What’s the #1 thing Facebook advertisers struggle with?

Scaling.

That magical moment when the cost per lead works, cost per sale works and you have positive ROI.

But…

Now what? Let’s just double the budget right? Nope.

If you have tried scaling ads, you know it’s not as simple as doubling your budget.

Phases of a campaign

The there are a few phases of a successful Facebook advertising campaign:

1. Advertising spend breaks even on the front end
2. Advertising spend breaks even on the back end
3. Advertising campaign generates positive ROI
4. Advertising campaign generates positive ROI as you scale

Most Facebook campaigns don’t break even on the front end. It could be because the offer was misaligned with their audience, the copy doesn’t resonate, the imagery doesn’t connect with the market or a variety of other reasons.

This is for an information product I am promoting that my team was able to scale from $2,000/mo to over $20,000/mo consistently.

So here’s how I scaled a client’s ad campaign from $2000/mo to $20,000/mo+:

1) Know your numbers!

Most business owners I speak to do not know their numbers, unfortunately. If these questions make you nervous or leave you scratching your head, find out the answers ASAP:

What is my cost per lead?

What is my cost per sale?

What are the numbers we need to hit to break even on the front end?

What are the numbers we need to hit to break even on the back end?

Do you know what the ideal cost of acquisition is at each level of the campaign?

Do you know what the conversion rates at each step of the campaign should be to hit your goal?

What are all the costs associated with running your Facebook ad campaign in addition to the ad spend? Ie: cost of landing pages, graphic design, person or agency (like mine) managing the ad spend, the cost of delivery of the product and more.

Don’t know your numbers? Your campaign isn’t gonna scale.

 

2) Optimize Your Campaign As You Scale

Now that you know your numbers, how are you optimizing your campaign to maintain those numbers are you 2x-10x your daily ad spends?

For this client, here’s what we did:

– We tested targeting

– We test placement of ad (mobile, desktop, iPad, right hand side)

– We tested copy

– We tested images

– We tested call to actions

– We tested ad objectives (clicks to website vs. ppe vs. optimized for conversions)

– We tested landing pages

– We tested retargeting

For other clients, we test offers, thank you pages, follow up copy ideas, and more.

If you aren’t testing, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

 

3) Scaling up vs. scaling out

There are variety of ways to scale campaigns. Here’s how we start:

All our client campaigns start at $5-10/day/interests. Depending on the starting daily budget, we start most tests with $20/day. For new offers and promotions, what this allows us to do is set benchmarks.

This process works even better when you have interests that you know work for your business. When we launch a new offer to an audience that has never seen an offer by this company, we use benchmarks from the same industry as well as benchmark performance from other industries.

For example, if we are running a webinar campaign in the startup niche, we benchmark numbers with the IM niche or the health niche and see how the numbers vary. This benchmarking is key because it sets a baseline to ensure you know your numbers and predict profitability; this is huge and usually overlooked.

So now that we have $5-10/day/interest running, we wait 48-72hrs to let ads “settle down”. We don’t make decisions on scaling or worst, pausing ads on 1 day of performance; you could have turned off the audience that was going to lead to setting new benchmarks! This part requires a bit of patience and a degree of comfort with losing money on the first few days.

After the 48-72hrs of data we have acquired, now we start making decisions on which audience to scale, which to maintain and which to pause. At this point we start scaling in two ways: scale up or scale out.

Scaling up means to increase the budget. We usually increase budgets by 50-100%. For example, your daily spend is $10, I would increase that to $15/day or $20/day. This doesn’t work all the time, a lot of our ad sets go to shit when we do this. So don’t get excited and start increasing a $10/day ad spend to $50/day; it hurts performance most of the times.

Scaling out means to adding more interests to the campaign. When you have exhausted an audience or it is working well, you want to test additional interests. The way we do this is by using related interests to our initial audience. We use Audience Insights (a tool inside of Facebook) to find additional interests that are closest to the audience that are already performing at a high level.

We also duplicate ad sets to increase efficiency of ad sets.

This process is not “testing”, this process is clearly investing. We are strictly buying data to make decisions. If you understand that this part of the ad campaign is to buy data, that will be huge for your ad campaign! Again, please be patient

That’s it!

Well, it sounds simpler than it is, but we have successfully scaled campaigns into high performing campaigns where my team is spending $500-$1000/day.