# How To Scale Facebook Ad Campaigns

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz1nffslEc8
Duration: 21 min
Language: English
Words: 4721
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Zz1nffslEc8

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[0:00] In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to scale Facebook ad campaigns. Now, Facebook advertisers get this wrong all the time. And that's bad for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they miss out on the fantastic results they could have got with successfully scaled campaigns. But, if you scale a Facebook ad campaign wrong, it can even wreck the results you used to have at the previous level when you reduce the budget back

[0:18] down. This is going to be quite a detailed walk-through of exactly how we scale Facebook ad campaigns as an agency. We spend more time scaling Facebook ad campaigns than we do creating Facebook ad campaigns for our clients. It's something we very much know how to do, and it can be done provided you do it the right way. So, I'm on an example Facebook ad account here, and I've just created a a campaign called the epic sales campaign. And you only really want to be scaling a Facebook ad campaign if

[0:41] you are already delivering good results. It's a myth to think that, "Oh, I'm not getting good results cuz I'm not spending enough. If I went and, you know, quadrupled my budget, I'd be getting better results." That's not true. Your campaign needs to be delivering a really good cost per lead, cost per sale, cost per conversion, whatever it is you're optimizing for, before you go ahead and scale. So, that's the first thing I very importantly to say. Next is what people then typically do, right? So, we've got our here our epic sales campaign that's delivering a great cost per um conversion. We want to spend more. We

[1:13] want more conversions. And let's say we were spending 20 pounds a day as is the example here. Now, there's a couple of things that people often do that aren't the best approach. Firstly, is they only increase their budget by, say, 20% or less. That's the thing that goes around the Facebook advertising community that you can stay out of the learning phase if you only increase the budget by 20% or less. Is that true? Sometimes, not always. We've absolutely seen campaigns go into the learning phase again with budget increases of less than 20%. So, don't think that it's a way to avoid that completely. That's not true. Also,

[1:47] the issue with increasing by 20% is if you're going from a smaller budget level, let's say 20 pounds a day, and we increase 20% to 24, and then we increase another 20%, another 20%. If we want to get up to a budget level of 1,000 pounds a day, 5,000 dollars a day, you know, we have client campaigns with these sorts of budgets. This is possible. It's going to take forever to achieve that. Okay? I don't know about you, but I imagine if you've got a campaign that's doing well, you've got an offer that's performing well, you want to scale that and you want to scale that over a reasonably

[2:17] short time period. I'm going to talk about time periods a lot in a minute, but you don't want that process to take a year to two years. It may be that the opportunity you've got right now will be gone by then. So, 20% could just take a really long time. And because those increments are so small, what people typically will do is they'll be increasing the budget all the time. So, you go from 20 to 24 a day and then you up it to 28, then you up it to 35, you know, whatever 20% works out at. And if you're doing that every day, every couple of days, which I've seen Facebook

[2:47] advertisers do all the time, your campaign never has time to establish stability. You don't have a long enough time period to see if your campaign is still successful and profitable at the higher budget level, that leads to all sorts of issues. So, the constant, frequent, small increases is not what I'd recommend. Let me show you exactly how we do it now. So, let's head on over to a Excel document and I'm going to walk you through an example here of the

[3:12] sort of thing we would typically see. Now, before we get into this data, the very first thing that you need to establish um is what is your acceptable cost per result. I'm not talking about your ideal cost per result. I often talk to business owners and they say, "You know, what what are we looking for here?

[3:27] What what's our target cost per lead?" And they'll say, "Oh, as cheap as possible." And you go, "Okay, great. That's not useful." They ask you how you are and you just have to say that you're fine. Everyone wants leads as cheap as possible, but we need to be realistic. And the first number they come out with, they might say, "Okay, we're willing to pay 15 dollars a lead." And you go, "Okay, great. If I came to you with 100 leads right now and they cost 25 dollars each, would you still take that?" And they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, sure. We'd take that." Okay. So, you need to work

[3:50] out what that upper limit of the acceptable cost per lead is. And that's going to be a benchmark that we can use as we go through this. So, have a little think about what am I really willing I'd love to pay almost nothing. Of course, we all would. But realistically, at what point do I start to go not sure if the leads are worth it. You want to be under

[4:07] that point but not miles under it, okay? So, let's assume that we're spending 100 a day, right? $100 a day. And let's assume that when we're spending $100 a day on our campaign, we're generating a cost per result for $25. And result could be lead, purchase, it's going to vary depending on your business, right? Now, that means in terms of results per week,

[4:27] we're generating 28 results per week. Okay, and let's say, you know, we're really happy with that and we want to scale the budget. Here's what we would do. We wouldn't increase by 20%, we would increase a small budget, like $100 a day, by about double to $200 a day. Now, what you'll see is that down here I've written weeks. These aren't days and that's because I only want you to scale

[4:54] once per week. That way, what happens is you can increase the budget and you can give yourself enough time for Facebook to go through the learning phase, that first 48 hours typically, and then generate results for a number of days where you can assess how is the campaign performing at this new budget level. That's really important and that's what the frequent

[5:15] small increments don't allow you to do. You just keep chipping up the budget, chipping up the budget, you haven't got a day or two's worth of data. You don't really know how your campaign's performing till you stop increasing, you let it run, you realize, oh, campaign doesn't work at all. That happens all the time. That's why people go from smaller budgets to bigger budgets and

[5:29] the campaign just completely dies. Um, they didn't stop and assess at certain levels. So, we're going to go from 100 to 200, which is much larger increase than a lot of people use, but at smaller budgets, it's fine. That's why I'm not a big fan of just increasing by a certain percentage. We're going to change it depending on what the budget is, the percentage increase. You'll see as we go through. So, let's say we've done this and the cost per result goes up to

[5:52] $28. Happy days. It's gone up a little bit, but we're still well under our acceptable cost per result of $50. We've increased our budget. We've also increased our overall results per week to 50. Fantastic. Okay. So, we increased the budget from 100 to 200. We gave it a week. Results were good. Let's scale again. So, now we go to 300 a day. Now, obviously we've doubled there, but we've only increased by 50% here. And you'll see this is how we're going to go through this. You can get away with much larger percentage increases in budget at smaller budget levels. And you've got to think about the reason why it makes sense cuz you've

[6:26] got your target audience, right? And let's say you're only reaching a small fraction of them at lower budget levels. Well, as you increase your budget, you're going to start reaching a larger a larger proportion of that audience. And and that's fine, right? As you get higher and higher, you start running into the limits of that audience. You

[6:41] also start to increase the ad frequency. So, people within the audience are going to see the ad more and more often. So, it you can't you couldn't take a budget of $5,000 a day and double it as we can with a budget of $100 a day because you're just going to either obliterate your audience, run into massive ad fatigue issues because you've turned the frequency up

[7:00] massively, all that sort of stuff. Okay? So, that's why we're doing it this way. So, let's say we do this and we get a cost per result of 32. Fantastic. Results are getting more expensive. I'll explain why in a minute. Um but still well under our target cost per result of 50. Great. Wait another week.

[7:18] Do the same thing. Now, we're going to increase to 500 a day as as our budget. But again, remember we're only doing this in weekly increments. Not doing it more frequently than that. Whatever it may be. Now, this is a more reasonable um budget increase. We might see an increase in the cost per result to say $45. Actually, let me let me go with 40 cuz I think that's more representative. And I'm just sort of making up these numbers, but I've literally seen this happen with hundreds if not thousands of Facebook ad campaigns. Okay, this is great. Let's increase again up to 750. And let's say

[7:49] our cost per um cost per result now goes up to $47. Still under our acceptable cost per result, but we're close now. You know, we're still getting a lot more results. This is why I've got this column in here, by the way, results per week, because it's important to see yes, you're paying more per result, but you're getting more results, and that

[8:07] might be worth it for your business. That might be better to pay more, but get a higher volume, um which obviously is good. Then we go up to the say a thousand a day. And now what we see is our cost per lead cost per result goes up to $55. So, we've now gone over our acceptable cost per result. Results have gotten too expensive. Yes, we've increased the overall volume, um which is great, but we're paying too much for them. And this sort of thing happens as you scale. Now, what do you do here? You've got two

[8:35] options. Firstly, you can reduce the budget back down. And that's the option that I would most likely take. Again, remember, we've increased and we've given it a week, we've given it some time. We're not increasing, assessing the results a day or two later and going ah, too expensive, reduce the budget. That's not the right thing to do. You're going to be going through the learning phase, you've got to play that out. So, we would often increase to something like, let's say, 850 um dollars a day. And that might bring the cost per result down to say $49. Just under our acceptable cost result. Great. Okay. So, we've

[9:07] established that right now this campaign can't run at a thousand dollars a day and still be profitable, but can run at 850 a day and be profitable. That's good to know. What do you do now from this point in your scaling journey, in your scaling process? If you try and increase the budget again, it is very, very likely that you're going to go over your acceptable cost per result. So, that's not what you want to do. Instead, you want to stay at this budget level for a while, reduce your cost per result with other things, and that will then allow you to scale. You need to build in some

[9:40] buffer room between what you're currently paying and what you're willing to pay um before you go ahead and scale so that you can scale into that buffer as as opposed to going over your limit. So, let's say we stick at 850. And in that week we're introducing a whole lot of new ad creative. Can we Can we beat our previous best results? Can we put in new ads that get a lower cost

[10:00] per result? And we do. Yeah, great. Comes down to 45. Fantastic, we're doing good work. Perhaps next week we test some targeting options again at the same budget level and they work as well, right? We come down to to 42. The one you target We test a whole bunch, not many work, but one targeting option did perform a little bit better. That comes down. Okay, now we've got a $42 cost per

[10:18] result at 850. Could we go to 1,000? Probably can. We go to 1,000 and the cost per result say comes up to 48. Fantastic, we're able to spend $1,000 a day now, generate more results, and still be under our acceptable cost per result because we've stayed at a certain level and improved our campaign. We've improved targeting, we've improved some ad creative, all that sort of stuff. We couldn't in week six week six do that cuz the campaign just wasn't good

[10:44] enough. We can in week 10. Okay, right. So, we're right under our limit now. We're going to have to stay here a while um for a few weeks and try and improve some stuff, right? Bring that down, maybe down to 40 before we then look to go ahead and scale. And then we go ahead and scale to 1250

[11:01] and sometimes it's not linear, right? So, the percentage increase in budget does not result in an equal percentage increase in cost per result. We might see that we go we're at 40, great, we've got that $10 headroom between 40 and 50, we can spend into that. Uh-oh, we've gone to 1250 and the cost per result has gone all the way up to 62. Right, what are we going to do? We're going to bring it back down to 1,100 and that brings us back down to say 48, something like that. Okay, fine. There's obviously a bit of a sticking point there. We're going to then have to stick at 1,100 and

[11:31] work on some stuff, reduce the the cost per lead down, perhaps you introduce a brand new offer that results in a significant decrease. Um I don't know why that one's not in dollars, but you could You know that one's not, but you can see the same sort of thing. And then we could go ahead and look to scale. And that is very typically the process that we will go through. Um and you can see that, you know, we've massively increased this budget over a a 16-week period. We haven't done it in a couple of weeks. We haven't also taken 2 years to do it. It's been done

[12:01] it it a nice balance between getting to your destination and not taking too long and being too slow. So, a couple of things I need to mention about this. Firstly, it is more or less inevitable that as you increase your budget, your cost per result is going to increase. And this drives a lot of Facebook advertisers mad, and they think, "Why does this happen?" Here's why it happens. If you have an audience of a million people, Meta is really, really good at finding the say the 50,000 people within that 1 million-person audience that are the best possible prospects to advertise to. And perhaps that's the Those are the only people

[12:33] that your ads are being put in front of when you're spending $100 a day. But when you go and double it, you're then saying to Facebook, "You know that 50,000 is the absolute best, and now I want actually want you to advertise to more people than that, just the 50,000. I'd like you to advertise to say twice as many." It's not quite that clean, but for argument's sake, let's say it's like that. Well, okay, the next 50,000 out of that

[12:52] million still good audiences, right? Still good prospects, but not quite as good. And as you spend more and more, you sort of think of the center circle, right? As you spend more and more, you go from like perfect prospectors in the middle, and you go a little bit further out, a little bit further out, a little bit further out, a little bit further out. And that's why cost per result

[13:08] increases are inevitable as you scale. It's something that you have to be aware of, something you have to work with. If you just get angry and try and fight against it, you're not going to get anywhere. The solution, as I've displayed going through these steps, is to improve the quality of your campaign. That is something you can control. You can create better offers. You can create better ads. You can create more engaging creative options. You can test targeting options you haven't tested before that may well improve your results. There's all sorts of things that you can test and improve and I've got videos on these

[13:37] on my channel and I'd recommend you do. That's how you improve your results in order to be able to scale. The most scalable campaigns, when I look at something, aren't ones that um you know, are what people potentially think, right? With like a massively engaging uh ad creative or anything that often goes hand in hand. It's when I look at a campaign and go, "Oh, that's really scalable." is when their current cost per result is miles below what they're willing to pay. So, when a business says, "Look, we're willing to pay $30 a lead. We're currently generating leads for $3." You're like, "Wow, that is scalable. That's what it means to me

[14:13] to have a scalable campaign." Okay? Now, I know some of you will see this and go, "But, hold on a minute. If you do this approach, you're going to re-enter the learning phase every week as you scale your budgets." And I've done videos about this before, but I want to make it very, very clear here. Facebook advertisers in general are way too afraid of the learning phase. I

[14:33] understand why Facebook introduced it. They wanted to basically say to people, "Look, if your results are bad for the first couple of days, don't worry. It's because we're working stuff out for you." But, the impact of the learning phase is so overblown. I've spoken to a lot of advertisers that don't introduce new ads into their campaign because they're worried about the learning phase. They duplicate and create a whole brand new campaign. You don't want to do

[14:52] that. The The learning phase in general is just way over feared. It's not something you need to be afraid of. Do you want to be in it all the time? No, that's not ideal. Can you go into it once a week because you're making significant adjustments and improvements to your campaign? Absolutely. We do it all the time. So, please don't worry that this is going to put you in the learning phase. It is and that's fine. You've probably heard the expression penny wise, pound foolish, right? People who worry about learning phase are not are being penny wise. They're worried about the small thing and missing out on the

[15:23] bigger thing, which is the massive improvements in your campaign that you can get from new ads, scaling significantly, etc. etc. Okay? So, please don't worry too much about learning phase. And the other thing is that with scaled Facebook ad campaigns, you're going to be spending more. You're going to want to use, in general, larger target audiences. Now, that doesn't mean you need to change your target audience every week as you're going through the scaling process, but at some point, you're

[15:46] probably going to want larger audiences. That may mean that instead of using a 1% lookalike, you're increasing it to a 2%, 3%, 5% lookalike as you go along. It might mean that instead of the really specific interest targeting options you're using, you are going with broader targeting options, or perhaps you're expanding your target locations. If you're adding in extra countries, or your age parameters instead of being really specific around your core age demographic, maybe put in a bit more buffer on either side. Um, it's just simple maths, right? Spending more, you're demanding more ad impressions on Facebook and Instagram. If there's more people for those ad impressions to go

[16:21] around, that's better. Otherwise, you run into ad frequency and ad fatigue. You run into high frequency and ad fatigue issues. And that leads me to my next point is that with higher budgets, you also need to be refreshing ad creative much more often. It could well be that in your campaign that's at $100 a day, your ad is being put in front of someone within your target audience once a week. Whereas, when you get up to

[16:44] $1,000 a day, it's more like once a day. Now, that means that people are going to become bored of your ads and desensitized to them, ad fatigue, which results in a drop off in results, um, much faster. It's going to happen much, much faster. So, if someone's running a small budget campaign on $20 a day or something, I often will say to them, "Look, if you can refresh ads, you know, put in new ad creative once every 2 months, you're probably fine." With higher budget campaigns, you need to do it much more frequently than that. We have campaigns that are spending a lot of money where

[17:14] ad creative will go into those more than once a week, cuz it's just so key to keep things going and keep things fresh and and just think about how you consume like TV adverts and things like that. The same ad comes up again and again and again. You get bored of it. It gets annoying. Don't be that advertiser. And it also you'll see it in your results, right? Your results drop off when you get ad fatigue. Something you really need to be aware of. And jumping back to our example campaign, I've talked about this budget at the campaign level. So, campaign budget optimization is what it

[17:41] used to be referred to. It's now called advantage campaign budget. Got a video on that if you're interested. You can check it out on my channel, the difference between the two and that sort of thing. What I talked about with this getting process can absolutely apply to ad set budgets as well. So, don't think it just applies if you're setting budgets at the campaign level. It applies to both. Okay? Um when people set budgets at the ad set level, one things that they'll often do to try and scale is they will duplicate an ad set and then run multiple versions of the same target audience um in the same

[18:07] campaign. That's not something you want to do. There are different strategies for Facebook advertising where we may use that technique, things like omni-presence content, but we're trying to do a very very different thing than what most Facebook advertisers are trying to do when they're scaling. Um you don't want to do that. You'll end up with massive auction overlap, big issue, want to avoid it. So, scale within the same ad set, within the same campaign or multiple ad sets, multiple campaigns, that's fine. Don't duplicate what's often referred to as horizontal scaling and then run things that are identical alongside each other thinking that's a good way to spend money. That is not a

[18:39] good way to go. As I said, auction overlap is going to eat your campaigns up. One of them at least is not going to perform well at all. And then jumping back to our example scaling calendar, one thing to also be aware of when it comes to Facebook and Instagram advertising is there may well be a

[18:53] scaling ceiling for your business. Fact that nearly always is. That's simply because there's only so many people in your target audience that are interested in what you have to offer. And I have run into Facebook advertisers that have done a great job. They've massively scaled a campaign and they've just try and scale more, try and scale and they just can't do it. You think, maybe this is about right. You are reaching tens of millions of people here. Um and I I'm pretty sure you're getting your ads in front of everyone that might be interested in this. And what that limit is is going to be different for all businesses. Some that

[19:26] are more niche, you're not going to scale as much. Some that have product services that have massive broad appeal, yeah, you're going to have a higher limit. But there's always going to be that limit. Now, I should say because I've also seen advertisers go, I think I've reached my scaling limit. You look at their campaign they're spending $500

[19:41] a day and you're like, no, no, no. Definitely not. There's you could definitely spend more than that. Scaling limits are not small, but when you get into the thousands of dollars a day, tens of thousands of dollars a day, some campaigns can go higher than that. Um you you do start to see very often butting up against what's even possible on the platform. And along those lines, it may also be a decision for you to stop scaling at a certain point, not because you couldn't scale further, but because it's more profitable for you to stay at that level. So we've given these example numbers, right? Um obviously the

[20:15] cost per result is going up big time. And you might say, you know what? Uh $300 a day, a cost per result of 32 is massively profitable. Whereas at 750 a day, a cost per result of 47 is only a little bit profitable. We're actually just better off spend We make more profit overall if we operate with less volume and spend less. That's also

[20:33] something that you can you can do. Again, with most businesses, that's still going to be a reasonable high number. Might be well higher than 300 so I've given an example here. But you get the idea here that maybe you go you want to just keep an eye on profit. You don't just want to think, okay, we'll generate as many leads as we possibly can. Or actually, do you just make more money at this certain level and you can stay there and you can look to build a loyal customer base that way and upsell them and email use other methods to try and generate more revenue and stuff like

[21:00] that. Just something to be aware of with this process. Oh, and before you go, have you heard about my new retargeting strategy? I talk about it in detail in this video over here. It's not a very long video, which strongly recommend you check it out. It's working really well.

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