Top 6 Ways to Scale Facebook Ads

Top 6 Ways to Scale Facebook Ads

Facebook ads have been a staple of almost every major brand for the past 5+ years. There is no doubt that the platform provides value and can help you introduce your company to new buyers.

If anything, one of the more common challenges I hear is how to find a greater scale in the Facebook ad environment. The company is seeing good returns and wants to make the most of this channel while earnings are still good.

With that in mind, here are some ways you can try to find a scale in your Facebook ad account.

6 Clever Ways to Scale Your Facebook Ads

There are two main levers for scaling Facebook ads: audience and budget. A note on the audience: Through years of advertising on Facebook, I’ve discovered that almost everyone has a different approach to finding their target group. Since I can’t know what strategy you’re using, I’ll briefly outline some of the best strategies I’ve seen. But first, let’s start with the budget.

1. Increase your budget

It may be a complete no-brainer, but the easiest first step to getting more out of your Facebook ad account is to simply give it more budget.

As simple as this advice is, Facebook’s budget adjustments aren’t as straightforward as other platforms like Google or Microsoft Ads.

Every time you change your budget on Facebook, you change one of the data points that feed its algorithms and determine who sees your ad and when. So every time you make a budget change, you risk resetting the learning phase or Facebook’s name, “We’re trying to figure out what to do now, so give us a minute”.

Whether you’re using a daily or lifetime budget, there is a general guideline for scaling with this method:

All budget changes should be 20% or less of the original budget. If you want to adjust your budget by a higher percentage, you should do it in multiple stages, each not exceeding the 20% rule.

Here’s a video you can watch to learn more about this strategy, but for the sake of this article, just know that increasing your budget is an easy-to-implement strategy to scale on Facebook, but you need to do it in 20% increments.

2. Target off-site interests

If you’ve stretched your budget to the audience you have and are still looking to find more scale, it might be worthwhile to expand your reach to a new user base. here is

Luckily and unfortunately, Facebook’s positioning isn’t perfect, which means you might not find the exact product you’re trying to sell, but you might find something similar. I’m going to assume you’ve already targeted the perfect fit for you in your original campaign.

For this approach, you’re trying to find “off-site” interest related to the product/service you’re selling. Maybe they’re a substitute or supplement, or they’re in the same field as what you’re offering. Take advantage of the vague associations Facebook can make with its targeting options and use these closely related targets to find a larger scale.

3. Go after competitor brands

Everyone likes to take a piece of a competitor’s business. After all, we are competing, right? You can also use some strategies to find your competitor targets on the Facebook platform.

First, you can see if your competitor’s brand name shows up as a targeting option. This may only work with big brands, but you don’t have to be a big brand to use them.

If you offer a product or service locally, and you can target brands that offer the same service nationwide, you can leverage their interest to help attract new customers to your local service.

Here is an example. I have a luxury furniture company as a client that sells high-end, very beautiful custom pieces. Unfortunately, the revenue targeting option left Facebook a long time ago. So we’ve expanded the list to include other high-end brands like Arhaus, Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, and others that are comparably priced and have larger footprints.

As a bonus for ad creativity, you can jot down some notes from your competitor’s creative playbook by looking at their live Facebook ads in their Facebook ad library and finding aspects you like and can use in your strategy.

4. Mining Affinity Brand Audiences

Like competitor brands, you can also use affinity brands to help expand the reach of your current listings. Think of other brands that complement your brand or that your customer base will also buy. Using these as a way to find new clients has always worked well for me.

Taking the same furniture company as an example, we know that many of the brands that people are likely to buy are also on the higher, more expensive end, but not in the furniture or home decor space. We use the targeting options above to find new customers based on their affinity for other brands.

I’m sure you can see from these examples that none of these are perfect. Just because Facebook thinks you’re interested in Burberry and Versace doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed an $8,000 sofa too. But if you’re looking for scale, it’s a great way to learn some form of machine learning, and it might also be the right mix of people.

5. Extending the Similarity Model

Lookalike models are one of my favorite targeting options on Facebook. As long as the torrent viewers I use have strong patterns, they always perform well for me. If you are unfamiliar with Lookalike audiences, they are essentially an algorithmically generated audience on Facebook for new users based on a user list you provide.

The biggest problem I see with advertisers is that they don’t make the most of these lists in one of two ways:

They only use one model

The easiest place to get started with Lookalike audiences is to create a new list from your current customer base. This is the model most people use because, logically, we all want more customers. Therefore, creating a lookalike object for our current clients is the best place to start.

But if you see strong performance, you can easily expand to other high-value user models to find new groups. The similarity model on Facebook is a function of population and always has the same number of users. So, by creating multiple seed audiences, you can expand the reach of your Facebook campaigns.

Here are some ideas for other seed audiences for Facebook Lookalike audiences:  

• The user who added the product to cart
• newsletter subscriber
• Lead Generation Form Submitter
• High-value customers only

As long as there is a unique pattern in the user list you create, you can create a lookalike audience from it.

They only use a 1% extension

I mentioned above that a lookalike audience is a function of the population within a particular area. The most specific user model is 1%, which means those users who are highly relevant to your seed list persona.

But if you see strong performance from this list, why not scale the model to 2% or even 3%?

Test adding incremental percentages to your list and see how they perform. In my experience, every account will have its breaking point, whether it’s 2% or 8%, but you never know until you test scaling increments.

6. Test broad targeting

If you’ve already expanded your budget and tested all your potential target audiences on Facebook, and you’re still looking for a bigger scale, this last option can be valuable, but it comes with a big caveat. First, the strategy:

With broad targeting, you can use conversion-focused campaigns and identify the conversion actions you want more. Then, you leave the rest to Facebook.

Aside from a few exclusions, you won’t add any other targeting options to your campaign to make sure you don’t target existing customers or customers in your retargeting audience and get Facebook into town.

Now warn:

This strategy is best for accounts with a large number of desired conversion actions. This is not for those who barely exceed the transition minimums to exit the study phase.

For broad targeting to work best, your account should have at least 100 desired conversion actions per week for it to perform optimally. It’s still worth a shot if you don’t, but I encourage you to start conservatively with your budget and only scale up if you see success.