How do you successfully scale ads?

A lot of times, we are stuck with how to how to successfully scale ads without compromising our ROI. You may run an ad on Facebook, and found a sweet deal of getting $5 per lead or conversion and think that you may get better results when you hike up the budget to $30. However, soon you find that your conversions are getting more expensive, and that goes for your impressions and click costs.

So how do we scale Facebook ads? Here is Ben Malol’s strategy into successful scaling campaigns to maintain a good return on investments, by just adjusting the bid amount and understanding CPA (costs per action).

If you would like to watch the video of his explanation, you can do so here:

Or if you prefer to read, we’ve written a summary of his strategy in the steps below.

Firstly, you would have to ask yourself…

Do I have enough data to run a web conversion campaign?

By data we mean installing a Facebook Pixel to track number of constant purchase (about 5 -10 daily purchase) at your site and  add to cart, if you do not have at least 15 of these number of actions overall on your ad account, hence you should not start with the “web conversions” objective under Facebook ads. Those actions happened outside of Facebook. It would be wise to start building and collecting data by using Facebook ad objectives that happens within Facebook such as PPE (page post engagement), clicks to website, video views, etc.

What do I do if I don’t have data?

Ben recommends testing different ads with different products. A good budget to start would be around $5-$30. Run a few low-budget ads on automatic bidding, to mobile and desktop users until you get an ad with the lowest CPA and highest conversions.

Facebook ads optimised as time goes by.

One thing about Facebook ads is that whatever objective you pick, it is set to optimised as time goes by. While running your ad, you may find that the first day your CPA is a bit higher, that is because Facebook is adjusting and looking for people more likely to convert based on your ad objectives. Let it run for a few days and when you start to see 5 purchase conversions, Facebook will start to optimise your CPA to find more conversions based on the profiles of those 5 conversions.

You can close an ad after 4 days if there are no purchase conversions happening because then you would know that your ad is not working.

So yes, say you have an ad with a targeting that is converting for you, and you are getting the lowest CPA with the highest conversions, how do you scale?

Start small and slow scaling

This type of scaling is the simplest and easiest to do. It is suitable for beginners or anyone who is comfortable to go slow and steady. However, this scaling method may take a longer period to actualise.

What you have to do is just increase the ad budget to 20% daily, but also tracking if your CPA has not gone too high.

Fast scaling for the bigger boys

Here is where you will be playing a bit more on manual bidding. First, break down the ad based on mobile and desktop placement. Here you would want to see where are you getting the cheaper CPA. Most of the time, it is from mobile.

So, now you duplicate the ad but you set your targeting to only mobile users with the same audience targeting and ad, and set the daily budget to a minimum of $300 and manual bid. Your bid should be your CPA multiply by 2 (CPA x2). You will want to watch the ad for the next two hours to see how quickly you go through your budget, and then start to decrease the bid amount, depending on results in the first two hours, until you reach a point where you are comfortable with the spend versus CPA.

When you lower your bid, Facebook will lower your ad spend and also lower your CPA. With manual bidding, you are telling Facebook to find conversions that cost lower than the bid amount you set, hence having a bigger ad spend such as $300 allows Facebook enough room for optimisation, but you won’t be spending all $300 in one day because you will be lowering your bid.

After you find a point where you are comfortable with the spend versus CPA, you duplicate the same ad set but this time you target desktop users. And, you repeat the same steps. CPA x2, monitor for the first few hours, lower your bid until you get to a point where you are comfortable with the spend versus CPA.

After having good results on the 2 ad sets, you can now start repeating your steps but basing it on each ad set’s lookalike audience. If you do not know what lookalikes audiences are, you can go here.

Conclusion

Do keep in mind that scalability works best with audiences that have more than 500k, if you do not have that, you can do slow scale. Always remember to monitor and that Facebook won’t spend all $300 of your ad budget as long as you control and lower your bid. This makes you stand out from your competitors from the start because with a bigger budget in the initial stage, you are allowing Facebook to optimised and find conversions which may come at a higher cost, but the more conversions it gets, the more optimised your CPA will be so that lowering your bid will allow Facebook to look for the conversions that are below your bid amount.

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