How to Scale a Facebook Ad Account From Scratch in 2023
If you ever plan on starting a business, there is a 99% chance that you will also need to one day run Facebook Ads from a starting point of zero. So how do you launch ads on Facebook for the very first time? We’ve launched over 25 pre-revenue brands on Facebook from scratch. Here’s how you scale an ad account from the ground up, the right way.
Set Yourself Up For Success
Make sure you verify your business info in Business Manager and set your billing threshold to the lowest possible level ($2) so you can complete as many daily payments as possible early on. This quickly remove the $50 per day account-level cap they put on most new ad accounts for weeks or even months. You don't want to get stuck with the inability to scale.
Throw Out Best Practices - At First
A "best practices" ad account structure will not work when you launch. Do not lead with a single-campaign “challenger/champion" setup. You need to go WIDE and leverage Facebook's machine learning to find the assets that are most likely to scale profitably before you go NARROW. There are two ways to go wide:
If you're thinking "you can't possibly expect me to have 25+ unique creative assets ready to go at launch", that's exactly what I expect and what is necessary in 2023. Creative is everything.
Understand How Your Users Will Change
Be aware that your audience at launch is NOT your end audience, and you’re probably going to see brutally high CPMs/CPCs. Facebook almost always serves your ads to a 50+, extremely hard to convert and expensive demo when you first go live. Why? They’re the most likely to click and engage with an unoptimized ad funnel, which is unfortunately you (for now). Attached is a real screenshot of an account we recently launched. As we developed better ads, a better LP, and gave FB more data, it found our TRUE audience - parents 35-44.?
How do you combat these high CPCs and climb up the audience quality ladder more quickly? There are a few things you can do to reduce your click costs:
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Scale And Consolidate Your Directional Winners
Once you’ve thrown your spaghetti against the wall using DCTs or a wide range of cost-capped campaigns, consolidate and test what is working directionally well against 3 of the highest-success audiences we have seen historically on Facebook. Take the top 3-5 post IDs of your top performing DCT combos (or top Post IDs from your high volume of cost-capped campaigns) and put them into a 3-cell test:
a) One Advantage+ Shopping campaign
b) One adset with open broad targeting
c) One adset with a 1% LAL of ad engagers and 50%+ video viewers
Why this setup? We have tested all 3 of these “scale” structures across multiple clients, along with dozens of other audiences/setups that DID NOT work. We don’t have a consistent winner among these three setups, but one of these 3 audiences ends up performing the best the most frequently.
Sit Back And Do Nothing (Seriously)
What’s next? Make NO changes. Don’t touch anything. It doesn’t matter how terrible your ROAS or CPCs are. Give this setup 3-5 days of uninterrupted performance before evaluating CPC, ATC rate, IC rate, CR, session duration, and of course ROAS to choose a winner. You should start to see one of these adsets receive the most spend, drive the lowest-funnel user activity, and get you the lowest CPCs on-platform. Pause the losers and let your new "champion" run for another 3-4 days, uninterrupted.
At this point, assuming you’ve been doing your job on the creative and landing page front, you should start to see CPC finally come down into a manageable range. Audience quality should be improving and you SHOULD be on track to profitability. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to also pull all the levers you can outside of Facebook Ads Manager to set yourself up for success...
Optimize The Rest Of Your Funnel
Test 3 different landing page formats: a traditional “shoppable” landing page, a more advertorial or listicle-style landing page, and your product page. See which flow leads to the best down-funnel performance. I’d recommend using a LP builder like Replo that will allow you to stay nimble and test without spending hours designing from scratch.
Go through a creative ideation exercise like this one to make sure you aren’t just blindly throwing spaghetti against the wall, and that you’re maximizing your likelihood of finding a creative winner: https://twitter.com/peterczepiga/status/1674483164981370903?s=20
Implement post-purchase or email surveys asking customers about their main purchase motivators and if anything was unclear or confusing on your website. Pay very close attention to the ad comments you’re getting during this time - you will learn a LOT.
Conclusion
Once you've done the above (or even before), it might make sense to bring in an expert like us at Flighted . Profitably scaling paid media is like juggling plates - if one of the above pieces is missing or not up to par, you will have an extremely hard time hitting positive ROI. However, if you listen to your customer and iterate quickly, you will get there eventually!
Owner/Operator at Future Tilt | Email & audience strategy for high-effort ecommerce brands
1 年"If you're thinking "you can't possibly expect me to have 25+ unique creative assets ready to go at launch", that's exactly what I expect and what is necessary in 2023. Creative is everything." ??
Back to basics. I love it