How to SCALE Facebook Ad Campaigns (2021 Blueprint)

How do you take your existing campaigns and scale them to 6, 7, or even 8 figures? It’s not as simple as just increasing your spending. There are very specific tactics that will help you increase your ad spend while still remaining profitable.

Here are 6 advanced techniques that will boost your success:

1. Aim for Being Profitable With a ROAS Under 2
2. Ad Testing – Use the Right Strategy to Test While Scaling
3. Connect With the Right Scaling Audiences
4. Use Specific Lookalike Audiences 
5. Use These Key Retargeting Ads and Audiences
6. Leverage Reviews & Testimonials in the Right Way 

If you implement everything mentioned here, you have a very high chance of scaling your ads effectively and profitably.

1. Aim for Being Profitable With a ROAS Under 2

‘ROAS’ refers to the Return on Ad Spend that you are aiming for. For example, if you spend a total of $100 on Facebook Ads and you generate $200 worth of purchases, the ROAS would be 2. You’re generating twice as much money in purchases as what you spent on ads.

As you scale and do ad testing, your ROAS tends to go down. There are a few reasons as to why this happens.

At scale, you’ll need to target many people who’ve never heard of you or your brand before. This is often called ‘cold traffic’. Before you scale, you can put a large percentage of your budget showing your ad to people who’ve visited your website or have engaged with your social profiles. But, when you scale usually at least 70% of your budget will go toward reaching brand new people.

It typically costs twice as much money to get a purchase from your cold audiences.

Why is a ROAS of around 2 the target? Well, so many times I’ve seen companies aim for a ROAS of 3. They manage to hit their numbers on a small scale, but as they scale up and their ROAS goes down, they lose profitability.

If you are at 3.1 ROAS at $100 a day and you need to stay above a 3.0 ROAS, that means you have no room to scale.

If you are at 3.1 ROAS at $100 a day and you need to stay above 2.0 ROAS you have quite a bit of room to scale.

Don’t get me wrong, if you can be profitable at a ROAS of 1.0 or 1.5 that’s even better. But, 2.0 is a number I’ve seen work well at scale and it’s often a more realistic profit margin for people to hit. You’d need to be at a 66% profit margin in order to break even at 1.5 ROAS:

• $100 in Ad Spend

• $150 in purchases

• Cost to make and ship the product: $50= Breakeven

So, how do you boost your ROAS? The other 5 tips will help, but offering upsells or additional products to people is the one of the best ways to boost your return on Ad spend.

In the example below, there’s a $30 product, but offering people an additional bundle boosts the profit from $15 to $25 (nearly double).

2. Ad Testing – My Proven Strategy to Test While Scaling

Do NOT stop testing when you start scaling. While you don’t want to mess with a campaign that’s working (you want to either turn the spend up or down), you should continue to create new campaigns where you’re testing:

• new headlines
• body text
• photos
• videos
• landing pages
• bundles
• and email sequences.

Over time, ad performance goes down, so it’s really important to be ready with new ads for when this happens. If your ads are doing well, let your successful ad campaigns continue running and allocate around 10% of your ad spending budget to ad testing. 

Generally, you need a number of really effective and powerful ads to scale. We often find 5 to 20 high performers which generate high profits. This often means testing 50-200 different ads to find huge winners.

This doesn’t mean you need to create dozens of 100% unique ads. Sometimes just making a small adjustment or changing the text can lead to a huge boost in performance.

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3. Connect With the Right Scaling Audiences

You need large audiences in order to scale. Aim to have several audiences with at least 1 million people.

I’ve actually found that on some campaigns, wide opening targeting is working well (everyone in the United States, for example).

When you’re doing your initial testing at a lower budget, make sure you’re including some larger audiences.

When an ad campaign is doing well, I’ll scale it up by 20% at a time (increasing the spend more than that leads to the campaign resetting or changing it’s performance).

While the different interests and audiences will vary depending on your product and your customer, it’s often worth creating personalized ads, headlines, landing pages and checkout pages for the various customers and interests.

Each audience must feel as if you are speaking directly to them and their needs, challenges, and inner thoughts.

Don’t stop testing new audiences while you’re scaling. You should always put at least 10% of the budget into testing, and audiences should be one of the things you are testing.

https://youtu.be/aWnoUncrAiY

4. Use Specific Lookalike Audiences 

Once you have over 100 purchases, you can begin using lookalike audiences. With lookalikes, Facebook tries to find the people that are the most similar to those who have already bought.

You can create a lookalike based off purchases that have happened within your Facebook Ads, or you can upload a customer file and create lookalikes based off your list of existing customers.

That means with a customer list, you can run lookalikes immediately, even if you’re brand new to running Facebook Ads.

If you use your Pixel with purchases or have Lifetime Value (LTV) in your customer file, you can actually create the lookalikes based off how MUCH people spent at your store.

While I always test a number of lookalike audiences, here are the audiences that have been top performers (in order)

• 1% Lookalike
• 10% Lookalike
• 5% Lookalike
• 2% Lookalike

I also use a tool called Madgicx which unlocks even more lookalikes based off precise purchase amounts and purchase frequency.

5. Use These Key Retargeting Ads and Audiences:

Retargeting is always important, but it is critical during scaling. You are spending a lot of money to reach audiences, and on average, most people do not make a purchase the first time they see your ad.

Once someone watches a decent portion of a video or clicks on an ad, they’ve shown interest and it’s important to continue to get in front of them.

I recommend including people who have engaged with you on social media or watched more than 30 seconds of one of your ads or videos.

A very important group of people to retarget is those who have hit certain pages on your website without making a purchase. This would include your homepage, landing page, advertorial, checkout pages, and strategic blog posts.

For these people, it’s important to figure out what stopped them from going through with the purchase.

Sometimes, people are simply busy, and simply getting in front of them again will result in a purchase. But, for others, there may be skepticism or doubt that stopped them from making the purchase.

You need to discover every objection someone would have to completing their purchase. Then, make retargeting ads addressing each objection. It’s insanely effective if you can get testimonials from actual customers that address each objection.

Post-purchase retargeting is also crucial for building customer loyalty and building a community. It’s important to thank the customer for making the purchase, make them feel special and appreciated. Then, once some time has gone by, show them some ads that entice them to make a purchase again.

6. Leverage Reviews & Testimonials in the Right Way

People are much more likely to buy if they see that others have bought the product or have had a good experience with the product. When you begin testing, you should be responding to comments and saving some of the best comments or posts about your brand.

You could also reach out to people who have left positive comments or posts on your page. If you have their permission, you can show a screenshot of their comment, or show a photo of them with your product (with a quote about your product. You can even ask them to record a video testimonial and use it in future ads.) 

When you launch a new campaign, you can also use an existing post to keep all of the social proof. This will allow you to keep existing likes, comments, and shares.

Having reviews on your website (preferably where anyone can leave a review) can lead to a huge boost in sales.

You don’t need to have a 5-Star Average, but it’s ideal that your product is good enough that you get at least a 4.5 average review.

Conclusion – You’re Ready to Scale Your Facebook Ad Campaigns…What’s Next?

If you study everything in this post, your efforts to scale your ad campaigns will be more effective. Feel free to bookmark this post so you can refer to it in the future. Continually work to improve your ads, landing pages, audiences, and retargeting efforts.

You’ll want to opt-in to receive our ultimate guide to boosting Facebook Ad Performance. It’s a must-read if you want really strong Facebook and Instagram Ad results.

You also have to be ready for ad performance to go down over time. You’ll want to watch this video so you know what to do once your campaign performance goes down. This is the key to continuing to make a profit over a long period of time.

https://youtu.be/nLRU_U6N_Eo

Here is a list of the tools I use for marketing and sales, I love each one and can highly recommend them.

Also if you are in the eCommerce space, make sure you check the amazing WooCommerce Recovered Abandoned Cart tool. 

Thanks for reading our 2021 Blueprint for SCALING Facebook Ad Campaigns. Want to work with us? 

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