Scaling your Facebook ads can be a pretty tough process if you’re new to the world of social media advertising. Once you discover that an ad is generating value for your business, you want to squeeze as much potential out of that campaign as possible.
Unfortunately, if you take the wrong approach, you could end up damaging your reputation, scaring off customers, and wasting your budget.
On top of that, Facebook doesn’t exactly make advertising easy for beginners. There are constantly new algorithm updates, features, and trends to keep track of. It’s no wonder that so many companies end up turning to groups like ours for help.
The good news? Scaling doesn’t have to be as headache-inducing as it seems. It does require a little trial and error in some cases, but there are various tactics that you can try to bring your Facebook results to the next level.
Here are some top tips to get you on the right track.
1. Test New Lookalike Audiences
Just because your ad campaigns are working with one audience doesn’t mean that they’re going to work with everyone. When you’re scaling your Facebook ads, you don’t want to make the mistake of pushing your campaign out to everyone and anyone. A focus on the right group is crucial if you want to keep getting a consistent ROI.
To help you, Facebook offers something called “lookalike audiences”. Here’s what Facebook has to say about them:
When you create a Lookalike Audience, you choose a source audience (a Custom Audience created with information pulled from your pixel, mobile app, or fans of your Page). We identify the common qualities of the people in it (for example, demographic information or interests). Then, we deliver your ad to an audience of people who are similar to (or “look like”) them.
So, you can create Facebook lookalike audiences to direct you towards leads that share similar characteristics to the customers you’re already targeting. If you create an audience with information pulled directly from your Facebook pixel, Facebook will look at the customers currently interacting with your ads, pinpoint specific information about that audience, and deliver a “similar” audience.
You can create different lookalike audiences for different locations too, which is great if you’re selling your goods in multiple environments.
Another great way to make the most of your lookalike audience is to import a database of customers from your CRM (customer relationship management) tool to give Facebook more information about your customers to work with. You can even include the LTV of each customer (lifetime value) and ask Facebook to look for customers that might have a similar LTV to the audience you already have.
3. Add to your Budget (Gradually)
Unfortunately, you actually do have to spend money to make money in the advertising world. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you’re running a Facebook campaign, is failing to put enough of your budget to work. However, just because you’re seeing results from your current campaign, doesn’t mean you want to spend all your money instantly.
The best option is to increase your budget spend a little bit at a time. Most experts will recommend increasing ad set budgets by around 20% every two to three days. A gradual increase is good because you should be able to see your performance slowly ramping up. If something goes wrong, you can also shift your budget backwards without causing too much disruption too.
Want to save some time? You can use Facebook’s automated rules to increase budgeting automatically when your ads are successful. For instance, you could create a rule that increases the budget for all ad sets by around 20% as soon as impressions go over 8000, provided that the cost per purchase is less than $10, and you’ve had at least one purchase in a certain period.
You can modify things like the maximum daily budget trigger to find a number you’re confident with, and there’s always the option to jump in and make changes if something starts to go awry. You can also set automated rules that allow you to reduce your ad-spend automatically if your performance begins to drop on a campaign.
3. Replicate Winning Ads (with Different Audiences)
If you’re getting excellent results from a specific ad set, you don’t always have to scale vertically. You can also consider horizontal scaling, which means that you test out the performance of a positive ad on a different audience.
To try this technique, check out your Ads Manager back end to find the ads that are currently the most profitable for your brand. Facebook allows you to create new ad sets but use the same ad information and content. Reusing existing brand assets is actually an excellent way to reduce the cost of your overall social media marketing campaign.
Once you find the most profitable ads and create the new versions, you can choose different targeting for each new ad set. Once again, you’ll need to think carefully about your target audiences here, and who is likely to respond well to the campaigns you’ve built.
You could think about targeting 2-10% lookalike audiences of customers, 1-10% lookalike audiences of leads, or new audiences that have different interests. The great thing about the horizontal scaling method is that it allows you to reach a wider range of customers without creating a brand new ad from scratch. This means that not only does your profit go up, but your reach increases too.
4. Test New Interest Audiences and Ad Types
This is a scaling tactic for your Facebook ads that can take a little finessing to get right – but it’s well worth the effort. Targeting new groups with interests that you haven’t targeted before is an excellent way to discover new sales opportunities and expand brand reach. You may already be using “interests” on Facebook as a targeting factor to find the right customers, so this is about finding new possibilities and opportunities.
The best way to make sure that you’re not wasting money on sending your ads to audience members who aren’t going to respond well is to use data. The good news for today’s companies is that Facebook provides a lot of useful information for you to build from when you’re searching for the right audience.
Look at your Facebook Insights and search for trending interests among your leads and customers that you haven’t considered before.
You can also try scaling your Facebook ads by duplicating unsuccessful ads and looking for ways to make them successful. Rather than just making direct edits to your under-performing campaigns, create a copy of the ad, and implement elements from your successful campaigns to see whether you can make them more effective.
Testing upgrades to different ads will also give you a more solid idea of what kind of offers, content, and other important aspects make the biggest difference to your audience from a conversion perspective. Ultimately, the only way to scale any business over time is to do some experimentation.
5. Explore the Benefits of CBO
Ever since Facebook advertising became a thing, companies have generally managed their budgets at the ad-set level. This meant that you could create multiple ads in each ad set, and Facebook would allocate the spend you offered among the ads using intelligent algorithms. Now, Facebook has changed that process. Since 2019, ad budgets moved to the campaign level.
Through Campaign Budget Optimization features, Facebook wants to help business leaders to allocate their spend among different ads and audiences – rather than just focusing on the ads alone. Tapping into this machine learning strategy could actually be a good way to determine where your spend should be going when you’re scaling your Facebook ads.
Through CBO, you can determine whether you’re allocating your ad spend intelligently and start getting better results from the Facebook platform. Although this solution won’t work for everyone, it’s generally a good choice if you’re trying to scale over $1,000 per day. CBO solutions are also a good choice if you have multiple ad sets targeting audiences that you know to be profitable.
We recommend starting with ads that are performing well according to early tests and are delivering positive click-through rates that go beyond 2-3%. This should give you some decent room for growth. Remember, keep a close eye on your results when you’re using campaign budget optimization. That way, you’ll be able to determine whether you’re actually seeing better results with the automated process. If you’re not, switch back to the manual process.
Bonus Tip: Get the Right Help
Scaling a successful Facebook marketing campaign isn’t as simple as it seems. Even after all the work of figuring out what makes an ad successful, you’ll need to be cautious about how you assign budgets and where you expand your campaigns if you want to maintain ongoing results.
If you really want to get the most out of your Facebook ads, the best bet could be to work with a Facebook advertising agency who can do the hard work for you. Reach out to the Graygency for more guidance on how you can scale your Facebook advertising success in a way that’s both measurable and sustainable.
