How to Scale Facebook Ads: Try Our 3-Step Process to Change Your Ad Game in 2023

A distinct group of entrepreneurs and thought leaders shines brightly in the world of online marketing. These visionaries invest significantly in their ventures, channeling more than $10,000 per month into paid advertising. Their financial acumen has propelled them to the upper echelons of financial success, with incomes reaching multiple six to seven figures. 

What sets them apart is their mastery of crafting profitable online sales funnels, serving niche markets such as coaching, consulting, speaking, and subject expertise.

However…

Even as these business owners continue to shape their industries, there exist consistent obstacles when it comes to scaling their Facebook ad campaigns, including 

• Balancing escalating ad budgets with maintaining cost efficiency.
• Identifying and targeting new audiences.
• A constant need for new and creative ads to capture and maintain audience interest.
• Time Management
• Continuous learning and adaptation to Facebook’s ever-evolving algorithm.

Our 3-phase scaling strategy offers a path to overcome these challenges and thrive in your industry.

In today’s article, we will break down our 3-step methodology (and give you 5 more steps to take it to the next level) so that you can successfully scale using Facebook ads.

Start With the Audience as Control Group

You might be wondering why we start with creative testing instead of audience testing in phase 1 when it comes to learning how to scale your Facebook Ads. 

To put it simply, most of the accounts we work in have already discovered winning audiences. They might not be producing revenue quite yet, but the leading indicators of success such as the cost per thousand impressions (CPM’s), cost per click (CPC), and click-through rate (CTR) indicate these are good audiences to start with.

Most ad accounts have poor ad creatives and overall funnel strategy. When looking for audiences that are performing well in your account, customize your columns so that you can clearly see the leading indicators of success, as mentioned above.

Look for the audiences getting the best CPM’s, CPC’s, and CTR’s.

Once you have built your list of performing audiences, now it’s time to plug them into a new creative testing campaign.

What To Do If You Don’t Have Any Account Data

If you don’t have any account data, then you’ll still want to start with the audience as your control variable. Since the biggest issue to tackle with a fresh ad account is finding reliable creatives, this is what we want to solve first.

Let’s say you are starting a new ad account at $100 per day, the structure we would recommend is as follows:

Creative Testing Campaign – Set to Adset Budget Optimization – Optimizing Towards First Event in the Funnel (Oftentimes this will be the Lead event)

• Adset #1 – $20 Per Day – Single Interest – New Creatives
• Adset #2 – $20 Per Day – Single Interest – New Creatives
• Adset #3 – $20 Per Day – Single Interest – New Creatives
• Adset #4 – $20 Per Day – Stacked Interests – New Creatives
• Adset #5 – $20 Per Day – Stacked Interests – New Creatives

Campaign Structure Walk-Through

Step 1: Select your objective based on your specific account situation.

Scenario 1: Brand New Account. Select the first event in your funnel which is most often leads for coaches and consultants.

Scenario 2: Under-Seasoned Account ($0 to $100k in total spend). Select the event that is furthest down your funnel which you have the most event data for (Best results optimizing for a conversion with 500 or more events fired in the account).

Scenario 3: Well-Seasoned Account ($100k – $10 million). Select the sales objective to optimize based on the sales data you have collected over time.

Step 2: Name your campaign for organizational purposes.

We follow this naming convention to keep our campaigns organized in our accounts for easy accessibility. (Media Buyer Initials – Type of Campaign – Objective – Funnel Name – Date)

Step 3: Name your ad set using the following naming convention to keep your audiences organized (Single Interest or Label it “Interest Stack” – Gender – Age Range – Household Income).

Step 4: Select the area where your leads will be generated (this will most often be the ‘website’ option).

Step 5:  Select your performance goal, the pixel you’re using, and the event you want to optimize for.

Step 6: Set your daily ad budget. (Your overall testing budget should be around 10-20% of your overall marketing budget)

Step 7: Choose the location you’ll be advertising in, your target market’s age range, and select the interest(s) you’ll be targeting.

Step 8: Select the language of your target audience and choose which placement strategy you’d like to use.

Advantage+ Placements: This is great for starting out and building your account.

Manual Placements: Once you have enough account data, you can begin manually selecting the placements that are performing the best for you.

1. Filter your reports by placement

2. Analyze which placements are working best for your ads

Step 9:  Name your ad for organizational purposes.

Step 10:  Choose your Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Step 11:  Select create ad, manually upload, and single image or video options.

Step 12:  Add your image or video creative, your primary text (body copy), the headline, and the description.

Step 13: Select which call to action you want to use, insert the link you’re sending traffic to, and insert a display link if you want to clean up your link and make it look more professional.

Step 14: Make sure the correct pixel is selected.

Step 15:  Build out your URL parameters for any third-party tracking services you use. (ClickFunnels, HubSpot, Hyros, etc)

Step 16:  Double check your entire setup to make sure everything is set to your liking and then publish your ads.

Creative Becomes Control Group

Once you have found 3-10 winning creatives, you can now start expanding your audience portfolio. With the new data in your account, you can also begin creating lookalike audiences based on your event data. 

Lookalikes are very powerful audiences you can use on your account to target people more like the traffic who’ve already taken specific actions in your funnel. We suggest testing lookalikes for leads, booked calls, and sales when you get at least 100 contacts at each level.

The more contacts you have, the better the probability of your lookalike performing. When we test our lookalikes we test 0% – 1%, 1% – 2%, 2% – 3%, 3% – 4%, and 4% to 5%.

Over time we have found that these percentage ranges have the highest probability of success.

Campaign Structure Walk-Through

The campaign structure is basically identical to the creative testing campaign. The only difference is you’re going to be labeling the campaign as an “audience testing campaign” of course for organizational purposes.

With this campaign setup, you can begin testing the new lookalikes you’ve created, new single interests you’ve found, or even some more audience stacks you’d like.  

The goal is to identify more winning audiences using performing creatives as the control group. This will help you to horizontally scale your ad account, which we’ll talk about later. 

Set Up The CBO Campaign

Now that you’ve found your best-performing creatives and audiences, it’s time to set up your big kahuna, CBO scale campaign you can run at $100 all the way up to $10,000 per day. This will be the campaign in your account that will drive the most results for your business.

At this point, you’re going to be targeting booked calls or sales conversions based on which will optimize the best and have the biggest impact on the campaign. You’ll want to make these considerations:

1. Do I have enough sales data in the account to make a meaningful impact on the optimization of this campaign? (100+ sales events)
2. If not, I’d most likely be better off running it toward booked calls or leads, depending on whether I have 100+ booked call events or not.

Next, you’ll want to name your campaign accordingly.

In order to set your campaign budget at the campaign level you’ll turn on this switch. Turning this on will automatically turn your campaign into a campaign budget optimization (CBO) mode.

Duplicate Best Performers

After that, you’ll go into your audience testing and creative testing campaigns to duplicate the best-performing ad sets into your new scale campaign.

You must publish your CBO campaign in order to duplicate your ad sets across campaigns.

You can simply turn the published campaign and immediately turn it off so that it doesn’t spend without the correct setup.

Now that you have your campaign published you will use these settings to duplicate your best-performing ad sets over to your new CBO campaign.

Always select “Show existing reactions, comments, and shares on new ads” so your social engagement transfers over to your new campaign. Once you get all of your best-performing ad sets from your audience testing and creative testing campaigns, make sure to delete all of the ads that were not high performers from the ad sets.

Finally, when you have your ad sets boiled down to your best creatives, double-check them all and make sure they are set up correctly.

Now you’re ready to publish your scale campaign!

We followed this exact scaling process to quadruple Megan Tuohey’s profits and you can learn more about that by clicking here.

Once you’ve published your scale campaign, here are 5 more steps to optimize even further.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to allocate 80% of your resources (ie. ad budget) towards what is tried and true. This will ensure that the majority of your budget is going towards the campaigns getting you the best results. So what do you do with the other 20%?

The other 20% is going to be used for constantly testing new things so that when your tried and true creatives fatigue, you are prepared. This budget allocation strategy allows you to do a couple of things:

• Find new winning variations before your current winning creative fatigue.
• Expand your winning creative and audience portfolio so that you can more easily scale your account when the time comes.

This will create a seamless environment within your ad account and allow you to stay profitable for years to come.

Another type of campaign we use solely for organizational purposes is called the Builder Campaign. We follow the same exact process as we do with duplicating winning ad sets and we paste them into a campaign labeled, “Builder Campaign”.

This allows us to keep all of our winning ad sets organized for future use and to make sure all of them are in one easy-to-access campaign.

We get it! Coming up with new creative ideas and ad angles is HARD…

In fact, we’ve spent the last five years developing our creative team and processes and we still don’t have it perfected. But we have learned a TON in the last five years and after spending over $150 million dollars on ads.

One of the big lessons we’ve learned is in order to be proactive with your creative strategy, you need to sit down once a week, once a month, or once a quarter to brainstorm new big ideas. Our creative team goes over new ad ideas for one of our media buyers and deploys them into our creative creation process.

Consistently coming up with new big ad ideas will ensure that the pipeline always stays full and you’re able to consistently get new creatives into production.

Using ChatGPT to give you more single-interest ideas to explore for your specific customer avatar.

Here’s a prompt idea you can use to get started:

This will spit out 25 single interests you can pick and choose from for your audience testing exploration.

Vertical Scaling

Vertical scaling at the ad account level includes increasing the budget of existing campaigns.

You are scaling up already existing campaigns by increasing budgets. Vertically scaling an ad account can often take more time as big shifts in budgets can impact your performance.

You do not have to follow this rule, but we find that scaling campaigns incrementally by increasing the budgets by 20% every 2-3 days has a higher probability of keeping the KPI’s consistent. If you’re looking to increase your budget higher and faster than 20% increments, then we suggest plugging all your best performers into a CBO campaign or another CBO campaign if you’re already running one.

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling is when you start looking at other verticals you could expand out to. For example, our client Douglas James’ primary vertical is veterans who want to make money and provide for their families. 

He is also able to tap into the entrepreneurial vertical because these people also want to make money using his program.

Examples of other sectors you could look into scaling ‘out’ to are healthcare, government, finance, energy, agriculture, real estate, legal services, and more.

Avoid These 7 Common Pitfalls when Scaling Your Facebook Ads

1. Ignoring Ad Frequency

A huge pitfall that advertisers often miss is their campaigns tanking due to high ad frequency. The ‘Frequency’ metric allows you to gauge how many times people are seeing your ad. You want this to remain as low as possible at ‘1’ so that you’re continuously showing ads to new people within your targeting.

However, when you’re scaling especially you can see your Frequency increase leading to poor results and wasted ad spend. Make sure to turn this column on and check it frequently to ensure you’re not wasting your budget.

2. Using the ‘Create Ad’ with Existing Creatives instead of ‘Existing Ad’

We see it all too often when advertisers want to scale out a winning advertisement. When they duplicate the ad into another campaign, they forget to turn it into an existing ad. This is the option you want to turn on when you duplicate it out to another campaign.

If you do not select this option it will completely wipe out all of the social engagement you’ve collected over the duration of running your campaign.

All of this social proof and engagement gets wiped to 0 and your ad has to start from scratch instead of leveraging the engagement you’ve already got to attract more people.

3. Increasing Budgets Too Quickly

As briefly mentioned above, increasing your ad spend too quickly can often tank your ad results. The problem is that just because an ad performs at the initial budget you set, it doesn’t mean it’ll perform at a higher budget.

There are phases to confirming whether or not your ad is truly a winner.

• Phase 1: Performs within KPI at initial testing budget
• Phase 2: Performs within KPI at scale budget 
• Phase 3: Performs for months within KPI at scale budget

If you try to scale a Phase 1 or Phase 2 creative too quickly, there is a good chance it could tank at the next level. However, you’ll have much better success if you try scaling a Phase 3 creative.

4. Underprepared for Creative Fatigue

The ugly truth is that the creative working the best in your account right now is bound to fatigue at some point. It’s very tough to say when that time will come but it’s best to do what’s in your control to be prepared for when it does.

By implementing the 3-phase scaling methodology we discussed in this article, you’ll continuously be able to find new winning creatives and audiences to plug in when that ad or audience dies. This is a simple but proactive approach that will prepare you for the future and also get you the best results in the present.

5. Audience Saturation

Similarly to Frequency, if your audience is seeing stale content that they aren’t resonating with, then the overexposure will cause your campaign to tank. The best way to avoid this is to expand your winning audience portfolio so you’re showing ads to multiple different audiences.

This displays the importance of the audience testing campaign because it will allow you to find more winning audiences and avoid falling victim to this issue.

6. Scaling at the Wrong Time

The ideal quarters for scaling an offer can vary significantly depending on the nature of your business, the target audience, and the offer itself. However, there are some general considerations to keep in mind:

Best Quarters for Scaling an Offer: 

Q4 (October to December)

This is typically the strongest quarter for many businesses. The holiday shopping season, starting with Black Friday and continuing through Christmas, can lead to a significant increase in sales and a prime opportunity to scale offers. People are in a buying mindset, and there’s a strong sense of urgency.

Q2 (April to June)

The second quarter often sees an uptick in economic activity, with consumers spending on spring and summer-related products. This can be a good time to scale offers related to outdoor activities, travel, fashion, and home improvement.

Worst Quarters for Scaling an Offer: 

Q1 (January to March): 

The first quarter can be challenging for some businesses, as consumers may be recovering from holiday spending and resolutions for frugality. However, this varies by industry, and some businesses may still find opportunities to scale.

Q3 (July to September): 

Q3 can be slower for certain industries, as people are away on summer vacations, and spending patterns shift. However, this can also be a strategic time for businesses to prepare for the upcoming holiday season.

It’s important to keep in mind that these are general considerations and your offer and industry could have different trends. The best thing to do is collect quarterly data over the span of years to see which quarters your business performs the best in and which quarters you perform the worst in.

This will give you the best shot of determining when a good time to scale your offer is for your specific situation.

7. Rising Cost Per Click

Cost per click is one of the most important metrics to track because it tells you how much it costs to get someone just to see your funnel. Well, when you scale your ad account drastically ie. 2x’ing, 3x’ing, or more with your budget can cause increases in cost per click.

If you don’t pay close attention to this metric, then it could cause the downfall of your ad account. Even a 20% increase in your cost per click can have drastic effects all the way down your funnel. You have a couple of different options here and both are challenging to implement:

• Produce better creatives to reduce the cost per click (CPC)
• Optimize your funnel to brace the impact of an increase in cost per click (CPC) 

Want to learn more about how to scale your Facebook ads and overcome the challenges of online marketing?

Let’s work together to maximize your reach by creating ads that scale.

Book a call to see how we can scale your ads for you.

Our team of experts can script all of your ads for you, put together the videos, set up the back-end tech and tracking, and handle pretty much everything for you so that you can focus on serving all of the clients that the ads bring in. 

Click here to book a strategy session with our team of experts, who will dive into your marketing strategy and provide you with clear action steps you can take to make your marketing more profitable!