Maintaining ROAS When Scaling Ads

Brand Context

In this article I will be breaking down a case study we recently made at the agency where we scaled a client's brand to multiple 7 figures [Proof at the end] within a year of working with us. I will cover the strategies we implemented for this brands advertising efforts, the underlying concepts behind them, and some important external factors that contributed to our success.

• AOV - $60 - $65
• Niche - ?Fashion & Apparel
• Overall ROAS - 8.04?(combined value)
• Desired Outcome - highly targeted conversional traffic

Overall Structure & Implementation

Trifecta Campaigns: Tier 1

This is essentially the fundamental underlying concept behind our entire funnel strategy. If you are still interested in learning more, we have an entire playbook on exactly what we do in each tier of the funnel and the exact parameters and values we consider (just send me a message):

To provide a better overall description of what we are doing, I want to show you the campaign structure we typically use for testing:

1 Campaign?

• Adset 1 → (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
• Adset 2 → (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
• Adset 3 → (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
• Adset 4 → (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
• Adset 5 → (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)

1. Use a 3x3x3 dynamic creative setup = 27 unique creatives
2. This strategy is super experimental and tests an extremely wide range??
3. We typically test somewhere between 10 - 12 audiences initially
4. The “angles” are very similar forms of the same general copy

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• Every Brand is Unique - While this strategy isn’t set in stone and we often make small tweaks and variations for different clients, this is a typical foundation we use. For example, depending on budget, there are different formats we can use, more cost-effective (but can be slower) alternatives to TOF creative testing, substitute funnel structures, etc.

This is especially important in the current digital marketing climate. Understanding how to capture the attention of your audience and cut through the noise is vital to the success of your campaigns on any platform.

While of course the exact type of creative testing strategy depends on your platform of choice, in general there are a few key aspects to consider for any effective ad.

For example, UGC with subtle copy performs incredibly well on platforms like TikTok and IG, while longer form copy, text heavy images, and informationals can be very effective on platforms like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Copy:

Free Shipping on All Orders! // 48 Hours ONLY!

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Perfect for Every Occasion!

All Natural & Vegan Friendly

Ships in Less Than 24 Hours

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“I’m always weary to try new products that I see in ads, but I have to say I’m glad I took the leap with this jacket… I could already see AND feel a difference before even trying it on!”

- Dwayne Johnson (verified buyer)

Free Shipping For 48 HOURS!

(CTA LINK)

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Creating the Variations:

• Keep the description elements the same, change the “Hook”

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?The Methods to The Madness:

• In just about any article/ post/ blog you see from us, we will always say the fastest way to find success with anything is to test experimentally. Always change one thing at a time, so you can quantitatively measure the success.?
• We do the same for anything regardless of marketing type or platform. We already have an understanding of what we’re selling, the benefits, and how we’re going to attract more eyes on the products. But what we can test is what’s the most attention grabbing.?
• While this is for copy, a similar approach is used to experiment with media! Don’t be afraid to check out your competition for inspiration too.

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Scaling Your Success, Successfully: Tier 2

What most agencies struggle with is they’ll get a 10+ ROAS campaign and brag on every platform they can find, but when you look closely they spent some super small amount of money.

As these super high converting ads begin to scale, their ROI with PLUMMET if you don’t use the right strategies to scale them.

An important point worth mentioning here (which is something that helped us make this campaign and many others so successful) is that when you find something that works, make clones! When we find a winning copy/ media, we make lots of super similar ads to try and capitalize on that success even further.?

To understand what this means, you must understand the overall structure we are constantly working towards. This is called the funnel for more than one reason, but as we begin scaling we move into the second tier where we consider The Top 3:

Top 3 audiences 3 adsets Top 3 creatives

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1 Campaign (CBO)?

• Adset 1 → Ad 1 ? ? Ad 2 ? ? Ad 3
• Adset 2 → Ad 1 ? ? Ad 2 ? ? Ad 3
• Adset 3 → Ad 1 ? ? Ad 2 ? ? Ad 3

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1. Budget: Depending on the size of the account of the degree of scaling, this can range. We typically start them around $300 - $800/ day on smaller accounts, and $1k - $3k / day on larger accounts.?

1. It’s important to consider that the second tier is meant to be smaller than the first tier, and therefore should be spending a fraction of what goes into the first tier. We typically will keep this between 15% - 30% of the total budget.?

1. Something many professionals in the field overlook that is very important: Make sure to use the post ID’s by grabbing them from top performers in dynamic variations (we make an entire campaign for this when necessary)!

Dynamic Optimization: Tier 3

Understanding how to implement the lower levels of the funnel is what can truly set your campaigns apart from your competitors.?

While there are a variety of strategies that can be used here (and we often change this around depending on the client, overall budget, ad performance, product market fit, and a variety of other considerations). We actually talk more about this as well as a few other strategies we use in our “Ad Funnel” Playbook that I mentioned earlier.

For this particular client, we used a split strategy where we used our top 2 audiences and had an overall structure like this:

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1 Campaign (CBO)?

• Adset 1 (Audience 1) → Ads 1 - 12
• Adset 2 (Audience 2) → Ads 1 - 12

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1. The number of ads could be anywhere between 10 - 20?
2. We selected 12 of the most successful and high converting ads?
3. The budget is more highly concentrated
4. The objective is longevity & consistency

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What many won’t tell you (or don’t know) is that successful campaigns often go hand-in-hand with only a small collection of high performing ads (we call these “Diamond Creatives”).?

The entire process from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel is essentially a long in-depth optimization analysis of your ads. The final product (BOF) is more or less the absolute best product of all of your tests. It is because of this that you will often see your biggest success with a few extremely successful ads.?

An extremely important part of this success is constantly continuing to test on every platform you use to try and always increase the number of Diamond Creatives you have at any one time.

Overall Funnel Structure

Top of Funnel?

Where your cold audiences exist. This is where everyone is hearing about your brand and your offer for the first time and you’re doing massive waves of testing using the Tier 1 strategy.

Middle of Funnel?

This is for retargeting and scaling ads (as explained in Tier 2). This includes people that have interacted with your brand lightly in some way or another. This translates to things like following and interacting on social media, clicking through your website, looking at your emails, etc. (more explanation on retargeting parameters in the “Ad Funnel” Playbook).

Bottom of Funnel

These are considered the “hot” leads. These are viewers and brand supporters who may have added to cart, purchased before, subscribed to email and SMS list (more explanation on retargeting parameters in the “Ad Funnel” Playbook).?

Creating A Predictable Sales Process

• Identifying your Ideal Client Avatar?

Before you can truly start engaging with the right audience, you need to identify who that audience is, aka your Avatar. There are several benefits to clearly defining this for yourself:

1st - Pain Points → understanding who you're speaking to allows you to effectively identify their “pain points”, or their largest struggles.?

2nd - Location → as you gain an understanding of the ideal Avatar, you can begin to conduct the necessary research and analysis of where your Avatar actually exists online. This doesn’t mean the literal location (although it can) but more so what types of communities they exist in.

• Building an Irresistible Offer

Not so surprisingly, developing and building out your offer is an extremely important part of the process. This is what convinces your customers they’re getting more value with you then they would anywhere else, RIGHT NOW.?

There are multiple factors to consider when building your offer, and if I were to write about all of them, it would take dozens of pages.?

Build out a funnel that prospects could, in some form or another, join at any level and continue smoothly. What do I mean by this? First, consider if you have a downsell and an upsell offer. Do you have a way of handling cold prospects? Warm prospects? Inbound leads???

An important example:

If your margins allow you to sell a shirt 20% off, do they also allow for 25% off?

If so, then you could also run “Buy 1, get one 50% off”.?

Which offer seems more valuable to you?

• Build the Credibility

Just because you know you can successfully provide the product or service doesn’t mean everyone else does. The only way to convince them is to show them! Hence why in the example we put social proof directly in our copy (these were repurposed from actual reviews our client had gotten on their store).

As soon as you begin to build some experience and success, you can begin to show others. As with just about every other part of a business, organization is key. Be sure to keep track of your endeavors as this will make life so much easier in the long run!

• Build the Audience?

So you know your Avatar, you have an offer, and you're building credibility for your offer. Now what? You need an audience to show it to!?

There are a multitude of methods for reaching your audience from a Facebook group to email marketing. What matters most is that you start! While cold outreach is important, diversification is even more important. Many alternative methods utilize a funnel-based model that allows you to gradually transform cold prospects into warm leads.?

• Track your Data?

Tracking your metrics correctly is the key to understanding how to get an extremely successful ad campaign up and running. You will never know how you’re doing, what is working, and what should be repeated unless you implement a system for data analysis. Track your numbers!?

For starters, you should try tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), such as:??

• Daily/ weekly/ monthly traffic?
• Conversion rates
• Abandoned add to carts
• Time spent on the website
• Average order value
• Best selling products
• Website speed
• Traffic sources
• Profit Margins

• Consistency

Consistency is always the key to success. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and doing all of it at once can be overwhelming. What’s important is that you start, and that you continually move forward and keep growing and improving.

Conclusion

While many of the inline examples were taken directly from our Facebook/ Instagram campaigns, these underlying fundamental concepts were applied to every platform we run ads on.?

For example, we used these strategies on TikTok, but focused much more heavily on delivering our message through the video rather than the copy. We were able to show social proof using UGC, lots of text on the screen, etc. For Google, it was about giving the viewer a reason to click on our link instead of anyone elses that showed up on the search. Given it’s ONLY copy there, you have to really think about how you can completely deliver your offer and the quality of your product with only words (not for shopping ads of course).?

In summary, these were the strategies and campaigns structures that allowed this brand to scale to multiple 7 figures in just under a year. While there’s still a ton of growth ahead of them as a brand, it was an incredible journey so far and I wanted to share everything we did with them to help them get where they are today. I hope this helps give insight on some exciting strategies or ties up some loose ends you might have in your campaigns or within digital marketing efforts in general.

If you have any questions, or you would like access to the “Ad Funnel” playbook, don’t hesitate to reach out or check out our website.

Scott Caputo

CEO of Adamant Media

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