How to Scale Facebook Ads Profitably

There's multiple ways to get to the same destination. What I'm about to discover and tell you here is just the 3 tactics that we've used to scale our eCommerce clients Facebook Ads campaigns profitably. Somebody else out there is probably accomplishing the same thing in a very different way. This is our framework and approach how we scale the campaigns as I sit on the bench where I oversee the benchmarks of multiple different eCommerce businesses and scaling their Facebook Ads.

One thing to know about Facebook ads, it's like a car going a decent speend 30mph and if there's any sort faults in terms of aerodynamics, or a window is down, it doesn't really affect the vessel at that speed. But once you start to speed up and start to reach 100mph, 150mph or even 200mph, then any sort of imperfection or resistanse in terms of the actual aerodynamics that cause drag, is going to ruin everything.

It's kind of the same thing that you need to look at in you Facebook Ads campaigns. As you try to put your foot on the gas, any sort of imperfection is just going to destroy the entire thing. Really what happens with Facebook is things start to brake at scale but here I'm going to show you is how to press the gass as far as we can and scale the spend as far as we can without breaking things.

First, the process to get to the scaling part.

Testing -> Optimizing -> Scaling

Testing

The foundation for a successfull ad campaigns is mastering the testing phase. Whenever starting with a campaign we start off with a few week testing period. In these few weeks, we test and see if the product itself and what kinf of things in the campaings are going to work on a longer term. During the testing phase, we can create for example a bunch of already proven creatives in the industry (like for example user generated content) and multiple single interest audiences. When testing audiences, one thing that has been proven to be very successfull is finding interest just off of the gut instict. Thinking the industry and the customers, and asking yourself what might be a common thing between these people. There are bunch of things to test when you run Facebook Ads, such as headlines, cta's, placements, etc. but the main things we focus on with the testing phase are 1. Single interest audiences. Already proven creatives for our other clients. 2. Optimization. Optimizing your sales funnel is crucial for driving sales to your store.

Optimization

Make small changes.

Rather than taking a successful campaign and doubling or tripling its budget, move in smaller increments. The most that you may be able to get away with is a 50% increase, but we recommend making even smaller changes (think around 20%).

After your ads complete the learning phase and have had time to generate results two to three weeks into the campaign, it’s time for retargeting. For the retargeting audiences we use usually a few different approaches. 1. Middle Of Funnel: Website visitors, video views 75%+, engaged with Facebook and IG but no further actions or went to the content page, but not added to cart. 2. Bottom Of Funnel: Added to cart and Initiated Checkout. With both of these we're adding bigger budget accordingly the closer to the action they were.

After we've found some winning ad-sets, meaning you are getting good enough cost per purchase it's time to scale and bring more money in.

Scaling

On the testing period, we figure out which are the best performing audiences for the brand and from there we find out what are the ads, which work the best. Also because Facebook recommends us to get 50 events at the Ad Set level, we usually put 3 to 5 ads to an ad set and let Facebook decide which ads to show. We've noticed that broad auciences without any specific targeting work well, so we include worldwide audiences without any targeting.

When we start to see some sales and traction, there are ususally always some ad sets that are not getting many sales, so then we take a look into the ad level and see for example if the cost per add to cart, cost per initiate chechout and landing page view is performing below or above the average. Then we of course stop the ones that are not performing above the average.

After some optimisation, looking into the ad sets, we can start to see the ROAS increasing. Usually a good point to start scaling is when you get for example over 3x ROAS for 5 days in a row. Then we can start to increase the budget by 20% every day and dublicate the campaigns trying a few new audiences.

The process is an endless job, testing new creatives, audiences, ad copies, etc. all the time and it may seem complicated but can be broken down into testing, finding a winning audience, and reducing your ad sets while increasing your budget where it counts.

One of the biggest things when you're scaling is to have patience. Take the time to really see what are the most successful things. Whatever your marketing and advertising goals, there are plenty of strategies you can implement to scale your Facebook campaigns successfully.

As almost in every area and thing, scaling takes time and practice. However, doing your research and strategy, scaling becomes the most fun part and gets your business to a whole new dimensions.