How to scale your Facebook ads campaigns without wasting money

If you’ve had initial success, you might be keen to scale your campaigns by increasing their complexity and adding to the budget, but knowing how to do that effectively can be challenging.

This post will help you build out your campaigns without wasting valuable budget just testing the water. This has been written for an individual with a solid understanding of Facebook ads and is familiar with the platform.

How to scale your Facebook ads

1. Scale what works

First, here’s what to avoid. Merely throwing more money into an ads campaign will not make it perform better. So, if you are not happy with the return on your campaigns, spending more will not magically transform your fortune. If anything, they could well deteriorate in performance as Facebook strives to spend your budget however it can.

You should only consider scaling your ad spend once you are ROI positive or you’re at least happy with Facebook’s contribution towards your marketing goals. If that is the case for one or more of your campaigns, see what happens when you simply increase your daily budget. Do the results improve proportionately? If so, this is the perfect place to start. If not, we need to make some improvements.

2. Use the marketing funnel as your structure

Facebook’s ads platform has been designed to complement a traditional marketing funnel which describes a customer journey from their initial awareness of a brand or product at the top of the funnel, all the way through to the bottom of the funnel where they become a paying customer. The middle of the funnel includes all the interim considerations an individual makes between initial awareness and purchase.

The different Facebook campaign types are designed to engage users at different stages of the marketing funnel. If you have not organised your campaigns into a funnel, this is the first thing to address. A logical campaign structure is paramount to scaling your ads effectively.

Having campaigns based on certain parts of the customer journey enables you to really master your strategy. Each campaign should be targeted at a different audience, have creative specific for that stage and audience and have its own budget and spending strategy. This will enable you to allocate budget appropriately and scale ads in a controlled way as opposed to just adding budget to existing campaigns.

3. Get granular

As we’ve mentioned, campaigns in different parts of the funnel command different:

• Audiences

• Creative (images and copy etc.)

• Budget

Getting granular on your Facebook ads is the fastest and most effective way to scale because there are simply more campaigns and audiences to allocate budget to. As soon as a campaign isn’t working well, it can be paused or reworked.

Treat your Facebook ads account like a portfolio of campaigns, each with their own return on investment. As opposed to having one, all-encompassing, campaign responsible for spending all your money, having smaller campaigns helps you spread the risk as you look to scale.

It’s also a much easier way to compare and contrast performances between the creative – which pictures work best for conversion ads? Which calls to action actually encourage clicks?

4. Monitor audience fatigue

This is one of the major pitfalls of running any Facebook campaign for a long period or at scale. There will simply come a point where the audience your campaign is targeting has seen all of your ads. Facebook will still work to show your ads but they’re simply less likely to attract engagement because people will ignore them.

If you notice an ad or campaign begin to drop in performance, there’s a good chance it’s suffering from audience fatigue. A simple common sense check using the number of people in the audience and the historical impression data will give an indication if this is indeed the issue. The solution is to add new members to the audience or replicate the campaign with fresh creative. The latter will give the same audience something new to take notice of and potentially give the campaign a short term boost but, ultimately, a new audience will be required.

5. Add new ad types and style to the mix

Video ads, carrousel ads and dynamic ads are all highly effective ad types that should be incorporated to a campaign with growing complexity. The latter two are particularly potent for e-commerce businesses but video ads have many purposes. Video ads do not have to be complex to produce. Short animations and stop motion videos are perfect to grab the attention of potential customers or fans.

In terms of style of content, ensure you have a mix including emotive ads, ads with bold claims, offers and testimonial ads. We find that social proof is one of the most powerful styles and customer testimonials work well at all stages of the ad funnel. Testimonials need to be genuine and detailed, ensuring they resonate closely with the target audience identified.

6. Monitor trends closely, including other channels

This is something you need to take seriously when scaling Facebook ads. The more ads you run, the more inter-ad relationships there will be. You may find that increasing the spend on one campaign at the top of the funnel, say, elevates the effectiveness of ads aimed at the middle of the funnel. This, of course, makes perfect sense because now perhaps someone has seen several eye-catching brand awareness ads from a company which means they’re more inclined to take a closer look at a web traffic ad or like campaign.

Another common occurrence is that individuals who see a Facebook ad for your brand may go and use Google to find out more about your company. Therefore, you may experience more organic traffic to your site or branded Google Ads search campaigns. If you’re spending more and more on Facebook ads and reaching more people, an increase in other activity is likely, even if those individuals don’t directly interact with your Facebook ads.

All this means that there could be important forces at play that the numbers don’t, on the surface, account for. This means that as you scale you could be underestimating the value of a campaign that is underpinning the success of others or is inspiring other forms of company research. Ideally, the campaigns work in harmony with one another, all playing an important role in getting people from top to bottom (of the funnel!).

Final words

If you’ve found that Facebook ads are valuable to your business, increasing your investment should increase that value. Adopting a marketing funnel approach to your campaign structure and getting more granular is the most effective way to increase spending without wasting money.

Refreshing audiences and creative are also ways to keep the momentum of campaigns up and prevent results dipping during scale. Ultimately, keeping an eye on the data, including trends that may be occurring behind the scenes, ensures you’re maximising the output of the spend.