Advertising on Facebook has the potential to finely target extremely profitable audience segments with messages specific to what stage of the sales funnel they are in.
But once a campaign is set up and generates high conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS), it’s not a sure thing that those success rates will scale when you increase your budget.
When it comes to scaling Facebook Ads campaigns, taking the next step requires advanced structuring, optimization, and targeting in order to take the next step.
This article will outline some of the most powerful strategies and tips for making sure that when you increase your spending, your conversion rates stay steady, and your campaigns successfully scale with it.
Strategy 1: Account Simplification
There’s an old adage that comes to mind. KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. The same concept goes for Facebook Ads campaigns. If you are running too many campaigns with multiple ad sets each, campaign management can snowball out of control when scaling it up.
When it comes to scaling your campaigns, the hardest work is done up front and involves making sure that your account is simplified and optimized before increasing your daily spending.
With the proper account structure, Facebook’s machine learning algorithm is capable of optimizing your campaigns for you. There’s no need to manually adjust your bidding or placements once the audience targeting and basic campaign settings are in place.
If you’re stuck and don’t know where to start, consider reducing your campaigns to the essentials based on sales funnel positioning:
- A top-level campaign for generating new leads and reaching users for the first time. This may include lookalike audiences and shared interests that are proven to convert in your high conversion campaigns.
- A mid-level campaign for reaching returning users. This typically includes broad remarketing audiences and directs users to entry-level conversion landing pages, like encouraging users to sign up for a newsletter or browse category pages for products.
- A bottom-level campaign for capturing lost conversions. This usually involves dynamically generated ads that remarket a specific product to a user that has abandoned their shopping cart, or promoting a special discount to help finalize a sale.
In addition, some ecommerce websites may opt for a fourth type of campaign to target users that have already converted. This is typically to help transition past customers into repeat customers (a hugely important transition), and could involve special offers or advanced notice of upcoming events.
Splitting your account into campaigns that target specific points in the sales funnel creates a larger sample size for Facebook’s optimization algorithms. And with a larger sample size of performance data, your campaigns will have an easier time maintaining their high conversion rates at a higher daily budget.
Voila! A simplified campaign helps convert more in the long run.
Strategy 2: Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)
A common problem that we’ve seen in the past are Facebook Ads accounts that are set to a manual daily budget for each ad set within each campaign.
Perhaps your current campaigns are set up with $50/day for remarketing audiences, $10/day for Lookalike Audience A, and $15/day for Lookalike Audience B. While this is useful for many small businesses that may be working on a limited budget, when it comes to larger campaigns, those settings do not scale in predictable ways.
Facebook now allows for Campaign Budget Optimization, or CBO budgeting, which dynamically adjusts the daily spending towards ad sets that tend to convert more.
Now, you only need to set a single daily budget for the entire campaign, and Facebook’s machine learning algorithm will adjust the spending for each ad set to optimize for CPAs.
At the end of each month, you’ll not only be able to clearly see which ad sets outperformed the others, but you’ll have been running them optimized the whole time!
Strategy 3: Automatic Placements
One of the most common questions we get from businesses advertising on Facebook involves the option for manual or automatic placements.
Manual placements allow advertisers to limit where their ads appear, and can be a particularly attractive choice for marketers that “know” that Facebook’s right-column ads or Instagram’s Stories don’t convert at the same rate as other placements. And to the untrained eye, automatic placements may seem like a big potential waste of money.
However, this is one situation where we’ll need to trust in Facebook’s learning algorithms.
The automatic placements setting allows advertisers to target audiences across multiple platforms and optimize conversion values depending on how the user interacts with the ad, not necessarily by which platform they are using.
It’s a good way to identify user activity that you may not have realized before. Maybe users tend to concentrate browsing on the Facebook Marketplace or Instagram Stories. Using automatic placements, you’ll be able to reach these users with your campaign, and then use the performance data that you collect to identify new opportunities for you campaigns in the future.
In addition, Facebook features an option called placement asset customization. This allows advertisers to customize how each ad looks visually in each type of placement. That way, if the image that your ad creative relies on doesn’t translate well on portrait or landscape views, you can manually crop it to appear differently in the Facebook Newsfeed, the right-hand column, Stories, etc.
Strategy 4: Auto Advanced Matching
For slightly Orwellian user behavior tracking, look no further than Facebook’s Automatic Advanced Matching technology.
Auto Advanced Matching uses the Facebook Pixel already installed on your website to detect cached customer data from certain text fields, such as names and email addresses, and automatically associates it with corresponding events such as registration form signups, whitepaper downloads, and more.
This allows advertisers to more accurately identify similar users, and helps the pixel learn exactly who and how people convert on your website.
What this means for your campaigns are two-fold:
- Helps expand your audience list size
With more user data, your campaigns can better target a larger audience size, leading to more sales leads without a huge drop off in CPA.
- Helps increase the number of attributed conversions from your campaign
For advertisers, there’s no better reason. Auto Advanced Matching allows you to better track conversions and attribute them back to specific paid campaigns.
Strategy 5: Scaling with Dynamic Ads
One feature that Facebook Ads has included but is often overlooked is Dynamic Ads. This allows advertisers to include personalized information in the ad, test out multiple images and headline combinations at once, or promote specific products based on user behavior.
For ecommerce websites in particular, this is hugely important. If you’re running a successful remarketing campaign for specific products and your business adds 50 new products overnight, it can be a huge undertaking to create new individual ads for each one.
With Facebook’s Dynamic Ads feature, you’ll only need to set up once, and the campaign will scale up no matter how many products are added to your product line.
Businesses can also use these functions to promote similar or complementary products as a separate ad set or campaign. This is also called Dynamic Product Ad (DPA) retargeting.
Conclusion
So there you have it. With these advanced strategies, you too can scale conversions for your Facebook Ads campaigns. For more information, consult our blog. Or if you would like help on your own Facebook or Instagram campaigns, contact our social media advertising experts for a free consultation today.
