How to Scale Your Facebook Ad Campaigns without Ruining Performance
Scaling Facebook ads is not easy. But it also shouldn’t be a nightmare. Here you’ll learn how to do it right.
You’ve managed to build a high-performing Facebook ad campaign. Your ads are finally reaching your goals, and the CPA looks good. It’s time to scale.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
If you’ve ever tried to scale your ad campaigns, you might have seen every time you push your budgets, the performance fluctuates. Sounds familiar?
Good news: there are a few ways to scale Facebook ads without ruining performance. Want to learn how? Read on.
Scaling Strategies
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel to scale your Facebook ads successfully. Basically, there are just two strategies you should choose between:
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling involves duplicating existing campaigns or adding ad sets in order to reach larger audiences.
The horizontal scaling strategy works best when you need to scale ads immediately. If you do it right, you can increase your investment by as many times as you want without the need to patiently scale your budget bit by bit, as vertical scaling requires.
The problem with horizontal scaling is that when you clone campaigns, audience overlap may occur, and your campaigns will compete against each other.
To avoid it, you’ll need to target different audiences with every ad set. Using lookalike audiences is the most common technique when it comes to horizontal scaling. It’s important that you don’t change any other element of your winning ads, including ad copy, landing page, campaign schedule, placements, etc... as the setup has already proved effective.
Action plan: How to scale your Facebook ads horizontally
1) First, you need to select the ad sets that have shown the best results.
2) Click ‘Duplicate’ and specify the number of copies you want to get.
3) Next, you need to edit ad targeting for every new ad test. The preferred targeting options will depend on what audience you’ve been using originally.
Here are a few tactics for avoiding audience overlap with your new ad sets:
#1 Explore interest-based audiences
If you’ve been successfully targeting interest-based audiences, you might want to select new interests to target.
But if you choose new targeting options randomly, chances are you won’t see great results. Therefore, I recommend that you check FB Audience Insight before making any decisions.
Say you’ve been seeing great results from targeting people interested in Vegan Nutrition. In the Audience Insights section, type in this interest and switch to the Page Likes tab.
Now, you see a list of pages people interested in Vegan Nutrition are also interested in it on Facebook.
Based on the Relevance Score, audience size, the Affinity Score (the measure of how likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook), and the content of the page itself, choose the most relevant one to specify in the targeting settings of your newly-created ad set.
There’s no guarantee that the performance of the ad set targeting VeganFood fans (a page on FB) will be as strong as the original ad set, but it’s 100% better than choosing a random audience.
Finally, go back to the ad set settings and choose the selected page in the detailed targeting section.
#2 Expand lookalike audiences
While it’s not a good idea to test completely new audiences when scaling your campaigns, going broader with lookalike audiences is an option.
Many advertisers choose to target a 1% lookalike of previous customers to ensure their campaigns reach the best prospects. But when it comes to scaling, it’s better to target broader groups.
By expanding your lookalike audiences to 3%–5%, you’ll be able to scale your ad budget without the risk of exhausting the same audience.
Whether you explore new interest-based audiences or expand lookalikes, use the Audience Overlap Tool to identify and exclude overlapping audiences. It’s recommended that you avoid overlaps of 20-30%.
Vertical Scaling
The strategy involves scaling within the original campaign. To scale performance, an advertiser increases ad spend without making any adjustments to the campaign’s structure.
This is the most straightforward and least risky Facebook ad scaling strategy. However, it also has some pitfalls.
If you boost your ad spend too quickly, the ROAS is very likely to drop, contrary to your expectations. The issue happens for one of the two reasons: your campaign has either already reached its maximum potential, or Facebook’s algorithms need more time to collect and process the performance data that’s used for optimising your campaigns.
The problem can be easily prevented by increasing ad spend steadily.
Action plan: How to scale your Facebook ads vertically
Vertical scaling takes patience.
Increasing your ad spend by 20% every 3–5 days is the least risky way to scale your campaigns.
Start here if you’re not very confident you’ll manage to scale your Facebook ads horizontally.
While scaling vertically, keep a close eye on your ROAS. If it’s staying the same, this may indicate that your ad set is about to reach its maximum potential. In this case, you’ll need to increase the size of your audience.
Horizontal vs. vertical scaling
So, which strategy should you go for?
A vertical scaling strategy is the preferred approach of most advertisers. The argument that speaks in its favour is that once you’ve managed to build a setup that works, you don’t want to make any adjustments that might ruin your performance.
With horizontal scaling, you toggle between audience targeting options, and you don’t know whether they’re going to perform very well. And for those who are still learning to run profitable Facebook ad campaigns, it’s not the safest practice to try.
On the other hand, horizontal scaling brings in more opportunities for skilled media buyers able to build the right campaign structure.
As has already been said, by scaling your campaigns horizontally, you can boost your Facebook ad spend to any level almost immediately – this is what appeals to advertising professionals the most.
What we can say for sure is that you shouldn’t try to combine these two.
If you create duplicate ad sets that target different audiences and increase the budget for every single ad set, you won’t be able to evaluate the results of your actions. Were you too hasty to triple ad spend within one ad set, or is it a lookalike audience that doesn’t perform well for you? You’ll never know unless you split the scaling strategies.
Conclusion
Scaling Facebook ads won’t be easy. But it also shouldn’t be a nightmare.
By choosing a strategy and sticking to it, you’ll build a consistent growth model. When something goes wrong, it’s most likely there’s one of the top three reasons behind an issue:
Just make sure you keep an eye on your campaigns after you make any changes and address performance issues promptly.
So, which scaling strategy are you going to adopt?
Horizontal or Vertical? Do let me know in the comments below!