How to Scale Facebook Ads SO FAST It Feels Like CHEATING

0:0099% of people running Facebook ads scale completely wrong. And this is why your CPM spike, your ROAS drops, and ultimately it's why you feel like you hit a wall and everything hits the fan the moment you spend an extra few dollars. But after spending $500 million to drive well over a billion dollars in revenue for the brands that we work with here at the Moonlighters, I have a system that is both repeatable and really not that complicated. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to break down what most people are doing wrong, what you should be doing instead. I'm going to take you through vertical

0:33scaling, horizontal scaling, and then something special called twin engine. All of these systems are the exact systems that we use to actually scale brands beyond the wall that they're currently at. So one of the most common things that everybody experiences at some point when you're running Meta ads is that you have a very high-functioning ad set campaign or even just an ad. And the moment you try to push up the spend on that ad, the cost per purchase skyrockets. So take a look at this example. per purchase is $88, $106, all of which are good. Then the client tries to raise the budget and cost per

1:05purchase goes absolutely haywire. $299, $252, and $269. You might say, "Why on earth would an increase in budget create that high of an increase in cost per purchase?" It's because the algorithm literally did not know what to do with that amount of change all at the same time. So an over-leveraged amount of spend caused

1:25everything to go absolutely haywire. Another major red flag, as we can see from an audit here that we just did, is this account spent 6% less. So actually didn't scale at all, but once they added a few new ads to their already existing consolidated campaign, things went haywire yet again. We had an ad go from $11 in spend over a 30-day period to $2,000 in total spend, effectively hogging the entire budget of the entire account. So where things completely shifted away from all of the other ads that they were previously running. Therefore, tanking the overall return on ad spend. Now, this is just my simple way of showing

2:03you that when you scale, you need to have a methodology behind scaling. Simply just upping the budget by huge increments or making dozens of changes and adding a bunch of new ads to existing campaigns often kills things. That said, there's one common mistake that almost every operator is guilty of at some point. Something that almost everybody does wrong at one point or another is they pause too many ads down too quickly. So, most brands, agencies, or just media buyers in general make the common mistake of going into their ad accounts, not looking at any of the secondary metrics, which we'll show you in a second here, and they just go in

2:37and look at return on ad spend and make quick cuts to their ad account. One of the worst things you can do in an ad account is pause your highest spending ads that are feeding the rest of the account. For example, in this account right here, we have a 2.65 return on ad spend, and you'll notice that of the 186 total ads that we have, only three of the ads in the first big bunch here are actually paused down. And really, the top 10 represent a huge portion of the total spend. That's because these top 10 feed all of the purchases that happen at the bottom of the account. And we can

3:10see ads like this where it drives a 26.95 return on ad spend. Now, that's great. We love a 26 return on ad spend, but it's not scalable. It's feeding at the bottom, which is great because the top is being built by right here. And what most operators get completely wrong is making changes too early and too often. So, to set our foundation here, think of scaling and the entire learning

3:31phase process just like this. Effectively, what happens when an advertisement is shown to someone is a consumer goes on a journey. So, we're going to mark this as our person. That person could be at any stage across the life cycle. Now, let's just say this is where the dollars are transacted. So, if this person makes their way to the the sign, we make money. They purchase our product. So, what we want to do is two things. First, we want to get as many people who are right here already interested in our product to see our ads. And second, we want to get everybody here to move down to the

4:05bottom of the funnel. Now, the amazing thing about Facebook ads is that your first dollar spent are very much focused right here. They're going to be on the lowest hanging fruit. So, every additional dollar that you spend, meaning when you scale your advertising budget, it's going to increasingly be spent this way on people who are more upper funnel because there's not an unlimited amount of people who already want to buy your product, who are already in market. And the higher you go up funnel, that simply means that the time to convert takes longer. So, what most people do is they raise their budget, they don't see instant results,

4:40and they go right back down to where they were. And then, they see later a pocket of conversions come in, they think they have a high return on ad spend now. So, then guess what they do? They raise their budget again, and guess what? Results don't come in. They lower their budget, and then the results start to come in. And that's because all that's happening is the people that we are targeting right down here are just taking time to get to the bottom of the funnel and actually convert. So, patience is one of the biggest skills that you actually need to lean on if you're managing an account. And there's

5:09actually a data point that we can look at to make sure we know if people are going to make their way down to the bottom of the funnel. So, to figure out if someone's going to make it to the bottom of the funnel and actually purchase without just relying on purchase metrics, go to your column set, click customize columns, and we're going to add cost per ad to cart, cost per initiated checkout, and cost per link click. Now, I like to have these in the order of cost per link click, then cost

5:33per ad to cart, then cost per checkout. And to see how this all flows together, add in cost per purchase as well. Now, what this basically is showing us in very simple ways, there's more advanced versions you can do here, is you're going to be able to see your total ad account, your cost per click, how much it cost to get someone to site, how much it cost to get someone to add to cart, cost per checkout, and cost per purchase. And as you scale your budgets, cuz what you're looking for is that these metrics will eventually flow down funnel and eventually result in the purchase to occur. Okay, you've got the

6:01foundation, but now you need to know how do you actually scale? We call this vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is a very simple process that you can use on any ad account, and you've probably done this a thousand times. Vertical scaling is the simple process of increasing your budget when you are already over your target. So, don't worry and don't try to

6:20chase the highest return on ad spend. For example, here in the last 30 days, this brand has a 2.65 return on ad spend. Their target is a 2.3. Now, that's great. We're at just a bit over target, we're making money, we're well over their break-even. This is great. What we don't want to do is increase this ROAS from 2.6 to 4.5, because then we're going to actually leave a lot of money on the table in terms of how much we could spend and acquire as many new customers as possible. So, to keep this simple, whenever we are above our actual goal and target, we're going to take our

6:51campaign budget and we're going to increase it by increments of roughly 20 to 30% at a time. If you are smashing, if you are 100% over your target, for example, if this 2.65 was a five, I feel way more comfortable scaling by significantly larger increments. For example, if this was at that five, I'd probably double my budget outright, because I know that worst-case scenario, I'm not as efficient, but I'm still way over my target. By the way, the three scaling systems that we're going through right now, I've already released months ago inside of my school community. You can see them right here. We have our full guide on vertical scaling,

7:23horizontal scaling, and then the twin engine. This is where I go in way more detail. You can see these are 30-minute videos each, and they have full checklist, full how-to guides attached to them, along with basically everything else that I've ever detailed out and what's actively working the best right now. Now, something extremely important when you're vertically scaling is you want to focus on new customer acquisition. The way that we're going to do that is go to our breakdowns and click audience segments. And here we want to make sure most of our spend is going to the new breakdown and the engaged breakdown. What we want to see

7:54is very little spend on existing. And we can see it already in this account that we actively manage, only $200 of the 25,000 have gone to existing customers. So our exclusions are essentially perfect here. We are very, very focused on new customer acquisition through the new audience and engaged audience. And as we spend more money, this is the first breakdown that we're looking at to

8:14make sure that it's funneling into new. The next thing you can also consider is going into your columns and clicking compare attribution and selecting incremental attribution. Here you'll be able to see the drop off from normal purchases to incremental. As a good rule of thumb, your incremental attribution is generally going to be where the next dollar spent is returned at. Meaning if I spend $1,000, I'm not expecting a 2.65, I'm expecting a 1.86 in this prospecting campaign. Now there is a second way to scale and it's actually really old school. If you've been in this game as long as I have, you've heard of horizontal scaling. But you've

8:47probably heard of some really old school ways of doing it, like duplicating a bunch of ad sets with super low budgets, endlessly having hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of duplicate ad sets and duplicate ads in your account, or cost capping 100 different ads at 100 different CPAs all over the place. These are old school black hat horizontal scaling methods and to be honest, they just don't work. They might get you a few extra bucks today, but they're going to die tomorrow. What we want to create is sustainable scaling systems that's not just going to allow you to go from $100 to $150 in spend, but from $100 to

9:18$1,000 to $10,000 to actually build a multi-seven-figure brand. So the new way of horizontal scaling is completely different. The new way of horizontal scaling involves taking what's already working inside of existing campaigns, specifically at the ad level, and building upon it horizontally. So taking a look at our number one performing ad set by both amount spent, purchases, and incremental return on ad spend, we have a few ads in here that are actually all doing pretty well. Two in particular that have driven high amount spent and very high return on ad spend. Horizontal method of scaling, in simple terms, is taking these exact ads and building iterations

9:57of these ads to be launched in a new pack as soon as possible. Now, iterations have been around forever, right? Everybody knows build iterations of your existing ads, but it's very important we build iterations on two key metrics. First, total spend. Total spend is an indication that the ad is scalable. And second, incremental return on ad spend or whatever your KPI is on incremental. This is proof that the ad can actually convert new people who have not heard or were not going to purchase without seeing this ad. In this case, we would want to take this top performing

10:30ad and make different variations of it. Variations do not mean that we're just going to change the headline and move on. It doesn't mean we're going to put a filter on top of it. It means we're going to take this exact performing ad and chop it in a different way. If it's a video, we might take the first 3 seconds out of the video and run it from there. We might take and add a different hook to the front. We might take the hook and add a new body. We are literally creating and generating new ads using the base of something that we know is very strong. And finally, my

10:55favorite, the most important way to scale is called the twin engine. The twin engine is doing both vertical scaling and horizontal scaling at the same time. creates something in every ad account, if done right, that is unbuildable elsewhere. Let's say that you're currently spending a set amount of money and your return on ad spend is very steady. This is a very common thing, spending the same amount, driving a very similar return on ad spend. Your goal is to increase your spend and your goal is to keep ROAS as flat as possible. This means, effectively, that you will increase your overall revenue because your revenue is going to be flat

11:32during this period, and as your spend goes up and your ROAS stays stable, your revenue will go up. This is not what happens to most brands. Most brands increase their spend, and we all know what happens to their return on ad spend, it starts to decline. You see an inverse relationship between amount spent and return on ad spend. What the twin engine does is it allows you to spend more money consistently and keep your return on ad spend flat. This then increases total revenue at a similar

12:00proportion to how much you are spending. You're going to hit roadblocks on the way. You're going to hit walls, but if you consistently produce with the twin engine doing both vertical scaling by increasing your budget when you know you can increase budget, and by creating your creative flywheel through horizontal scaling and expanding out the winners, you're going to create a very sustainable ad account. So, twin engine involves just a few things. First, we are increasing our spend vertically whenever we're above our target. We do this as consistent as possible in increments of 20 to 30%. If we're just a little over target, maybe we're increasing 10%. If we're way over

12:35target, we're increasing upwards of 50 plus percent. Then, horizontally, we're taking all of the winners in our ad account that are performing both high spend and incremental ROAS, and we're creating iterations of those to create more sustainability in the ad account. At the same time, we're testing new creative ideas and injecting them in the ad account. This creates a creative flywheel and basically a branding flywheel that allows you to spend more money as your ROAS stays flat, that allows you to generate as much revenue and profit above your target return on ad spend goal every day sustainably in

13:09Facebook ads. That's all for this video. If you have questions, let me know in the comments below. I always try to answer them. And if you want to join the blueprint, go to school.com/facebook. And if you just want to work with us and let someone take over your ad account, go to the moonliters.com to apply to work with us. And by the way, if you want to see how we actually implement this, click this video right here where I go through my best campaign structure so that you can set the right foundation for your ad account to implement vertical, horizontal, and twin engine scaling today. See you in the

13:39next one.