So you’ve been running Facebook ads for quite some time now, either for your business or your client’s. Hopefully, it’s been going great for you.
If you haven’t started yet, read “What You Basically Need to Know About Facebook Ads.”
Once you find winning campaigns which get you your objective at a low cost, it’s time to level up those campaigns by scaling them.
Scaling generally refers to making something bigger than it currently is. In this context, scaling your Facebook ads refer to improving your results through different strategies which are aimed at gaining more leads, customers, and sales.
Facebook Ads: How to Scale Your Campaigns
Ready to start scaling out some of your campaigns? Here are 4 ways to do so, starting with the most obvious one:
Increase Ad Set Budget
It makes sense to just go ahead and increase the spending for campaigns and ad sets which are performing the way you want them to.
This is the easiest way to scale a winner.
Before you do this though, you need to know that results almost always won’t be proportional. What do I mean by that?
Say you have a lead generation campaign with a daily budget of P100 and you are currently getting an average of 10 leads for Php 10 per lead. Let’s say that’s a good cost for your business so you decide to increase the spending from P100 to P1000 a day.
That’s 1,000% increase.
What This Means to You
WIll it follow that you will now be getting 100 leads a day?
No.
Facebook advertising is a platform which relies on learning to be able to provide the best service to advertisers. Scaling by this much in an instant will “overwhelm” the platform and will require an adjustment period to make the most of the increased budget.
In terms of results, though an increase in result may be expected, a spike in cost per lead may drastically rise as well.
What do I recommend?
It’s different for everyone and you have to find out what works best for you.
For me, I increase the budget by 50% every week. For Facebook ads with higher daily budgets, I increase by 20% every week.
So, yes, go and increase spending to replicate results. Just don’t do it recklessly.
Use Lookalike Audiences
Since conversions are now coming in more regularly, one good way to scale and expand is to use lookalike audiences.
Lookalike audiences are groups of Facebook users who Facebook deems to be much like a custom audience of your choosing.
Custom audiences are groups of people defined by certain actions they have taken on your website or their relationship with your business.
For example, you can have a custom audience of customers, leads, people who watch your videos, people who engage with your page and many more.
So, if you have a custom audience of all existing customers, you can create a lookalike audience of people who are much like your existing customers. This lookalike audience will now have a multitude of people who are very much like your customers already.
How to Create a Lookalike Audience
To create a lookalike audience, go to Audiences and select Create Audience. From there, select Lookalike Audience to proceed.
You’ll see a pop-up window where the lookalike audience is to be created.
Create a Lookalike Audience
You will first be asked to select the source audience which is the custom audience you’ll want to mimic. In the example above, the custom audience you’ll select here is your customer list.
You will then be asked for the location where the lookalike audience will be based off on. If you do business locally, you can pick the Philippines for this.
Then finally, you’ll pick audience size where you’re asked to select from between 1% to 10% of the total population of the location you selected. I always recommend choosing 1% so you can focus on the people who are the most like the custom audience you selected.
Once this is set up, it will take a few minutes to populate so while you wait, proceed with creating the new ad set which will target this audience. Make sure to target the lookalike audience you just created. Publish the addition and it will run as soon as the lookalike audience has been completely populated.
Find Similar Interests WIth Audience Insights
In some cases, having lookalike audiences are not enough for some advertisers.
For them, another way to scale would be to find out more interests to target. One way to do research for this is with the help of Audience Insights.
If you haven’t checked out Audience Insights yet, it’s a tool from within Facebook Ads Manager which help you find information about Facebook Users which can help advertisers target them better. One of its special functions is to analyze custom audiences.
How Does It Work?
To get access to Audience Insights, simply go to your ad account and select “Audience Insights” from the menu.
This tool is very useful, especially when planning your initial campaign. But since we are looking to scale our existing campaigns, we’ll focus on the analysis of our custom audiences. So when you see the welcome pop-up, select to start with a custom audience.
On the left side of the screen, put in the custom audience you want to study. Let’s use the example above. Check the existing custom audience. What other interests do they have?
Create AUdience
Other Data to Be Aware Of
The first set of data you will find is demographic data. I tend to skip checking this if it’s not a big concern to the campaign.
What I do want to look for is the second tab which is the ‘Page Likes’ tab. This is where you’ll find the other interests of your custom audience.
So what should you do? You list down all the related interests on this page and try to target them on Facebook.
Once you have that, head over to Ads Manager or Power Editor to set up your new ad set. You may choose to put in all the new interests in one ad set or split them up into multiple ad sets. Once they’re ready, publish them.
Trim Off the Non-Performers
It’s only logical that if adding budget to the winning campaigns will scale success, cutting out the losing ones will also improve overall success.
But trimming off the non-performers is more than just pausing campaigns with poor results.
Sometimes, a successful campaign may need some trimming too. Take this example:
The overall campaign shows results which are good for us, which is 4 purchases, or P288.96 per purchase.
But if we look at the breakdown of the stats of the campaign, we see that all the 4 purchases come from the 18-24 age range. If we only counted that, cost per purchase lowers to P134.92 per purchase, which is much better.
What This Means
It shows us that we’ve been spending money on a wide age range, even though the purchases are coming from the 18-24 age range.
Assuming that these results continue for about a month, then it would make sense to just narrow down the targeting to this age range instead of targeting a wide range. This means that we would have more budget to spend for the demographic which converts well without actually increasing ad spend.
To see this data, go to ads manager and find the ‘Breakdown’ button on the right side of the screen. There you will find multiple data points to use to check for your campaign. The ones I tend to check usually would be age, gender, location, and placement.
Now let’s say for the gender breakdown, you see that both are converting, but females are converting at a much better rate than males. What you can do instead of cutting out the male demographic would be to split it up into two ad sets: One for men and one for women. This way, you can increase the spending for the women campaign since it’s the one performing well.
Conclusion
Talking about scaling personally makes me excited to implement and grow my businesses. But I always have to remind myself that it still takes time.
No matter which among the suggested tips above you will try, always remember that Facebook adjusts every time you make a change. So don’t worry if after making a change, nothing happens, or your numbers dip.
It’s also important to remind yourself to let the data dictate your actions. Don’t scale based on assumptions. I have done that countless of times, and almost every time, I’ve regretted it. But it’s difficult not to. You still probably will despite this warning (and that’s understandable and it’s okay.)
Finally, if you do decide to scale up your ad campaigns, make sure your business adjusts as well.
Do you have a store? Does scaling suddenly give you an influx of new customers and orders? Make sure your operations can still handle it.
Having successful Facebook ad campaigns is just the first step in your business growth. The next step is to scale your winning campaigns and scale them strategically.
Good luck!
As part of our mission to help you focus more on your passion, we at Taxumo will be inviting various experts here on our blog to guide you on how to grow your business effectively.
Read more about digital marketing specialist Julian Cañita’s insightful advice on Facebook advertising: