Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You have a Facebook campaign that’s going well. Unexpectedly well.
You finally feel like you have a profitable combination of targeting + messaging + bidding.
But the moment you want to scale it up, whether that means increasing the budget on this campaign or creating a new one with the same settings but a bigger budget, it all goes to your head.
The cost per conversion goes up significantly, the campaign yield doesn’t look like it did before.
What’s happening? How can you spend big and profitably on Facebook Ads?
Let’s see what, why and how we do it 🙂
Why do we have a campaign that works, but when we scale it the yield drops?
On the one hand, it’s normal.
Let’s make an analogy: let’s say I give you the task to find me 3 pokemons, with certain characteristics, every day. Living in a big city/medium town, it’s no problem to find them.
But then they come: from today I want 30 pokemons a day.
I’ll give you a bigger budget too, but if up until now you were going alone to places where there might be pokemons and catching them, you already have to hire a scouting team, maybe advertise that you’re looking for help catching pokemons, etc. Whatever, you’re doing new things that you have to learn.
Does what you did before still help you now that you have a 10x bigger goal?
Generally, no.
That’s why it’s hard to sell much AND profitably on Facebook. The bigger budgets (and goals) you have, the harder it is for Facebook to find people who fit our criteria (to buy/become leads).
The numbers will probably change, but as I write this, I’ve noticed that almost anyone can run profitable campaigns with budgets up to 150/200 RON per day. From there, however, it usually seems to break the film.
Sound familiar?
How NOT to scale Facebook campaigns.
Let’s see what you should avoid. I’ll start with this because these are most likely the 2 ways to scale that you’re aiming for right now.
A) Significantly increase the budget on your current campaign.
You have the campaign at say 50-100 lei per day. ROAS/Cost per Lead is good, you want more.
So you double his budget.
Shiii went to his head.
What’s the matter?
Problem one, exactly what I was saying in the previous section. Now it’s harder for Facebook to find people who meet those criteria. You want more customers but you can’t pull them out of a hat.
Problem two, any budget increase over 20% will make the campaign (actually ad set) go back into the learning phase.
Basically, Facebook is saying “Ok, these are totally different terms, let’s start from 0 and see who responds”. But usually that just means messed up, few campaigns recover.
B) Copy the same settings to another campaign, but put a much higher budget on it.
Maybe you knew about the 20% rule above, so you said “Let’s duplicate this campaign and give it a bigger budget. That’s the way it’s supposed to work“.
Except you do this and… crickets. Results far below expectations.
What in God’s name is going on? Why did we do everything the same and now things don’t work?
We’re back again to how the Facebook algorithm works. I recommend you watch the video below, it will answer many questions and challenges:
But in short: chen you create a campaign, Facebook looks at all the settings, and out of the total audience chooses a percentage to target.
I mean if you pick women from Romania between say 30-45 years old, out of the total audience that appears on the right, say 1.3 million, depending on your budget + settings, Facebook will pick the x% most likely to take the action you want.
Important: that doesn’t mean it will always get it right.
So basically, even though we have 2 campaigns with identical settings, the actual people who will see our ad are likely to be different.
Another alternative many choose is to stick with many low budget campaigns. With small exceptions, I haven’t seen businesses that can increase sales much that way. At some point, nothing works. Probably because we end up bidding against ourselves, or maybe it’s hard to manage multiple campaigns and not optimizing them well, it generally doesn’t work.
I would recommend these strategies more for scaling:
How do you scale Facebook Ads campaigns correctly?
From my experience, the fundamental problem with scaling Facebook Ads campaigns is that I’ve never had a real winner. We’ve never really had a combination of audiences, messages, offers, etc. that could help us achieve our goals.
I repeat – with small budgets it’s quite possible to have a false positive, to have something that gets you results, but that you’ll never be able to scale. Not enough people respond to those messages and offers.
That’s why the “secret” to scalable campaigns is actually that we start testing correctly in the first phase, get more audiences, ads and messages so that we have at least 1-2 that can lead long and well.
Most of us start that way:
1 Campaign – 1 Ad Set – 1 Ad.
When, it should be something like:
It’s not the setup itself that’s important, there are several methods/strategies, I’ll leave you a reference to them below.
Ci what we actually do:
We are trying more audiences and messages to increase our chances of having at least 1-2 winning combinations.
If we put budget at the campaign level, they will probably optimize themselves and the budget will be distributed where the results are coming from. If we’re not happy with how it’s being distributed/if we see money still going on ad sets or ads that aren’t selling profitably for us, we can manually stop them.
And then we have 2 things we can still do:
a) If the overall results are satisfactory and very satisfactory, we leave this campaign active and increase the budget by up to 20% every 2 days.
b) We take what combinations we’ve seen work here, put them into a new campaign, along with new audiences/new messages. Basically we repeat the process.
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