Advertising allows your business to reach more potential new customers and introduce them to your products or services, increase website visitors, or even remind existing customers of your presence. Facebook (now owned by Meta) is a popular social media platform for advertising due to both cost and reach. It has helped businesses large and small reach highly targeted audiences through a variety of advertising options.
When you experience success advertising on Facebook, you’ll likely want to advertise even more. But scaling Facebook ads can come with pitfalls you’ll want to avoid.
What Does It Mean To Scale Facebook Ads?
Scaling Facebook ads means picking your best ad campaigns, based on ROAS (return on ad spend) or ROI (return on investment), and making changes to that campaign. This is sometimes broken into “vertical scaling” which means changing your budget, and “horizontal scaling” which has to deal with ad design elements.
The concept is really that straightforward. What is not as straightforward is deciding which ads to scale, figuring out what changes to make and then investing in those changes.
Signs That It's Time to Increase Your Facebook Ads Budget
There are many approaches digital marketing experts take when determining when to scale Facebook ads. Some recommend doing it once ads are profitable, others recommend waiting until you hit a 20% plus ROI. In the end, your business will have to choose a metric it feels comfortable with, given it will mean investing more money and time.
Take the time to think about the process you want to use to determine the approach you want to take for deciding whether to scale your Facebook ads. For example, you’ll want to review your business finances to see whether you feel comfortable investing more money with ads just breaking even, or being slightly profitable. If you’re not entirely comfortable taking that risk, you may want to ensure your ads have a 15–20% ROI (or whatever ROI you choose) before you make that commitment to put more money into scaling your Facebook ads. That’s okay too.
How to Scale Your Facebook Ads
It should be noted that scaling Facebook ad campaigns is not for everyone. Before you dive into scaling your Facebook ads you want to make sure that this is something that actually makes sense for your business. First, you should have existing Facebook ad campaigns that have been running for 3-4 days with no changes made to them.
When you launch an ad campaign, the Facebook algorithm needs time to figure out how to get the best results for your ad with the criteria you have set, which is why you need to allow some time to see how they perform. Plus you need enough data to make informed choices regarding your ad sets, conversions, demographics, and other criteria surrounding your ads before scaling them.
After your ads have been running for a period of time, you can look at the ROI or ROAS of your ad campaign. The return on investment or return on ad spend for the campaign should at least be positive before scaling the campaign. Once you have determined which ad campaigns have a positive ROI or ROAS you will want to determine your scaling method.
The simplest method is to increase your budget. Spend more and see if you can still achieve similar results. The more challenging approach is to dive into your audience, ad design, and other elements to find ways to improve performance or reach new customers.
If you decide to scale your Facebook ads through audience criteria, consider adding new lookalike audiences, expanding your lookalike audiences, targeting a broader audience, expanding to new locations, and/or adding relevant interests. Not all of these will be right for everyone.
If you have a business that can only sell goods or provide services within the U.S., for example, there is no point in trying to get a larger audience by advertising in other countries because that isn’t where your target audience is. But generally these methods are a good way to get your ads in front of more potential customers.
When expanding your audience through these methods, you will want to look at audience overlap. Naturally as your audience size changes, audience overlap is going to also change. If there is a lot of overlap, you should try to reduce it. Having a high audience overlap can lead to you bidding against yourself and/or your audience seeing your ads so much they get turned off (or tune out) your business.
Ad design (whether for new ads or existing ads) can be another great way to scale your Facebook ads. You can design new ads to add to your campaign. This helps ensure you have fresh ads showing up regularly to help prevent ad fatigue. You can play around with the layout, format, and visuals such as photograph ads versus video ads. It is also important to make sure you have ads for every placement option on the Facebook platform. You don’t have to have different ads for each placement, although it is a good idea, but you should at least have different sizes for your ads.
Another route you can take for scaling your Facebook ads is through ad duplication. If you have a successful set of ads and are reaching out to new audiences, you can incorporate some of the winning ads in new ad sets. Ad duplication doesn’t just have to be for your best performing ads, either. If you have some ads that have been unsuccessful, you can also duplicate these and add them to your new campaign. While this is a riskier strategy, it’s possible these ads may resonate with a slightly different audience. Plus making ad copies can help you implement multiple ad options with less work.
Just remember when scaling Facebook ads it is important to check on them frequently to make sure they are performing. There is going to be a learning phase so even if you read a lot of information and learn everything you can regarding Facebook advertising, ad performance, campaign performance, and scaling strategies you’ll discover through trial and error that some things will and won’t work for your business.
Increasing Your Facebook Ad Spend
Increasing Facebook ad spend to scale your Facebook ads is not always a matter of just increasing the amount you spend. Here, too, there are lots of different approaches experts suggest. There are so many factors at play here, so you’ll probably have to experiment with the approach that’s right for your business.
One method is to increase your advertising budget by 10% to 50% increments over the course of several days. Another is to increase your lowest bid for ads that have low impressions, which can indicate your bid is too low to actually get your ad shown. If you want to automate the process, there are automated rules in Facebook (and third party businesses) that you can use to customize your spending, even at daily budget level, based on measures like performance. If you are duplicating a successful existing campaign for a lookalike audience or new geographic region you may want to set the new ad campaign up with Facebook’s campaign budget optimization setting.
How Dash.fi Can Help You Scale Your Facebook Ad Spend
As you scale Facebook ads, keep in mind that choosing the right credit card to pay for those ads is essential. Ideally you want a payment method that will:
1. Offer robust rewards so you can make the most of your advertising dollars. With dash.fi, you’ll earn 3% unlimited cash back for the first 60 days, and 1.5% unlimited cash back after that. Ecommerce marketers can earn significant cash back to reinvest in the business.
2. Avoid card failure that can stop your business from scaling ads. Most credit cards strictly enforce credit limits and are not flexible enough for serious advertisers. Dash.fi offers multiple paths to determining your spending limit/creditworthiness so you don't have to worry about ad accounts being shut down because of card failure.
