Right?
But smart advertisers know better.
Facebook’s learning phase requires time, and knee-jerk changes often backfire. That’s especially true when you’re looking at early-stage campaigns or new creatives that need room to optimize.
So how do you know when it’s time to move money around?
Shift budget if:
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One campaign hasn’t spent more than 10% of its assigned budget over several days.
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Frequency on BOFU campaigns exceeds 3+ within 7 days.
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TOFU campaigns aren’t building any new audience (no video views, no landing page visits).
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Your total budget distribution drifts too far from your funnel goals (e.g., BOFU takes up 40% when you've planned to allocate 20%).
Stay on the course if:
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You’ve made changes in the last 3–5 days and performance is still stabilizing.
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Your top-of-funnel campaigns are generating low-cost impressions and clicks, even without conversions.
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You see attribution showing conversions influenced by TOFU or MOFU touches.
Stability matters, so don’t let short-term dips derail long-term growth.
Final thoughts
Managing Facebook ad budgets across multiple campaigns is both an art and a science.
The science is your data: ROAS, CTRs, cost per result, audience size.
The art is in how you interpret it: when to double down, when to hold, when to shift direction.
No algorithm knows your business like you do, so build campaigns around your funnel. Assign each campaign a job. Fund them based on that role, not just what looks good in the dashboard today.
