How to Scale Facebook and Instagram Ads
Ok, so at this point, you will have thoroughly tested your audiences, offers, products, and creative, in order to optimize your ad campaigns, and you have discovered what is most profitable for you! This means you are now ready to benign scaling your ads and increase your sales! Woohoo!!!
In this blog we are going to cover
Understanding what Facebook ad scaling is
How to know if you are ready to begin scaling
How to choose the right scaling strategy for your business
Scaling Facebook ads, simply put, is the process of increasing your ad budget to generate a positive return. This return is accomplished by reaching wider audiences while still maintaining a positive ROAS (return on ad spend).
It might sound like a difficult thing to do - which it can be if you’re not familiar with scaling your ads. But that’s why we wrote this blog and can help you scale successfully!
Here is a checklist if you think you are ready to begin scaling!
Begin scaling your Facebook ads when the following apply:
Satisfactory ROAS on your ad set
Low cost per click (CPC)
Ad frequency between 1.8 and 4
High number of impressions
Relevance score as close to 10 as possible
These are all the metrics you should track before deciding to scale an ad.If most of the conditions above are met, you can move on to choosing whether to scale your ad vertically or horizontally.
The 2 Strategies for Scaling Your Facebook Ads
Based on your experience with Facebook ads and your campaign goals, you can choose between two scaling methods — vertical or horizontal scaling.
The difference between the two is obviously the direction you’re scaling in. Let’s break it down.
*insert visual*
Vertical Scaling
Think of vertical scaling as using one successful ad, and slowly bumping up the amount of budget behind the ad to reach an increasingly broader audience. Essentially, by increasing your ad budget (generally by 20% every two to three days) you are steadily increasing the reach of your campaign
With this strategy, the key is:“slow and steady wins the race”. If you're increasing your budget too fast, your ROAS could decrease drastically.
The reasoning behind making this adjustment every two to three days is to give the algorithm ample time to settle and optimize the ad delivery.
This approach is more beginner friendly and considered lower risk than the horizontal scaling strategy.
But if you’re willing to dive in and see a potentially more profitable ROA, let’s jump into the details of horizontal scaling.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling can be defined by the process of adding new ad sets to a campaign or duplicating your existing winning ads. If you know which ads are yielding a positive ROAS, you can spend your ad budget on multiple ad sets at the same time, thus targeting different audiences with the same ad.
However, you must remember that in order for horizontal scaling to be successful, each of your ad sets must target different audiences. Otherwise, your ads will cannibalize and begin competing with one another.
Essentially, when you scale horizontally, you’re spending your ad budget on multiple ad sets at the same time, but targeting different audiences with the same ads (which, as we know now, may end up causing you to compete with yourself and diminishing your efforts).
Therefore, an easy way to help ensure results with horizontal ad scaling is by targeting lookalike audiences and increasing your audience size.
In Conclusion
When it comes to profitability scaling your ads here are our top three tips.
Make sure you do testing beforehand so that you know which ad to scale. Based off an ad’s performance metrics you will be able to identify if it’s ready to scale to a larger audience.
Set the right budget for your ad set. This can be done manually or you can opt for a central campaign budget and let Facebook’s campaign budget optimization (CBO) feature set a budget at the ad set level as per performance.
We recommend starting conservatively by only increasing your budget to begin with by 16% and gradually moving up to 20%.
Scaling your ads comes down to understanding what ads are top performing and also being able to firmly establish a good ROAS for your business. By focusing on a ROAS that enables you to stay profitable, you will be ready to start scaling your ads and growing your business.
We hope you found this helpful and feel free to reach out if you want to learn more! If you’re not quite ready to dive head first into scaling, take a look at our blog on “How to Test Your Ads” as another resource for growing your eCommerce business!
