The BEST Way To Scale Meta Ads (from $300M ad spend)

0:00I've spent over 300 million dollars on Meta ads over the past 11 years and [music] scaled thousands of ad campaigns and I can tell you there's a right way to scale and tons of wrong ways to scale. Most Facebook and Instagram advertisers scale the wrong way and it wrecks their results. In this video I'm going to show you the best way [music] to scale your Meta ads. Let's get into

0:17it. This video is sponsored by HubSpot. More about them later. Okay, so just before I dive into my example ad account and demonstrate this, I'm actually going to very quickly go back slightly on what I just said because I'm going to demonstrate two different ways of scaling, two right ways of scaling and which one you select actually depends on your personality type as an advertiser, which is certainly not the normal advice I give. I'm normally giving different strategies based on different business models or industries, things like that, but I think it applies well in this instance when it comes to scaling. So you have to be really honest with

0:49yourself here and decide are you the type of person that cannot help but tinker with your Meta ad account, that feels very emotionally connected to the results? If the results have been good so far today, you're having a good day. If the results have been bad so far today, you're having a bad day. I know

1:05tons and tons of advertisers like this. I would actually say that most advertisers are like this. If you are one of those people, I totally get it. I've been there. Then you need to go with option one. If you're not, if you can be very level-headed and calm and results can fluctuate and you can remain steady, then you can go with either option one or option two. But I just wanted to lay that out at the beginning and with that said, let's dive into the options. Okay, so I'm here inside my example ad account. I've created a quick

1:31example ad campaign to demonstrate this. And let's say we wanted to scale this campaign. And what I recommend you do is go ahead and click the little tick mark next to it, then click on more and then head into automated rules and we're going to go ahead and select create a new rule. We're going to select custom rule, going to click next and then we get into this window here. Now, what we're doing with this automated rule is we're going to set up a system here that will automatically scale your meta ad

1:57campaign if certain conditions are met. And that's why this option is perfect for those advertisers that cannot help but get involved and make adjustments to their ad campaigns and often cause more harm than good because this is going to take that out of your hands and allow your budget to be scaled according to performance, which is what all advertisers really want even if they're doing it manually because they want to spend more when results are good, spend

2:22less when results are less good, okay? So, the first thing we do is automatic rule a name. So, I'm going to call this scaling 3%. You'll see why in a second. Apply rule to the one selected campaign. Obviously, we can get this to apply to other campaigns as well. And then the action. There's a bunch of things you can do with automated rules. You can turn campaigns off, for example, but this is the important stuff for us, right? Increase daily budget, decrease daily budget. I would recommend that basically always with your meta ad campaigns you're operating with daily budgets as opposed to lifetime budgets, the options down here. They're far more

2:53flexible. If it's working, you can run a campaign for longer, easy to scale and adjust budgets, many advantages. So, I'm going to go ahead and select increase daily budget because we're talking about scaling. Then we get to choose the percentage. So, I'm going to go with three like I just described. We can change that to a certain amount. So, instead of scaling by a percentage, we

3:11can scale scale by a fixed money amount. I've got the the pound the GBP sign there because my account's in pounds being UK based, but your whatever currency you operate in will be will be demonstrated there. I like a percentage increase when we're using small percentage increases because it's dynamic. So, if you were to increase by a fixed amount and as you scale up and up and up, that increase would start to become really small. Like let's say you decide you want to spend an extra $10 a day. Want to scale up an extra $10 a day if certain conditions are met. That might be fine if right now you're

3:41spending $50 or $100 a day, but when you're spending $1,000 a day, like do you really want to be increasing by $10? It's almost nothing at that point. So, I think percentage works better. Then we've got maximum daily budget cap. So, you can choose whether or not to use this. This is a ceiling. I never want to spend more than this amount even if my campaign's performing really well, they're continuously being scaled, then you can add this in for comfort. A lot of advertisers like this if they're using automated rules and Meta's going to be scaling for them and they're going to be not thinking about their scaling

4:10as much. And you can go ahead and, you know, pop in 500 pounds, for example. I never want to go beyond it. You could always come in and adjust this as well. Action frequency. So, how often do you want this rule to run? So, increase the daily budget by 3%. Do we want that to happen once every 12 hours? So, in effect, twice a day. I usually like once daily for a nice small percentage increment like this. I'll talk later on about alternative scaling strategies that are faster, where you scale in larger increments, but I think with

4:39something like a 3% once daily is nice. The increase in budget is quite small, not going to be a shock to Meta systems, unlikely to go back into the learning phase. You can just spend a little bit more and it can be consistent. But if you're scaling 3% daily, like put that into a compound calculator and realize how quickly your budgets can increase from a relatively small amount to a larger amount should the condition that

5:02we set in a second continue to be met. If you go 3% day on day on day on day, you quite quickly get to significantly larger budget levels. So, once daily feels about right for me, but there are other options. I would not recommend you go with once hourly unless you're generating an enormous amount of conversion volume in order to meet the criteria. And then beneath that, we've got conditions. So, what needs to be true for us to want our campaign to scale? Under what conditions do we want Meta to spend more money? Okay? So, the first thing is we decide the metric, right? So, cost per result is the

5:32default, absolutely fine if you're a lead-based business, for example, and you say, "Right, if we're generating leads for less than X, we're happy to spend more. That's a great result for our business." And if you're a sales-based business, so e-commerce, for example, optimizing for purchases, you could use cost per result, whatever it is you're optimizing for would work there as well. You could change that, for example, to return on ad spend, uh which would normally be a recommendation if you're sale-based and you have varying order values. Some customers spend more than others cuz that's the more important metric than just cost per

6:01purchase. Um but I'm going to go back to cost per result. That's going to apply to more advertisers. And then what we don't want is greater than, well, okay, so we would if we were if we were using website purchase ROAS, we would want is greater than. So, if our return on ad spend is above, for example, a four, great, go ahead and spend more. That's a good result for our business. Or if our cost per result, let's say our cost per lead, for example, is less than 50 pounds, that's a great result for our business, go ahead and scale. This is where it's really important to know your

6:30numbers. You need to know what does my cost per lead need to be, what does my return on ad spend need to be in order for me to consider this campaign a success. That factors in uh your gross margins, it factors in other operational costs. So, you want to know your numbers and have set targets for what you want these to be um so that you know what's good, what's not, when do you want to spend more, when do you want to spend less. One of the best ways to improve your Meta ad results is to model from ads that are already proven to work. To

6:55help you do exactly that, HubSpot and I have put together a free resource of tried-and-true templates that I've seen work time and time again. Each one includes the hook, body copy, and CTA, so you can take the structure, make it your own, and start testing straight away. My favorite part is that these templates are organized by business type: e-commerce, lead generation, local business, and SaaS. So, no matter what type of business you're advertising, you can find templates that are relevant to you. There's a link in the description below to grab it for free, and thanks to

7:21HubSpot for sponsoring today's video. Okay, so with this one we've added in the condition that the cost per result needs to be less than 50 pounds, um and Meta's automatically put in lifetime impressions need to be more than 8,000. That's just to make sure that the cost per result doesn't run when the campaign is really, really new. You hardly have any data because it could be scaling based on misleading information. Like if you just had a a really good day, for example, early on, do you really want to start spending more? Maybe, maybe not, right? So, that's been added by default for that reason. Uh but you can go ahead

7:52and remove it should you want to. Then we've got time range. Now, this is really important, okay? So, the maximum is 37 months. I absolutely would not recommend you use that. What time range means is over which time period will these conditions be assessed? So, will it be looking at the last 37 months or just at today, just at yesterday, etc.? The problem with going with the maximum is that your cost per result could have been fantastic for, let's say, 3 months, and then really drop off and get much worse, right? Much more expensive in cost per

8:25result. Now, if Meta is looking at the maximum time period, 37 months, they might be continuing to scale your campaign because the average over that time period, the result looks great, but if in the last week to 2 weeks, the results have been terrible, you don't want Meta to continue scaling, you want them to stop. You want them to to potentially do the opposite, right? So, what you use here really depends on the conversion volume that you're generating what's appropriate. Don't go with maximum, but you most likely want to go with either

8:57last 3 days, last 7 days, last 14 days. So, I'd go with last 3 days if you're generating lots of conversions. So, you have a good sample size. If the last 3 days, if you're generating dozens, hundreds of conversions, maybe even more, 8,000 of conversion conversions, then the results that you've generated during that time period is going to be pretty accurate, pretty representative of what's actually happening, and therefore we can use that to make decisions. If you only generate a conversion every couple of days, you can't assess the last 3 days because that's going to be potentially very misrepresentative data,

9:30right? It's going to not mean anything. You need more uh conversions generated to be able to look at the data. So, you need to extend the time period. Could be 14, could even be 28, um depending on the conversion volume you're generating. So, that's kind of kind of the scale. I'm going to go with the last 7 days as a sort of middle of the road. I think that's a good option for a lot of advertisers, but please

9:49adjust that accordingly. [snorts] Schedule, when do you want this to run? So, run continuously will run as often as possible, usually every 30 to 60 minutes. Uh no. Daily between midnight and 1:00 a.m. seems about perfect. We've got action frequency once daily and we want the the schedule to run daily as well. You can uh operate using a custom one. Then we've got notifications. This is ticked by default on Facebook, so you receive a notification when conditions for this rule have been met. So, if the conditions have been met and the rule is triggered, so 3% scale, then I get notified. Great. Uh subscribe as well,

10:19so I can receive uh a message, receive an email um that way. So, that's that rule enacted. I can go ahead and click create and that rule is now created and because we told it to apply to this campaign, it will now run. So, the way that you set this up is that if the cost per result is less than 50 pounds over the last 7 days, the average over the last 7 days, then the budget will be increased 3% potentially daily as long

10:42as the conditions uh continue to be met. Now, you can change those numbers, of course. You can change that cost per result target. You can change the percentage increment by which you scale. Instead of 3%, you could go with 5%, maybe 7%. I wouldn't go above much above that if you're going to be scaling daily, otherwise that could just be too fast, too aggressive a scaling plan for

10:59Meta's systems to be able to keep up. But, that's a really good uh structure to start with and like I said, if you can't help but tinker, this is the right way to go. Okay, so let me show you how to use automated rules to make this process even smarter, right? So, we've still got the same campaign um selected. Going to click on more and then we're going to go ahead and select create a new rule and then custom rule. Now, I'm going to call this one budget decrease

11:243%. Okay. Again, apply to one campaign, select an action. Instead of increase daily budget by, I'm going to go with decrease daily budget by. I'm going to do the same thing and decrease by 3%. Again, you can change the percentage or use a fixed amount. Minimum daily budget floor, so when what do we want our ad spend to never drop below? You know, this could be whatever. It's going to actually depend on your business, but like I always want to make sure that I'm spending at least a little bit. So, let's say 20 pound per day in my instance. Action frequency, I'm going to do the same thing, once daily. And then

11:55the conditions, right? So, if we're happy for our budget to increase, if we're generating a cost per result of less than 50 pounds, which is what we had with our scaling automated rule. Let's say that if our cost per result is greater than 75 pounds, we want our budget to decrease. If it's between 50 and 70 5 pounds, in this case I talked about it as a as a cost per lead example, that works for our business, that's fine, but not super exciting. Beneath 50 is great, really profitable. Above 75, we're not making much money. So, we're happy for our budget to come back down. So, you

12:27don't normally want to set it, you know, so that your condition for scaling is the same as it is for decreasing budget. You normally want there to be a bit of a buffer where things can remain constant, but again, that's up to you. Time range, same logic, I'm going to do the last 7 days to look at. Daily, happy to be notified, and there we go. Go ahead and and click create. So, with those two simple automated rules, we've got a smart system where if your results are great, budget will be increased. If your results are okay, budget remain the same. And if your results are poor,

12:55budget will be decreased. Again, you need to know your numbers, but this is a great option if you can't help but mess around and you've got all these scaling questions and you think, should I scale? Should I not? When's right? How much by? All of this. You can sort of remove that mental workload and then go ahead and set up these these automated rules. Now, there are downsides to this scaling technique in that it's not as fast as some advertisers want. And actually, I find often that when I'm speaking to people as part of my inner circle calls, they're the types of advertisers that want to move really quickly and want to

13:24make had of progress. So, they're wanting to scale more aggressively. This wouldn't normally be the right setup for them, so they have to take manual control and and they'll use option two, which we'll get to in a minute. Now, of course, because they're part of my inner circle course, they can just ask me, "Should I scale? How much should I spend?" and I can give them direct personalized feedback on that. But this is This is great if you do want to a more of a hands-off approach. So, let's talk through option two. So, instead of option one where we're scaling or decreasing the budget very frequently,

13:51so once a day potentially, um in small percentage increments, with option two you want to do the opposite. So, you want to scale or decrease the budget in larger percentage increments, often significantly larger, uh but do so less frequently. You also, as you scale up, want to change the percentage by which you increase the budget so that you're increasing by a smaller percentage with higher budgets and a larger percentage with lower budgets. I know that might sound a bit word salad-y and a bit

14:16confusing. Let me uh try and lay it out. So, let's say for example, you right now are spending $50 per day and you want to scale. If you're going with option two, I would have no issue with you increasing from $50 to $100 a day. I was literally talking to someone on an inner circle call yesterday and I made that exact recommendation. They're at $50 a day. I was like, "Your results are great. Double it. Go to 100." Let's say you do that. You give it 5, 7, maybe 10

14:41days, normally in that range time frame. Again, it's going to depend on your conversion volume. Let's say seven is the average, but if you don't generate that many conversions, um push it out to 10. If you generate lots of conversions, you could look at more like five. You don't really want to do this more often than every five days because you normally can take a bit of time to get through the learning phase after you go through a budget increase like that. You will re-enter the learning phase. It's going to take a take meta a day, maybe two, to uh resettle the campaign, optimize, and then you need a few days

15:09on which to judge performance before you go, "Yep, we increased the budget from $50 a day to $100 a day. Our cost per result remained steady or only got slightly worse, but great, we're still nicely profitable. Let's go ahead and scale again." Then you might go from 100 to 150 again, then wait, see the impact of the results. If results get worse, you can either hold the budget where it is, or bring it back down. If results have continued to be good, great, you can go ahead and scale further. So, we might go from 150 to 200, 200 to 300, 300 to 400, 400 to 500, 500 to 650, 650

15:43to 800, 800 to 1,000, something along those lines. So, what you can see as I'm doing there is we start out with quite large percentage increases. So, 50 to 100 is a double doubling. So, that's a 100% increase. Uh 100 to 150, [clears throat] we're adding on 50%. It's a 50% increase. But, when we get up to say $800 in daily spend and we want to scale from there, I wouldn't double and go from $800 a day to $1,600 a day. It's too large an increase. Meta's going to really struggle with that. It can cope much better with the lower budget amounts. So, that's where in the example

16:14I gave, we're going from $800 a day to $1,000 a day. That's a 20% increase at that point. So, it's it's much ea- it's easier for Meta to manage the larger the increase, which is part of the reason why if you're going to be scaling more aggressively and using this approach and taking more manual control, you don't want to use automated rules for it. This approach, like I said, provide- it does require discipline, requires you to remain level about your um advertising, about your results, to not panic after the budget increases if the co- cost per result or return on ad

16:46spend has a wobble for a day or so. That's to be expected. You go back through the learning phase, but then assess it over the, let's say, 7-days on average time period after you've increased the budget, and then decide, "Aha, okay. Yep, it had a little wobble, but then stabilized. The result is still

17:01good. It's still within our target. We're doing really well. Let's go again." So, now that we've been through option one and two, and you can use either depending, like I said, on your personality type and which one appeals the most. I want to quickly run through some very popular scaling that I don't like, that I would not recommend you use, okay? So, option one is to leave the existing campaign running, duplicate it, and then run an identical version alongside the original. That I do not like at all. Meta does not like it either. When you use that approach, you have competing campaigns running alongside each other, you run into

17:36serious auction overlap issues. And I think when people hear that, they think of audience overlap. So, they think, okay, yeah, they're targeting the same people, so there's crossover and you're competing against each other. That's not really the issue. The idea of like bidding up the price because you have two campaigns targeting the same people is a bit silly because those same people are being targeted by thousands if not tens of thousands of campaigns right now. So, the idea that an extra campaign would make any difference is just that's not true. But, you do run into auction overlap issues, which is a different

18:05thing. Auction overlap creates a problem because of Meta's delivery system. So, what Meta will do to try and get you the result that you want, leads, sales, etc., whatever you've set up your campaign for, Meta will plan impression frequency. So, they might calculate that if they put four ad impressions of yours in front of a user across a 48-hour time period, they are most likely to get the

18:28sale or the lead that way. So, that's what they'll plan for. Now, if you have identical campaigns running to the same audience, how can Meta work out between those two different campaigns that process? So, like, do they get some ads impressions from this campaign and then some from this campaign? And how does that work? And whereas if that's within the one campaign within the one ad set, Meta can plan for all that. Meta's post-Andromeda as well, Meta's um delivery system is much more sophisticated in terms of being able to personalize someone's ad experience. So, working out this individual should see this ad instead of this ad. That's why they want lots of

19:01creative diversity. Much more difficult for them to do that if you've got identical campaigns running cuz again, what do they see? This type of ad from this campaign and this type of ad from this campaign? What you often just see is worse results. So, definitely don't do that. Absolutely you want to consolidate. There are other reasons even on top of those, like you want as much conversion data going through the one campaign as possible, so the meta can optimize better, so that you as an advertiser can make faster decisions. If you end up with the multiple campaigns, it's going to take longer. And then

19:31also, what's your long-term plan there? So, let's say it works the first time. We're going to do it again, and then again, and then again? I've seen that at many ad accounts with this process, by the way, where they have like 11 identical campaigns running alongside each other, because they just that's how they scaled. Each time they wanted to spend more, they just created a new

19:46version. Like, no. Please don't do that. It's not going to work. I also don't like just massively whacking up the budget in one go, which I've seen a lot of advertisers do. They were spending $20 a day, $100 a day, or whatever, and they 10x the budget all in one go. Meta system really struggles to cope with that. I'd rather you scaled an existing campaign instead of creating a new one, and if you do that and just massively increase the budget, you most likely see your cost per result, or your return on ad spend, get significantly worse. What ends up happening then is you either turn the campaign off or you

20:16scale it back down. The problem with that approach, as well, from a a learning going forward standpoint, is you don't know what your scaling ceiling was. Because had you gone through it in a stepped fashion, either with the automated scaling rules or by having control manually, but by doing it in a more measured approach, is you learn where your scaling ceiling is. So, let's say you need a 4x or better return on ad spend. Right now, you're spending $50 a day and you're getting a 6x return on ad spend. And you increase that to 100, and that drops to a 5.2. You increase it to 150, and it drops to a 4.9. Increase it

20:48to 200, and it drops to a 4.6. Increase it to 300, and it drops to a 4.3. Increase it to 400, and it drops to a 4.1. If you need to be above a four, it seems like your scaling ceiling right now is about $400 a day. Now, of course, there are things you can do to improve that, but that's where you're at. That's really helpful to learn cuz you go, "Right, if we want to spend more than that, we know we can consistently spend that and be profitable and operate a larger scale, get more customers, get more leads. But if we want to go beyond that, we

21:16therefore need to improve our campaigns and do various things." That's really valuable information. If you just go from small to big, doesn't work, come back to small, you didn't learn any of that. If you go through it in a stepped fashion, then then you can work it out and you can make decisions accordingly. Now, if you do scale and your results drop off immediately and often by quite a large amount um even at lower ad spend levels, this often means that your ads are good enough to convert warm audience or even hyper responsives within your market that are cold audience, but they're not good enough to convert true

21:47cold audience and do so at scale. And here here's why that happens. A lot of advertisers have this experience. It's because most businesses have, especially those who've been around a little while um or longer, they have warm audience. They have people who've engaged with their stuff before, that have bought from them in the past, even if that's quite a small number of people. Well, those people might basically buy no matter what is in no matter how bad your ads are, they might be interested enough

22:12to purchase anyway, right? But the thing is you quickly run out of those people. So, when you're at a small budget level, maybe your ads are mostly being put in front of those people. Well, the more you spend, yes, your ads are still going to be put in front of those people, but they're also going to be put in front of other people,

22:27genuinely cold audience. And if when you do that, your results drop off, that's the most likely cause. That's what I see. If you don't have any warm audience and you see that still see the same thing, again, within every market, there's a group of people that are so keen and so interested in what you have to sell or in what's being sold in there, they'll basically buy anything that's put in front of them. And again, there's not many very many of those people. You can't build a large scaled business off of that group, but you might have some initial early wins at lower budget levels, it might work, but

22:57as you spend more, um results really drop off. Now, the solution is better ads and better offers. And the easiest way is to make better ads, to make better ad creative, is to do exactly what I demonstrate in this video. It only takes you a few minutes to watch and then implement what I demonstrate in this video. It's something that you'll probably kick yourself for not doing

23:15earlier. Go ahead and give it a go.