How to Scale Your Facebook Ads on Winning Products and Maximize ROI

Facebook advertisement started to work for you from the get go, correct? Based on the success, you are thinking of maximizing your ROI, so the logical step would be to increase the budget, right?

WRONG!

It will probably go to bust and you’ll start blaming Facebook for eating up your money(such a monster)

Don’t worry you’re not alone.

There are specific things you should know before scaling your Facebook Ad campaigns.

It is one of the areas where most of the marketers, account managers and businesses in general make mistakes. I am going to show you exactly how to avoid them and actually Maximize your ROI.

After reading the article you’ll have a deep understanding of different methods of scaling, understand when to scale and what to expect after it.

But first… Let’s see why your campaigns didn’t work…

Most of the companies produce Facebook Ad campaigns in order to check whether the product is actually worth it or their audience is ready for it. And that’s a very clever way of doing it. It doesn’t require many resources (time spent and money) to see results.

After businesses see which campaign, product or audience is working, they start raising their ad spend. Let me give you an example.

A company starts off by testing their ad set with 25$/day, sees some traction in a form of sales or high CTR and a green light turns off in their head. They bump up their budget to 100$/day and expect 4x of sales. 

… and that will be a big issue for them.

This is exactly how not to do scaling on Facebook platform. Simply put, Facebook algorithm doesn’t work that way. It does not handle a massive bump over night and requires a slower build up. You may even get less conversions with 100$/day budget than you got from 25$/day.

So what is the issue, Facebook?

As mentioned above, Facebook algorithm doesn’t like increases of budget in such a drastic form. Understand this, Facebook plans their ad campaigns in advance and it needs time to optimize for it.

When you begin scaling your campaign and increase your budget by 4x, Facebook algorithm gets lost.  

“What happened? Is everyone buying your products? Amazing! I will be showing your ads to everyone, maybe even several times!”

In other words, Facebook algorithm looses its cool and gets very excited. Until it optimizes, which might take 3 days or more. Therefore for 3 days you’ll have it showing your ads to everyone in any order… which is not that cool. You may even burn your 300$ in 3 days.  

But before we begin diving deep into the methods of scaling, let’s discuss what are the signs of a scalable campaign.

When should I scale?

As mentioned above, one of the most obvious signs of winning campaign is … you guessed it. SALES.

However, don’t go too crazy when you see sales coming spending your first 1$. What we’ve seen in our experience is that at first Facebook shows ads for the most responsive audience and see if it responds. So it could be a fake signal of winning ad.

Depending on your daily spend per ad set, I would advice you to at least wait till you spend 10-20$ per ad set in order to make any decisions.

Another positive sign for your campaign is CTR. Whenever you get a high CTR, that means your audience is at least somewhat interested in your product and could be a good sign scaling. 

Similar to CTR, high engagement of your ads such as likes, comments is a pretty good sign of finding a winner. Hell, you might even get it viral!(but it still doesn’t mean you’ll get sales) 

2 different types of scaling

So we’ve seen 3 different signs of winning campaigns, now what, captain Sparrow?

Let’s dive deeper into 2 diverse types of scaling – vertical and horizontal.

Vertical

Let’s start with vertical scaling. Vertical means that you will add more power (money) to your existing ad set.

Does it mean that we will 4x our ad spend straight away? NO!

That’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We will start building it up slowly with a rule of 20%.

20% rule says that you can ONLY increase your budget by 20% every 24hours so that Facebook algorithm doesn’t mess up. It is not very important to stick with exactly 20%, but with 20% you would play safely. You can even automate it!

If you really want to increase your ad spend drastically and get these sales going we would advice you to use additional method – ad set duplication.

The method is simple. You simply duplicate your ad set and increase the amount you spent on the previous.

Let’s say you started testing your ad set with 25$/day, you would simply duplicate it to another ad set and bump your budget to 50$/day.

After a few days you’ll have to check your results and evaluate if they hit your KPI’s

Note: you could even start with 100$/day, but remember Facebook needs time to optimize.

What about audience overlap? Let’s be frank. Many Facebook marketers say to avoid audience overlap because your ads will be competing with each other. Bollocks! Your ads will be competing against another thousands of advertisers therefore it will not make a big (or any) difference for your CPMs

Horizontal

Horizontal scaling is a beast from itself. Let’s say you find a winning product for a winning audience, you start scaling vertically but your audience is small so your budgets won’t go very far.

So there are another 6 options how to scale it horizontally

1.    Find parallel audiences you could target to. If your product was a very good fit for one audience, there is a big chance it will be a good fit for similar audiences. Start with going to your Audience Insight tool and finding audiences with similar interest.

2.    Another thing you should definitely try is creating a Lookalike audience        from purchases and add to cart, viewed product (in our experience add to cart works the best, don’t forget to try it out!)

3.    If your product can be shipped to other countries, expand your horizons even further and start advertising in other countries to! This will increase your audience substantially, however I would not combine them all into one ad set, rather have different ad sets for each country and even change lingo in your ad.

4.    Choose different placements. If you were not using automatic placements, you should try and direct your ads to different placements and try to find them through there.

5.    Pick different objectives. Let’s imagine a pie cut into 12 different pieces. These pieces in Facebook context are: Clickers (Traffic objective), Commenters and Likers (Enagegement), PageLikers(Page Likes), Buyers (Conversion), Email Givers(Lead Generation), App Installers (App Install), Video viewers (Video Views) and so on. If you only choose Conversion objective, you might reach only one piece of the pie, 1/12th to be exact. In order to reach other pieces of pie, you’ll need to pick other objectives. For ecommerce we recommend choosing Traffic, Post Engagement and Reach objectives.

6.    Whenever you see one product that is working particularly well for your audience, there is a big chance that they will be interested in similar products to the original one. Put some effort into researching new products or create a completely new product for this audience. 

Learn. Learn. Learn.

So you’ve started to scale either vertically or horizontally. And you don’t get any great results.

“It’s been 2 hours and I’ve done everything you told me but I still don’t get any results! My hardly earned cash is melting!”

Well, my friend, patience is the key here. If you’re not ready to take some risks scaling big, start slowly and by only increasing your budget by 20%.

You see, Facebook algorithm needs some time optimize your ad set in order to find your perfect audience and the time they buy. And that, my friend, doesn’t happen in a few hours. It may take a day, two or even three days.

Just make sure you stay on top of it in order to make informed decisions.

To manual bid or not to? Here is the question.

How does manual bidding work?

The very first thing you need to understand managing your Facebook Ads campaigns is that Facebook is an auction platform. Whenever you want to advertise, you enter an auction with advertisers all over the globe. As Facebook is getting more and more popular, it attracts more advertisers, therefore there is less space to advertise on.

As you may know, Facebook is business and it gives its best ad spaces for the HIGHEST bidders and your ads might not be shown.

How does Facebook determine whether you’ll get your advertising space or not?

It's a combination of relevance score and your amount bidding.

Here is an example. Let’s say there are 5 competing advertisers.

A bids – 5$ per conversion

B bids – 10$ per conversion

C bids – 12$ per conversin

D bids – 15$ per conversion

E bids – 45$ per conversion.

Does it mean that Facebook will spend 45$ per conversion? No, it will probably way less, however it will show signals to Facebook that this advertiser wants to show their ads BADLY.

3 strategies to use manual bidding.

1. Starting low - Starting with low average bid and keeping your eye on CPA and EBU(Estimated Budget Utilisation), that CPA won’t increase a lot and the percentage of EBU(Estimated Budget Utilisation) increase. 

2. Starting high - Starting with very high average bid, first of all CPA will be very high and EBU(Estimated Budget Utilisation) will be 100%, but your goal is start decreasing average bid, so CPA would decrease and EBU would be staying at 100%.

3. Atomic Bomb Method. Taking a suggested bid and multiplying by 3-5 times for average bid and making ad budget 5 times bigger than your average bid. For example your suggested bid is 30, so your average bid would be 90-150$ and your ad set budget would be 500-600$.

2 NO NO’S WHILST SCALING

There are a few things that you should NEVER ever do with Facebook ads (at least for now).

1.    Don’t mess up with Zuck…! I mean, don’t make any changes on your winning ad set except increasing or decreasing money.

2.    Don’t change your budget MORE than once in 24hours! This will mess up the algorithm and it will not know what to do next.

To summarize

Scaling on Facebook might be frustrating and might even lose you money in the short-term, especially if you don’t do it correctly.

It is actually quite a difficult process to do it on your own, especially if you’ve never done it.

However in the article we’ve outlined a few important things to do, to ensure you don’t lose your hardly earned money and maximize your ROI.

There are a few obvious signals your campaign is ready to scale. Sales, CTR and Engagement in that order. However, don’t judge your campaign too early, as Facebook generally shows your ad to the best audience in the beginning and then moves forwards.

When you’re ready to scale, there are a few methods of doing it. Vertical and horizontal.

In vertical we have two methods. 20% rule, meaning to increase your budget by 20% every 24 hours and another one, duplicating your ad sets starting with more money to begin with.

Horizontal scaling explores new horizons. 6 types of these horizons are : New Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, New Countries, Different Placements, Different Objectives and similar products.

Choose the ones you’re capable of doing and measure your results.

Manual bidding is a beast of its own and if you don’t have enough experience dealing with it, it might be very confusing.

It basically shows how much does the advertiser want to show their ads on Facebook platform and Facebook rewards that (with higher cost obviously). T

There are 3 methods of manual bidding. 1. Starting low 2. Starting high 3. Atomic Bomb Method (3-5x suggested bid).

We’ve covered a few things we should never ever do whilst scaling our campaigns. These are: 1. Changing anything on your winning ad set (except budget) 2. Making changes on your budget more than once every 24hours.

What are the mistakes you’ve made and which method of scaling was working best for you?