8 Tips to improve Facebook ad performance when scaling
Here is what we work on first when scaling and optimising a high-spend campaign.
1. Are Poor-Performing Ads bringing Down Your Campaigns?
Are you optimising all your ad sets regularly? Use ad set average metrics such as CPA, ROAS and CTR to cut and replace ads that are under performing - this ensures you have only the best ads running when scaling and don't let bad ads bring your performance down. Always remember to have at least three ads per ad-set though, as the algorithm likes to have new ads to show people who have already seen your other ads.
2. Are You Scaling Vertically and Horizontally?
Use both vertical and horizontal scaling - vertical scaling, is upwards scaling on the ad set, so increasing your daily spend. I don't recommend more than 20% per day unless you're super confident or in a hurry. Horizontal scaling is sideways, by making ad set duplicates or creating new ad sets. Horizontal scale is the faster way to scale, especially if you start to introduce segments (eg split by platform, device, age etc) and include other objectives too, for instance horizontal scaling into a Video Views campaign.
3. Find New Audience Pockets
If you are using interest based audiences, look at the best~performing audiences and then use the audience insights tool and good old Google to find new audiences with similar interests. Sometimes these interests will surprise you and not be what you expected. Always use data! We spend a significant amount of time on our big campaigns doing deep audience research to find new people to target.
4. Are You Using Larger Lookalikes?
Look to scale audiences for example taking your Lookalike (LLA) % from 1% through to 5% at least, and even test 10% when scaling if you product has general appeal. Don’t forget to adapt your creative, because the 1% LLA will be closer to your ideal customer than 5 or 10, and so the creative needs to change.
There are so many ways to cut a LAA but just because a 1-3% works doesn't mean the higher ones will. Larger audiences generally give more scope for scaling and will last longer before they fatigue.
5. Check Your Funnel Game is Strong
Building at the simplest level a COLD, WARM, HOT campaign setup and managing budget, creative between those. For example often we see people scaling COLD campaigns but forgetting to increase budgets in HOT (retargeting) - if you're pushing more people to the site, then push more budget to the lower parts of your funnel to ensure frequency remains high enough to cut through and ensure delivery.
6. Are You Using Automation?
As you scale, you can't manage absolutely everything in the account manually without growing your team. Use FB's built in tool or a 3rd party, if not to action changes, at least alert you. If CPA is beyond your cap for an ad for example, pause and replace automatically
7. Is Your Audience Fatigued?
If your audience is saturated, meaning you've reached a large % of them already with ads, then you need to be refreshing your ads more often, and at a certain point you will eventually need to pause that Ad-Set.
But its less about spend more about reach. I'm doing $5K/d in an account right now and our reach in most ad sets is about 20% - meaning 80% haven't seen an ad from us, meaning we can still scale and not need to necessarily refresh creative. But if frequency starts to pick up alongside CPA/ROAS dropping then that's a good signal to take action by adding new ads or pausing the Ad-Set.
8. Is Your Creative Fatigued?
Are you testing creative fast enough to keep up with the demand from high spending ad sets? We use a small £10-50/d ad set tests to always be testing new creatives and/or audiences.
What's even better is we've automated part of our testing with this method (using rules) so we simply keep churning out new ads and audiences, and the automations tell us whether an ad is ready to scale or a loser.
Testing is a 24/7 activity whether you're doing £100 or £10K/d in ad spend - the only difference with scale is a lower % is on testing but its still important.
