Best practices for scaling Facebook ads Campaign stably

Is your Facebook campaign converting but is no longer growing?

Has it stagnated and you’re not sure how to give it a jumpstart?

In this guide, I will explain how you scale your already converting Facebook ad campaign.

I have been asked so many times how businesses and marketers keep on increasing leads when they’re targeting the same audience.

Surely some leads will hit peak and growth while others will slow down or stagnate because you have exhausted your audience targeting? This isn’t necessarily true, though.

There are tools on Facebook and off Facebook to help you better target your ads and scale your campaign.

When businesses ask me these questions, I find most of the time that they have missed opportunities in their targeting that they might not have known how to obtain.

Finding these targeting opportunities and using analytical insights is what I’m going to explain today.

Taking Advantage Of Facebook Insights

To get some real insights into your targeting, you can input your custom targeting or group of interests into the Facebook Insights tool.

To get true insights into your campaign targeting, copy the interests from the campaign to the Facebook Insights tool.

This very neat and free tool can be used to find more Facebook users that have similar interests to those you are currently targeting.

For example, if I had an ad campaign that has a potential reach of 100,000 people and converts really well, I would use the Insights tool to find more targeting opportunities to increase the potential reach thus scaling my already converting campaign.

The insights you will get back from this are age groups, gender, education level, relationship status, location and more.

Another reason this is such a valuable tool is the ‘Page Likes’ tab which gives you a deeper and real insights into what your audience is interested in.

You can find out a wealth of information to expand your targeting here such as what websites they like, what blogs they are reading, what software they are using, influencers they follow and more.

Facebook is handing you your targeting strategy for you.

If you find that there is a common interest among your audience such as the software they are using, it makes sense to add this interest to your targeting.

However instead of adding any new interests to your campaign test them first with the same ad copy and image as your already converting campaign.

Taking Advantage Of Lookalike Audiences

Image Source: Wordstream

Another very useful and clever tool on Facebook is the lookalike audience feature.

While the Facebook Insights tool is great for widening your audience reach, the lookalike audience tool is best for those of you who are using a conversion pixel.

The lookalike audience tool can only be used if you have already been running ads using a conversion pixel.

This is because the lookalike audience will be built around the data previously collected through your campaigns such as your customer list or email list.

If customers have already bought from you or have opted into your newsletter etc., it makes sense to target people who have similar interests.

This is what the lookalike audience tool does.

When you create your lookalike audience, it will give you an estimate of how many people fall within the lookalike bracket.

We recommend not going above the one million reach mark though so if your lookalike audience comes back with a higher reach, I recommend narrowing it down.

You can narrow the lookalike audience to make it more relevant by adding requirements.

Just because they like a few things that your audience also likes doesn’t mean they will be interested in buying which is why it is important to have some control over it.

The best way to do this is to add one broad interest that the lookalike must have to be served your ad.

For example, I would add ‘social media marketing’ as a target interest which is a lot broader than ‘Facebook marketing’ or ‘Facebook advertising’ but still very relevant.

You can then take it a step further and combine both the Lookalike Audience and Facebook Insights by adding your Lookalike Audience to Facebook Insights to get even more in-depth data to scale yet again.

Ad Level Cost Per Acquisition

For some, scaling doesn’t mean to increase conversions or reach but rather to increase ROI.

If this is your main focus then a metric you need to focus on for your scalability mission is the cost per acquisition.

I know many businesses and marketers look at the cost per acquisition on a campaign level however for scalability; it is best looked at the cost per acquisition at the ad level.

To scale and increase ROI, you need to make the most of your current budget before investing more.

Keep an eye on the numbers and split test optimizing per “cost per click”, “cost per engagement” and “cost per conversion”.

Never Stop Testing

I mention testing in almost every single blog post that I do and for good reason.

Without testing, you will never improve performance. Testing is different to changing, though.

Changing multiple things at once makes it harder to determine which change led to a change in performance.

One change could have increased the conversion rate while the other could have decreased it, thus cancelling each other out.

You might not think that any of the changes led to better results but one of those changes actually did but you missed it.

To make sure you don’t miss out on opportunities, test everything one at a time.

Duplicate ad sets to test new targeting methods, ad copy, etc. rather than making changes to active ad sets.

The Three Stages Of Scaling

For those of you who like to follow a process then this 3 step process to scalability will come in handy.

Sometimes businesses and marketers unknowingly try to jump ahead to scale their converting campaign which might not lead to the same results other marketers are boasting about.

It is important to know which stage your campaign is at and have a clear scalability strategy to plan ahead and jump ahead.

Here are the three stages of scaling:

Stage 1 Scaling

The first stage is to duplicate the ad set that is converting and give it a higher budget.

Do not change anything else but the budget.

Test the duplicated ad set with the original set at the same time for the same period to see which results in the higher ROI.

Many marketers and businesses make the mistake of just adding more budget to their converting ad set.

Doing this won’t give you anything to compare the results to. Comparing results to the period before does give accurate data.

Stage 2 Scaling

The second stage uses the lookalike audience I spoke about earlier.

Upload your customer list or email list and create a lookalike audience.

Test this lookalike audience by duplicating a winning ad set.

For accurate results, test it for the same period with the same budget as the original winning ad set.

Once you have done this you can then create a retargeting pixel.

Once you have generated over 1,000 conversions which has been tracked using the retargeting pixel, you can build another lookalike audience based on the data the retargeting pixel has generated.

Stage 3 Scaling

The last stage is to duplicate the winning lookalike campaign and change the goal type for the duplicated campaign.

Your original winning lookalike campaign should have a website conversion goal but for your new duplicated campaign, you want to set the goal to get clicks.

Because you know this particular formula works for conversions, you can reduce cost and expand reach by targeting clicks rather than conversions.

Targeting clicks and not conversions before this stage or without knowing whether your campaign is converting could be very costly.

Once you have completed all three steps, you can then start the process again on another campaign that is converting but needs scaling.

Advanced Tips And Tricks

Once you have mastered this scaling strategy, you can look to scale your winning campaign further.

You can look at new ways to increase CTR by testing different image, headlines and call to actions.

You could also look how to map the frequency of visits to conversion.

Even when you think your campaign couldn’t be performing any better… it can.

There is always room to scale so never stop trying.

Conclusion

Facebook offers some highly valuable insights and great tools which you may not be taking full advantage of.

Use both the Facebook Insights and Lookalike Audience tools to scale your stagnated but converting ad campaigns.

Here are some quick pointers to take away with you:

1. You need to have a conversion pixel installed on your thank you pages before being able to use the Lookalike Audience feature.
2. Track ad level cost per acquisition to make the most out of your current budget before investing more.
3. Never stop testing and optimizing your winning campaigns.

And last but not least, ROI is the game.

At the end of the day, if you’re getting an ROI on your paid traffic, then keep that ad set running!

What do you struggle with most with Facebook Ads?

Let me know by leaving your comments below.