You’ve got a Facebook Ads campaign up and running, your conversion rate is heading in the right direction, and everything looks good. The next thing on your agenda is to scale Facebook Ads.
A lot of people think that scaling is as simple as increasing your budget, but that rarely works. If you just double your budget and hope for the best, you’re taking a huge gamble. Sure, it could work, but the more likely outcome is that your campaign’s performance comes to a halt.
In this blog post, we’re going to cover the 6 best ways to scale your Facebook Ads so that you can keep getting those same great results.
6 Ways to Scale Facebook Ads
1. Incremental Budget Increases
Let’s make one thing clear: double your budget doesn’t equate to double the conversions. This is really important to remember and is the reason why you have to follow a strategy. Whenever you change your budget (in this case, increasing it), the Facebook algorithm has to adjust. To keep things running smoothly, incremental increases are ideal.
What do we mean by this? Every 3-4 days, increase your budget by about 10%. By doing this, you can monitor the campaign’s performance and see if there’s a drop-off point. You might find that after increasing your initial budget by 60%, your cost-per-lead sharply increases. If so, it’s best to take a step back and stop scaling.
This is such a great strategy because if the campaign starts performing really poorly, you can check the analytics and see exactly when that started happening You can then revert back to the last stable budget you had.
What we suggest doing is checking on your campaign every day. Make sure that your cost-per-click hasn’t increased too much but most importantly, make sure that your campaign is still profitable.
2. Using Facebook Lookalike Audiences
If you have a list of data on your customers, website visitors, or from your Facebook Pixel, you can use this data to create a Facebook Lookalike Audience. How it works is simple: you upload data to Facebook and they generate a completely new audience for you to target based on the data you uploaded.
This new audience “looks like” the other users whose data you uploaded. So, if you’ve been getting good results from an audience but you’ve been targeting them for a while or you just want to branch out and target even more people, creating a Facebook lookalike audience can help you to achieve that goal.
When you’re creating this type of audience, you need to choose a percentage of lookalike – how similar do you want the audience to be? The percentage you choose matters a lot.
Start with a 1% lookalike percentage. The higher the percentage, the less similar and broader the new audience will be.
If you find your ads are hitting high frequencies then a lookalike audience is one of the best things you can do. The last thing you want is to keep showing ads to the same group of people who will eventually hold it against your business. Instead, using a lookalike audience helps to keep your targeting fresh and is a great way to scale Facebook Ads.
3. Scale Up Your Most Profitable Segments
Another great scaling strategy is to look at your audience overview. From here, find out what your most profitable segments are. After doing this you can start investing more into those profitable segments which are performing the best.
On top of that, you should also find out what your least profitable segments are. This will allow you to save some money because you can allocate less of your budget towards those segments, and reallocate it to the more profitable segments.
If you check out our audience overview above, we can see a lot of things. Most importantly:
- Men have a cheaper CPC on average
- More women clicked on the ad’s link
- The 65+ age group among men performed the worst
- The 25-34 age group among men performed the best
So, in this case, if we want to scale Facebook Ads we could start investing more into that 25-34 age range and stop targeting 65+ year olds.
You can also find out how your ads perform throughout the day. If you’re getting a high CPC between 11PM to 5AM, pausing your ads between those hours will redistribute your budget to the better performing hours.
4. Campaign Budget Optimization
Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) gives you more control over how your Facebook Ads budget is spent. The purpose of this is to make sure your budget is being spent as efficiently as possible.
If you enable CBO, Facebook will distribute your budget across your whole campaign instead of you having to set a budget for each ad set. Their algorithm figures out which ad sets are performing the best and focuses your budget on those.
Some people get worried about using CBO because of how it works. In some cases, 80% of your budget might be spent on a single ad set – this is completely fine. All this means is that that ad set is outperforming your others and realistically, that’s where you want to invest the most in anyway.
There are two things to consider with CBO though. First, it’s not unusual for the algorithm to pick your winning ad sets too quickly. This is definitely a negative however over time, this isn’t an issue. Secondly, CBO takes longer to work better, so you should plan on using it in the long-term.
5. Reuse Your Best Ads
By this point, you should have run a bunch of different ads. In doing so, you can now identify which of your ads perform the best. When you start to scale Facebook ads, it’s a good idea to focus your attention on your best ads.
Use those ads to target different audiences and find out who the best people to target are with those specific ads. Even better: if you find that one audience far outperforms other audiences, create a lookalike audience.
You should also split test your best ads to really optimize them and get the best results out them. Test different colors, ad copy, or even the video’s background music. It’s these small tweaks that can have the greatest effect.
6. Make One Major Change Per Campaign A Day
We get it – it’s tempting to make a bunch of changes at once and see what happens. You need to resist this temptation!
It’s important that you only make one major change a day when scaling Facebook ads. When your campaign’s performance shifts, whether it improves or worsens, you need to know exactly what caused that shift. If you don’t know, you won’t know what to double down on and you’ll be at a disadvantage.
If you want to target a new audience, switch your campaign from CBO to ABO, and increase your daily budget, don’t do these things all at once. Do them over the course of a few days. This way, you’ll see how they impact your performance and you can be smart about your next move.
Scale Facebook Ads Like A Pro
That sums up our guide on 6 methods you can use to scale Facebook Ads. To quickly recap:
- Increase your budget incrementally every 3-4 days
- Try targeting a Facebook lookalike audience
- Scale up your most profitable segments
- Use CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
- Reuse your best performing ads (and improve on them)
- Make a single change to your campaign each day
Above all, take your time. A lot of mistakes with scaling ads are made by marketers trying to rush things. Facebook’s algorithm needs time to adjust to the changes you make, even if it’s a simple budget increase.
Maybe you’re concerned about scaling your campaign and think a Facebook Ads agency would do a better job. That’s where KonvertLab comes in. We are experts at Facebook Ads and if you book a call with us, we’ll show you how we’ll improve your business’s marketing strategy.