Scaling your Facebook Ads to the limit (and a bit more)
Setting up your Facebook Ads is just the start of it.
In order to get real results that can change your life and your business, you need to learn how to scale those Facebook Ads.
Some say it’s only for the elite marketers out there and others say it can be done by anyone.
On this one, we’re sitting on the fence.
You don’t have to be an expert of anything to scale Facebook Ads, but you can’t be a complete novice either.
Don’t listen to the Facebook gurus out there who make scaling seem incomprehensible.
It’s actually very straight-forward and we’re going to show you in this article how you can master the art of scaling Facebook Ads yourself.
Facebook Ad structure
It always starts with the root and the root of Facebook is your account structure.
Again, this doesn’t require expertise – just a bit of common sense will suffice.
If you’re a small-business owner then you can simply structure your campaign Facebook Ad account in 3 simple steps:
- Step 1: Cold Audience
- Step 2: Warm Audience
- Step 3: Hot Audience
*And if you’re really tight on budget then you can skip step 2 and just combine step 2 + step 3 and have a cold audience campaign and then a warm/hot audience campaign.
It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that, but if you have a big monthly budget then you can break it down even further:
- Step 1: Cold Audience
- Step 2: Warm Audience
- Step 3: Hot Audience
- Step 4: Referral
When you structure the account at the ad-set level, you can go into even more detail because there will be multiple sub-categories that come under cold audience.
As examples of cold audiences, you could have:
- People who have related-interests to your product
- Lookalike audiences
- Broad audiences
As examples of warm audiences, you could have:
- Website visitors
- Facebook page engagers
- People who read an article on a blog
As examples of hot audiences, you could have:
- People who downloaded your lead magnet such as an ebook
- Email subscribers who frequently read your emails
- Abandoned add-to-cart
As examples of referral audiences, you could have:
- Past purchasers
Any more stages in the funnel than the 4 above become unnecessary.
The referral stage of the ad structure can come in really useful as it can be hyper-specific with the message in the ad or creative you use.
If you were targeting past purchasers – which you would be in a referral campaign – then you could look at targeting your message to their previous purchase and marketing a product to either cross-sell or up-sell.
Analysing + testing your Ads before scaling
Just one last step before you go ahead and scale your Facebook Ads.
Once you have your structure in place like above, you can begin to run your ads to analyse and test their performance.
The metrics you want to be tracking to see if your ads are performing well would be:
- Leads
- Cost-Per-Lead
- Impressions
- Frequency
- CTR
- CPM
- ROAS
- Add-To-Carts
- Purchases
Not all of the above will apply to your Facebook Ads; for example, you won’t need to track leads if you’re not running a lead gen campaign.
As a Facebook Advertising Agency, we recommend testing different ad copy, creatives and ad formats such as carousel, single-image or collection ads.
The most crucial metric is ROAS, but in some cases, you may not have data for ROAS and instead need to rely on CTR to see what ads are resonating with people.
If your ads aren’t getting data for ROAS, but the CTR is 10%+, you could have something going wrong with your checkout service and stopping people from buying your product/service.
Any ad that isn’t hitting your target metrics will need to be cut short and used as a lesson rather than an ad.
How to scale your Facebook Ads
Now we get to the meat and bones of this article…scaling Facebook ads!
Once you have your winners and you’ve forgotten about the losers, you can begin to merge them together for your new campaigns and ad sets for scaling.
There are a few ways you can scale your ads, but there are two ways you can hone in on for optimal effect:
- Vertical Scaling
- Horizontal Scaling
The difference between the two?
Vertical is simply adding more fuel to your fire with the intention of making it bigger and more powerful, whereas horizontal is starting more fires with less fuel.
Just like the advice of adding more revenue streams to increase your chances of financial success rather than putting all your money into one stream, we like to use horizontal for that same reason too.
Why?
Because you run a higher risk of having your Facebook account banned by Facebook if you use vertical scaling than you do with horizontal scaling.
For example, if you have 1 campaign running at £100 a day then you can simply add more money to just that 1 campaign if you were vertically scaling.
When you horizontally scale, you would add an extra 1-2 campaigns (including the original) but keep the £100 a day budget for all campaigns.
Here’s where the advantages of horizontal scaling come into play:
- You can more accurately test audiences because you have more campaigns to choose from.
- The data in your campaigns will be more specific and will lead to a higher quality of analysis.
- You have the option of pausing losing campaigns and pushing your scaling further horizontally.
If we used vertical scaling for the example above, we either wouldn’t know which audience was responding best, or we’d have only 1 audience to test from. This is because you can either put all your audiences together in 1 campaign or just use 1 audience in your campaign.
How to scale horizontally
Hopefully, you’ve chosen horizontal scaling by now and that’s good because you can do a lot with it!
You can test different:
- Ages
- Genders
- Interests
- Various Custom Audiences (Past Purchasers Vs. Website Visitors)
The more budget you have, the more granular you can get with your testing and scaling.
If you’re short on budget, you can just bulk more variables together.
An example you could try would be to test interests that you have researched from audience insights, your own innate knowledge or by doing some Google searching; you could test people interested in the different competitors.
Conclusion
We told you it’s not complicated!
If you follow the above information, you can consider yourself a “Facebook Ads Scaling Expert” who is worshipped by other Facebook advertisers for knowing information that nobody else knows…
Or you can just scale your business and make more money.
The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London that drives more traffic, generating conversions and increasing sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
