How to Scale Facebook Ads SO FAST It Feels Like CHEATING

0:00Seems like every Facebook ads video lately is a new more clever way to set up your campaigns to convince total strangers to buy anything that you sell. There's a much better strategy that nobody's talking about once you see it, you'll never run an account the old way again. In this video, I'm going to show you the easy strategy that produces big results. Something I've been doing for years and by the end of this, you're going to have a step-by-step guide to something so simple and so fast, it feels like cheating. Here's what's actually happening. Every time you spend money on ads, some of those ads are

0:32shown to people early in [music] the customer journey and some are shown to people later. That's upper and lower funnel. The upper funnel is generally the majority of your spend and the CPMs on it are lower. This is where you fill the funnel by reaching new people who are starting their customer journey with your brand and the ads here have three simple jobs. Get attention, earn trust, and build authority. When those individuals move through the journey and down your funnel, your lower ads begin to hit them as well. These are the ads with the lowest CPA and the highest ROAS and frustratingly, they never see nearly

1:10as much spend. That's the textbook definition of a marketing funnel and that's how you've been taught from day one to spend your money and that makes so much sense until you break down what's actually happening inside a conversion campaign. Those upper funnel prospecting ads, the ones with the lowest CPMs and the lowest frequency and the most spend, are also the ads with the worst conversion rate. You can see this in your account right now. Let's say your cost per purchase is 50 bucks

1:41and your upper funnel ad CPMs are $20. That means you have to show 2,500 ads to make one sale. How many thousands of impressions does it take your top spending ads to create one conversion? The majority of that spend is wasted on people who will never buy. Thousands and thousands of impressions for every single sale your ad makes. And whenever you try to scale the budget, these are the ads that get most of that additional

2:09money. Which brings me to one of the most common questions I get from members of Disruptor Academy and from all of you right here in the comments section on YouTube. Why is it that every time I try to scale, everything breaks? Now you know why. You're trying to scale your business by spending more money on people who don't know who you are and will never buy from you. The fix has to be the exact opposite and I'm going to show you step-by-step exactly how I've done it for my own businesses and for hundreds of other brands in a way that I've never made public before. But

2:43before I show you how it works, I need to show you how Andromeda chooses who to show ads to because once you see that, everything else in this video clicks. The simplest way to show you how Andromeda actually makes decisions is to lay out the customer journey from left to right. All the way to the left is completely cold. A stranger who doesn't know you exist and has no reason to trust you and might not even have the problem you solve. All the way to the right is somebody who's ready to give you money. For the sake of keeping this simple, let's say it takes seven touch

3:21points to get there. Touch one, they don't know who you are. Touch two, they remember you exist. There's some recognition, but they're still cold. Touch three, they move into consideration. They begin to understand the problem and compare options. Touch four, they begin to believe in your authority. You're no longer some random advertiser. You're becoming someone who might actually have the answer. Touch five, they begin to trust you. Enough

3:52evidence, enough positive interactions. Now, there's a relationship. Touch six, they have buying intent. They're problem aware, solution aware, and they're evaluating where they want to spend their money. And touch seven, they buy. The person all the way to the left is cheap to reach because odds are they won't remember you. The person all the way to the right is ready to spend money, and that makes them dramatically more valuable. That is where Andromeda comes in. At each one of these touch points, Andromeda is deciding which ads are even worth considering. There are over 10 million advertisers on Facebook and Instagram spending money every single day. An enormous universe of

4:35potential ads competing for attention. Andromeda filters that universe down to the ads that best fit each touch point in the journey. As we move from left to right, from cold to warm, the audiences get smaller because people drop out and demand for those users goes up. The inventory gets more expensive, the stakes get higher, so the filter gets more aggressive. Meta doesn't just need people to click ads, they need people to trust the ads they click on. Andromeda's job is to protect the person who's already ready to spend money. Meta's entire business model is making sure that last touch point is an ad for something people want from a brand they

5:15can trust. Because if everybody regretted every purchase that they made, people would stop buying from ads entirely, and the entire business would collapse overnight. Everybody wants that last impression. That's why it's the most competitive and most expensive inventory on the platform. And that is the filter. It's not your bid, it's not your campaign structure, it's not how many ads you launch. It's the quality of the relationship. Every strategy that prioritizes the best way to reach new people, amplifies the problem of the unscalable

5:50funnel. When strangers and decision-making are built around hook rate, first-time impression rate, and cheap CPMs, those advertisers spend more and more money on highly engaging ads to serve to the people most interested in engaging. They tell the machine, "This is what I want. Give me more of this." And the machine does. And it gives them more people all

6:10the way to the left. More strangers. More people who don't know them, don't trust them, and aren't ready to buy. And you can see this in your account right now. Break it down by new audiences, engaged audiences, and existing customers. All the profit, all the sales, all the scale, all the things that will actually grow the business, those are the people all the way to the right. The ones with the awareness, authority, trust, and intent. The more you chase people to the left, the less of your budget reaches the people who actually buy. That's why your CAC goes up. That's why your conversion rate from your ads is going down. That's why

6:50scaling feels impossible because the machine is doing exactly what you told it to do. And what you told it to do is find more people further and further away from the sale. The unscalable funnel exists because you've been optimizing for the wrong thing at the wrong part of the journey. There is absolutely no reason your first touch point with a potential customer has to be a conversion ad, but that's exactly what most people are doing. It's the equivalent of walking up to a stranger at a party, introducing yourself, and immediately begging for money. You're not going to be very popular. Odds are you're going to irritate all but maybe one out of 2,500

7:33people. Here's the thing. The biggest, most successful advertisers in the world don't fill their upper funnel with conversion ads. Hormozi does it with YouTube, and his ad strategy can be, let's say, suboptimal at best because his ads only ever reach warm traffic. Nike, Abercrombie, and Hex Clad, their funnel is retail and community. Their conversion ads only ever reach one type

7:57of traffic, warm. What if you're not YouTube famous and you're not in a thousand stores? You can solve this problem for pennies on the dollar, and I'm going to show you how to do that in just a minute. But first, look back at those first four touch points. That is awareness and identity. It has nothing to do with the products you're selling. There are millions of other people spending money on ads. Let them do the expensive work. Your job is to show up at touch four and be the obvious choice, and earn trust and authority with the people already in the consideration phase, which brings us to

8:36step one, creating an aligned content strategy. And I promise, this is so much easier than you might think it is. In fact, let's look at my Instagram account. It has nothing to do with any of the services I offer. It's exclusively me having conversations with people who spend an obscene amount of money on Facebook ads, talking about how they do it and what they've learned. The content there isn't to teach my audience how to do a good job. It's there to build an audience who cares about wanting to know how to do a good job because that is what I sell. You don't follow this account unless that's the

9:16problem you're trying to solve. This is Dad Gang, and a ton of their content is just smiling and crying dudes around babies. If they show an ad to 10,000 people, how many of those do you think already know the brand versus how many are complete strangers? I'll give you a hint. It's way more than one out of

9:342,500. Andromeda already knows the people most likely to buy who really want to see this content. Going back to Meta's business model, they are completely aligned. They're reaching really warm traffic for dirt cheap, and they're making money hand over fist. They even joke about how easy it is. Bart is a great follow on Twitter. Now, I'm going to give you one more example because this shows how far this principle actually reaches. I have a friend named Donnie. Donnie is a travel blogger. He's writing pieces about beaches in Japan, hidden spots, the kind of content that makes you want to book a flight and enjoy some amazing opportunity of a time

10:16and an experience. The content has nothing to do with selling ads, but it attracted a very specific type of person. Someone with taste, someone who pays attention, someone who trusts a recommendation. And that content strategy, that aligned audience he built around it, is part of what established him as someone the world's largest music streaming service trust with a serious media budget. If you look at your phone

10:42right now, you probably have their app. Maybe three little black lines on a green circle? The content was always about attracting the right kind of person, not to make the sale. That is the whole game. And here's what that does to your ad account. As I scaled up my spend, my CPMs and frequency got lower and lower, not higher. Because I wasn't getting further to the left. I was making the size of the audience at touch four massive. I was making everything from the middle to the right of the journey dramatically cheaper. I 10x Disrupter Academy in just over a year, and I'm currently making about six

11:24to one on my money, which brings us to step two. How to build a Facebook campaign that does this for as as as $5 a day, and I know people spending 50,000 a day that do this with up to 10% of their daily budget. You create an engagement campaign. You target broad, your definition of broad, age, gender, and location in your target

11:48market, and you exclude your followers. That's the entire targeting setup. Your content has one job. Get you more followers for the cheapest possible price. Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. The goal isn't followers. The goal is figuring out which content most cost-effectively earns trust by proving authority and creates an audience that's interested in what you sell. A follow isn't a vanity metric. It's a signal that somebody has moved through the journey far enough to want to keep hearing from you. Now, promote every piece of organic content you have. Every single post gets spent behind it. I use an automated rule that turns everything off at a set threshold. For some

12:32accounts, that's $10 per post. For me, with worldwide targeting on Disruptor Academy, I let every post run to approximately 1 million impressions. And it cost me about 50 bucks. A new post goes up every 3 days. This is an exponentially cheaper way to test dozens or hundreds of creatives to see what actually gets people to want to buy rather than what's engaging for people who never will. And this is filling your funnel for pennies on the dollar of what you used to pay with people who are far more likely to want what you buy, which makes your conversion ads way cheaper, and your conversion rate goes up because

13:12you've trained the algorithm to know who your ideal customer is. Andromeda understands who to show your ads to, which all but eliminates ad fatigue, so you don't need to launch more and more ads, and all of your ads get way more data. So, even when you do scale the budget, and you go into colder traffic,

13:28you're not wasting nearly as much money. And because your ads don't change, the machine knows exactly who to show them to. The people coming into your business all more or less behave the same. So, customer service demands and returns go down. Bounce rate goes down. Your email campaigns and your search campaigns get dramatically more effective. And your LTV improves because you essentially only have to deal with your ideal customer. And that makes everything easier. This is an insane cheat code, and I've been doing it for years, and it blows my mind that nobody else is talking about it. Which brings us to step three, knowing what conversion ads

14:09you should actually run. There are really only two options you will ever need to choose from. Every campaign on Meta can either be focused on scaling volume or scaling efficiency. Going back to our customer before, volume moves further and further to the left, getting colder and colder until eventually you're back at touch one. Efficiency moves further and further to the right, getting warmer and warmer until you reach touch seven. And remember, the scalable funnel exists when accounts spend more money on touches one, two, and three than anywhere else. Our job is to maximize the volume of spend from touch four and on. Here is the step-by-step process to

14:58do exactly that. Step one is broad retargeting, set to 30 days. At the ad set level, your audience is Instagram engagers, Facebook engagers, and site traffic, all at 30 days, no exclusions. If you don't know how to build those audiences, here's how to do it. Step two is choosing the right ads for this audience. Ads in a warm audience behave differently than they do in pure

15:22prospecting. So, before we get ahead of ourselves, pull up every ad you've run to your hero offer in the last several months and sort by amount spent. Choose the ads that have spent the most where the GPT was as good or better than your account average. GPT is AOV minus CPA. It's gross profit per transaction. Sometimes your AOV is higher even when you're promoting the same offer and that can make the ad with the higher CPA or lower ROAS a much better choice. We're optimizing for volume of profit. And if you don't have GPT in your dashboard, here's how to build it. Step three is scale. If results are not good enough,

16:02scale efficiency by tightening the audience from 30 days to 14. And if results are with the good, raise the budget. And if frequency begins to rise, CPMs begin to rise, and CPA and GPT become undesirable, scale by expanding the audience. If you're at 14 days, go back to 30. If you're at 30, go to 90, and eventually up to 180 days. Step four is embracing the cold. Eventually, some of you will need to scale the budget to the point where broad retargeting begins to cap out. If you've only been running the engagement campaign for 2 months,

16:39that 90-day audience is only 2/3 full. Even at four or five months, the 180-day window isn't complete, and the first people who worked their way through it aren't nearly as good as the people in there now because you've been optimizing the aligned content strategy the whole time. When we outpace the growth of warm opportunity, we add a second ad set within the same campaign targeting broad. Again, no exclusions. Left unchecked, this will absorb the budget fast. So, start with a spend maximum at

17:13the ad set level of 20%. If you don't know how to set ad set spend minimums or maximums, here's how to do it. Step five is balancing the scale. That spend maximum is your throttle control on how cold you're willing to go. As the broad retargeting gets more and more efficient because of everything we've built going to your hero product, the one most likely to increase the volume of non-first-time buyers at a profit, your blended CPA will come down and your reoccurring revenue will go up. In those situations, it's not uncommon to reduce the spend maximum down to 15% or even 10, even as you're scaling the overall budget. And

17:56when you need to scale faster than the audience development effort will allow and you can afford to because your performance is strong enough, you raise the maximum on that broad ad set. And you'll notice, as soon as you raise it, what feels like ad fatigue all but disappeared. The way the machine spends inside the broad ad set changes. And what you now have is an upper and lower funnel, an early and late stage journey management system inside a single CBO run the way most people would

18:26historically manage an campaign. This is a campaign where Andromeda is making all the choices. You're not setting budgets, you're only setting thresholds. The longer you let the ads run, the better you get at building a warm audience with aligned content. And the more effective this becomes than anything anyone running could ever do. You will eliminate wasted spend on people who will never buy. You will scale with stability you've never had before. And most importantly, you're going to be profitable. I've run this with brands all over the world, skin care brands in New Zealand, men's luxury brands in the United States, even wedding band booking agencies out of

19:13Eastern Europe, and in every single one of those accounts, this has become so integral to how they operate that it replaced entire categories of spend they used to think were necessary, and they've been doing it for years, not months. The oldest account I just mentioned has been running this strategy for over 3 years. They commit at least 5% of a daily five-figure budget to it every single day, and that business has been known to drop a quarter million dollars on ads in a single day. This isn't a tactic you try once. It's the foundation everything else runs on. Now,

19:55watching this video was the easy part. Setting up the campaigns is something you can pause, bookmark this, come back to it and screenshot everything you need to do right here in this video, but knowing what happens when something goes wrong, or even when something goes really right, is way more than I can cover right here, right now. When your broad retargeting starts capping out, and you're not sure whether to expand

20:17the window or raise the broad maximum. When your GPT looks great, but your blended CPA starts to creep up. When the engagement campaign is running, and you're not sure if the content is actually aligned or just cheap. Those are the moments where having direct access to me makes the difference between figuring it out in a day and spending 3 months learning it the hard way. That's exactly what the premium tier of Disruptor Academy is for. It's ongoing access to me and a community of operators running this exact system, so you can get answers when the real questions show up. The link is on the screen and down in the description. And

21:01if you want to go deeper on the creative strategy that makes everything we just built actually scale, the ads themselves, the copy, the offers. That's what this next video is all about. [music]