Facebook Ads is one of the most potentially-profitably PPC platforms right now, especially with the high-engaging Instagram as part of its ad system. Brands of all sizes (and with budgets of all sizes) are relying heavily on this ad marketplace to reach new customers, develop brand awareness, and nurture users through the conversion process.
Many businesses start small with only a few ad campaigns to test the waters, but they don’t necessarily want to stay small. Scaling is typically the ultimate goal, at whatever rate works best for you, but scaling ad campaigns can be almost as difficult as scaling your business itself if you aren’t sure exactly what to do next.
Fortunately, there 6 easy ways to scale your Facebook Ad campaigns (and thus your Instagram campaigns along with it), and in this post we’re going to go over each one in detail so you can choose the options that work best for you.
Bump Your Budget Up
This is the simplest way to scale your ad campaigns: funnel more money into the campaigns that can withstand the additional ad spend and maintain or exceed profitability.
Here’s why this can be a little tricky: Some ad campaigns don’t hold up well to increasing the budget. This is particularly common if the ad campaign has pretty much run its course; a surge of a higher budget isn’t going to change that. Campaigns that have small custom audiences, for example, and frequencies creeping past scores of 3 or 4 won’t benefit from more ad spend, because they’ve already pretty much peaked.
Some campaigns, though, are great candidates for an increase in budget. Funneling more of your ad spend to campaigns that have been profitable and high-engaging after at least two weeks during a testing stage is a good choice. You want to look for engagement rates, click through rates, and conversion rates that have stayed steady during that time and ideally with a low frequency. These campaigns are better able to support an influx in budget and will likely be scalable.
For best results, scale slowly; big jumps in ad spend (like going from $100 a month to $10,000 a month) can be unreliable unless you’ve tested these jumps before, and it’s better to take things incrementally.
You can always use Facebook’s automated rules to increase ad spend of campaigns that meet certain criteria, like a frequency under 3 and an engagement rate or conversion rate above a certain percent. This prevents you from having to go through each campaign and manually adjust it, though you should be carefully monitoring each one.
Test Multiple Versions of a Single Idea
You have a strong video campaign that you think has a lot of potential. Thinking about it, though, you realize that the copy used in the video or in text part of the campaign could take three different paths. One, for example, could focus on a feature-benefit angle that’s short and to the point. Another could focus on a storytelling angle that addressed the customer’s pain point, even though the video itself would stay the same.
Split test them. Facebook even has a native split testing tool that makes this easy.
Split testing on your Facebook Ads is a good call to begin with, because ad campaigns, the marketplace, and consumers are all unpredictable. Not only will you be able to see what works, however, but you’ll be able to generate multiple “new” campaigns even if you’re using the same basic ad idea to change things up. This works well with scaling, and it keeps your frequency from soaring too high.
Shakr can help with this, particularly if you want to make some of those copy or concept changes in the video itself. Simply swap some text, or switch out a video clip or image of a product or use case and you’ll be able to have a whole new ad in a few seconds or less. You can learn more here.
Turn a Single Ad Into a Multi-Funnel Campaign
It’s important to remember that campaigns don’t live in isolated bubbles; everything we do in our marketing campaigns should have an immediate and big picture goal you’re focusing on.
If you create a strong brand awareness video ad, for example, that’s great! It gets lots of views and maybe even a few clicks to your site. You don’t want to let that momentum go to the waste, and the best way to capitalize on that momentum and scale your ads is to turn successful ads into multi-stage funnel campaigns.
Creating a clear, intentional funnel that shows increasingly-relevant ads to users based on their specific interactions with certain ads and the landing pages they head to from them is the best way to foster long-term success. Users are more likely to purchase more as they get further down the funnel, so this is something that should be kept in mind.
This ad progression below from Stitch Fix, for example makes sense.
It starts by explaining the purpose of the service, then encourages users to take the quiz to see what lies ahead. They finally end up by offering a timely ad talking about how it’s a natural time of year for the wardrobes to transitoin, encouraging people to either 1) sign up, or 2) get another Fix if they’re already customers. It builds awareness and a relationship slowly, but very effectively.
Introduce New Formats Into Your Campaigns
Have a campaign that’s already doing well as a carousel ad or a newsfeed video ad? Why not adapt it to new ad formats? You can convert landscape ads to square videos so that you can use them as the first slide in a carousel ad, or convert any type of video into a vertical format for a story campaign.
Shakr can help with this. Find a template that fits the new format you want to optimize for, and add in video clips, images, and text in the designated slides. This only takes a few minutes, and it allows you to take a single great campaign and adapt it for as many placements as you’d like. This allows you to reach more people and opens you up for more placements, letting you scale quickly.
Take An Ad & Adapt It for a New Audience Segment
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This is similar to the “tweak an ad idea to see what sticks,” but in this instance you’re taking a single ad campaign and adapting it for a new audience niche. Different niches will respond to different messaging, after all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use existing ideas or creatives for the new campaigns.
Let’s look at these campaigns from Rockin’ Green, for example (currently one of my favorite examples of Facebook advertisers out there).
They’re using the exact same video, which easily could have been shot with an iphone and demonstrates the effectiveness of their product, but their ad copy is likely tailored to different audiences. One intentionally goes after the drops-$95-on-a-sports-bra-at-Lululemon crowd, while the other is talking to the works-hard-sweats-hard crowd that has trouble getting the stench of hard work out of their athletic clothes. They could easily be overlapping audiences, but they also might not be, so they’re taking a single video and getting as much use out of it by appealing to different audience niches. This lets them scale faster in the process.
Show Tried-and-True Campaigns to Lookalike Audiences
You’ve already got a list of ad campaigns that has worked well for high-value custom audiences. You know what appeals have worked, and what copy drove them to convert. When you want to branch out to reach new cold audiences, this is one of the best ways to scale your Facebook Ad campaigns in a relatively risk-free way.
Excellent! You can now take that knowledge and tweak your ad campaigns, using their strategies but with language tailored to a cold audience.
Then, create new campaigns that are targeting lookalike audiences off of those high-value custom audiences and implement those adjusted-but-only-barely strategies. You can even still use the same videos or images that you used for the custom audience campaigns, switching up the copy just a bit.
When doing this, keep the similarity in audiences high, prioritizing a closer match over sheer reach. 10,000 great matches can yield better results than 100,000 if they don’t have anything in common with the original custom audience the campaign was successful with, particularly if it’s a more niche campaign.
Conclusion
As you grow your business, you’ll want to ensure that you’re scaling Facebook Ad campaigns alongside it. This will help you reach more people at different stages of the sales funnel and better connect with them individually, increasing success overall. It’s important to keep in mind that there are many different ways to scale your Facebook Ad campaigns, as we discussed in this post, so before you do anything, assess what would make the most sense for your campaigns as they currently exist.
Looking for a little extra help generating more creatives and great videos so you can scale accordingly? Learn more about how we can help here.
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* This article was originally published here