We know that scaling your Facebook ads for the first time can be intimidating, even if you have somewhat of an experience with posting ads.
You might have even already tried scaling but it didn’t work out and now you’re looking for answers.
No need to worry about it anymore; our article will help you:
- Understand what Facebook ad scaling is
- Figure out the best time to scale
- Choose the best scaling strategy for your business
- Identify and avoid common scaling issues and mistakes
- Stay up-to-date with the best ad scaling practices
- Get inspired by awesome ad creatives
Are you ready to dive in and start scaling like a pro?
What Does it Mean to Scale Facebook Ads?
Scaling Facebook ads is the process of increasing your ad budget to generate a positive return by reaching wider audiences while maintaining that positive ROAS (return on ad spend).
It might sound like a difficult thing to do - which it can be if you’re not familiar with scaling your ads.
To help you out, we’ve outlined some of the most common mistakes you need to avoid when scaling your ads.
3 Reasons Why Your Facebook Ads are not Scaling
So, you dipped your toes into Facebook advertising.
You have created an ad set and after some time decided to scale.
Unfortunately, you didn’t register the conversions you were hoping for.
What went wrong?
Here are the 3 most common reasons why your Facebook ads don’t yield the results you’re hoping for upon scaling.
Reason #1: Your account is not properly set up
Your ad account setup can complicate things for you.
That’s why account simplification is included in Facebook’s Power 5 methodology that aims to help you improve the efficiency of your ads.
But what does it mean?
Well, account simplification refers to reducing the number of campaigns, ad sets, and ads you’re running on your account.
For instance, Facebook recommends running no more than 6 creatives per ad set to improve the accuracy of your conversion predictions.
Moreover, simplifying your ad account can result in twice as many product purchases and 23 times more sales per ad set.
Reason #2: You don’t focus on the right creative
If you’re overcomplicating things by running multiple ad sets, audience overlap may occur.
When this happens, you end up competing with yourself.
What’s more, running too many ad sets simultaneously results in fewer results due to increased time in the learning phase.
Plus, you could end up spending more of your budget before being able to optimize performance.
On top of all of that, you will not be able to identify your best-performing ad sets; you will not be able to tell which creatives work and which don’t.
In this case, scaling the right creative gets tricky and you might end up increasing your ad spend for the wrong ad.
Reason #3: Your product doesn’t fit the market
If you’ve tried scaling your ads and it didn’t go as expected, there’s a chance that people are simply not interested in buying your product.
Maybe your target audience isn’t a prevalent share of Facebook’s user demographics.
Or, maybe you’re not standing out from the competition and you didn’t get your pricing strategy and competitive analysis right.
Whatever the reason, take a step back to analyze what your competitors are doing and why their strategy works.
Alternatively, your timing might be off.
Now comes the question of: When is Facebook ad scaling necessary?
Let’s discuss the answer to this question in the following section.
When Should You Scale Your Facebook Ads?
You should scale your Facebook ads when the following apply:
- Satisfactory ROAS on your ad set
- Low cost per click (CPC)
- Ad frequency between 1.8 and 4
- High number of impressions
- Relevance score as close to 10 as possible
These are all the metrics you should track before deciding to scale an ad.
If most of the conditions above are met, you can move on to choosing whether to scale your ad vertically or horizontally.
Take a look at the difference between the two in the following section.
The 2 Ways of Scaling Your Facebook Ads
Based on your experience with Facebook ads and your campaign goals, you can choose between two scaling methods — vertical or horizontal scaling.
The difference between the two is obviously the direction you’re scaling in.
Specifically, when you scale horizontally, you’re spending your ad budget on multiple ad sets at the same time, targeting different audiences with the same ads (which, as we know now, may end up causing you to compete with yourself and diminishing your efforts).
On the other hand, when scaling vertically, you invest in the same ad set for an increasingly broader audience.
The graph below offers you a visual overview of how these two scaling methods stack up against each other.
So, it comes down to deciding if you want to duplicate a profitable campaign or slowly increase its send budget.
Either way, the success of using these two methods relies on your ability to establish what is a good ROAS for your business.
You can simply calculate your ROAS by dividing the campaign revenue by the cost of the campaign.
To illustrate how the formula works, let’s use an example:
Theoretically, let’s say your business makes $200 worth of sales after an ad campaign that had a cost of $100.
In this case, by dividing the campaign revenue ($200) by the cost of the campaign ($100), you'll get a ROAS of 2:1.
This means you are earning $2 for each $1 spent on your ad campaign.
That ROAS might be low for small businesses and start-ups, but a reasonable ratio for corporate giants.
When trying to figure out what is a good ROAS for your business, keep in mind that your profit margins should be your first decision-making criteria.
Your goal should be to have a ROAS that enables you to stay profitable.
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Now, before figuring out which strategy to use, let’s explore both in more detail.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal ad scaling refers to the process of adding new ad sets to a campaign or even duplicating existing ads with a good ROAS with the purpose of reaching a wider audience.
To figure out what ads you should duplicate, look at the ROAS of each ad and only choose those with a convenient ROAS.
Once you’ve decided which ads are worth duplicating, please keep in mind that this strategy works only if each of your ad sets targets a different audience so that your ads will not compete against each other.
So, an easy way to achieve good results with the horizontal ad scaling method is by targeting lookalike audiences and increasing your audience size.
Even though horizontal scaling is the quicker method of scaling your ads, it is also riskier.
Plus, it requires you to have some prior experience with Facebook ads.
Let’s see what makes vertical scaling a safer, more beginner-friendly bet.
Vertical Scaling
The vertical scaling strategy requires you to increase your ad budget (typically with around 20%) every few days for the most profitable ads on your account.
By doing so, you will slowly but surely increase the reach of your campaign.
For this to work, you need to increase your budget in small increments every 3 days so that the Facebook algorithm has enough time to optimize ad delivery.
If you're increasing your budget too fast, your ROAS could decrease drastically.
So, remember: slow and steady wins the race (when scaling ads vertically).
In addition to the two popular scaling methods, we’ve prepared some tips to help you scale efficiently and profitably.
Let’s have a look.
Scale Your Facebook Ads with These 7 Tips
To help you scale your ads responsibly without breaking the bank, we’ve gathered seven tips on Facebook ad scaling below.
Let’s see the first one.
Tip #1: Choose the right ads to scale
Even though we’ve already covered the basics of this one, we can’t stress this enough:
You should scale an ad based on its performance metrics!
Look at the overall campaign performance, audience insights, your set budget, the ROAS, and all the like.
Based on your data, does it look like a winning ad?
Do the ad performance reports suggest that it’s time to make some tweaks and target a larger audience?
If so, it’s time to scale.
Moving on to tip number two.
Tip #2: Make sure your product has a market fit
Before increasing your daily budget, take a look at your Facebook audience insights.
If nobody is interacting with your ad after having made several tweaks to it, chances are people are not interested in your product, or you're marketing your product in the wrong way.
If that’s the case, search your competitors on Facebook.
If they don’t have a Facebook page, or if they’re not active at all on Facebook, they might be advertising on other platforms — where you should be, too.
By looking at your competitor’s pages (and especially at their ads), you can gain valuable insights into what your audience actually wants and how you can deliver that to them.
Now over to tip number three.
Tip #3: Collaborate with content creators
Let’s face it: not everyone has an eye for appealing design, text, or video. In fact, there are a number of unspoken rules of graphic design that even industry professionals are still learning.
But, some people are born creators.
Wouldn't it be easier to stop struggling with Photoshop tutorials on YouTube and hand over your projects to professionals that do it for a living?
And you don’t even need to search for creators yourself.
Insense can help you effortlessly find the best content creators for your ads.
Then, the only thing that’s left to do is post the ad on social media and welcome new customers.
Move on to the next tip to see what else you can do to scale ads successfully.
Tip #4: Reuse your best ads
Reusing your best ads is one of the easiest ways to reach new audiences with tried-and-true strategies.
If you decide to do so, don’t forget to redefine your audience to avoid ad fatigue.
An easy way to do that is to create a lookalike audience that will target people with similar interests as your existing customers.
To centralize your current audience, you can rely on Facebook Pixel or create a custom audience.
Pixel is a piece of code you can integrate into your website that tracks what people visited your website after seeing your ad on Facebook.
Read on for another valuable tip.
Tip #5: Experiment with your creative strategy
Playing around with your ad content a bit is essential if you want to create a successful campaign that is suitable for scaling.
Run different ads and experiment with your creative strategy to see what sparks the curiosity of your audience and what doesn’t work.
If creativity is not your strong point, see the next tip.
Tip #6: Use Facebook Branded Content Ads (BCA)
Facebook Branded Content ads (BCA) are basically transparent paid collaborations between creators and brands.
BCA can help you achieve your ad goals faster.
Moreover, Facebook Ads Manager enables you to input an objective for your BCA ad, including:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Video views
- Website traffic
- App installs
And more!
In extension to BCA, you can also use whitelisting and dark posting strategies.
More on that in a second.
Tip #7: Choosing the right budget for your Facebook campaigns
Lastly, one of the most important factors to successful ad scaling is your budget.
Now, there are two ways to set the right budget for your ad sets:
- Manually setting a budget for each ad set (if you’re experienced enough and you know what you’re doing); or,
- Setting a central campaign budget and letting Facebook’s campaign budget optimization (CBO) feature set a budget at the ad set level as per performance.
CBO can take your best-performing sets to the next level based on data, by increasing their budget. Thus, you’re scaling your ads vertically without too much effort.
On the other hand, if you’re more experienced, then you might want to take the matter into your own hands and manually set the budget for each ad set.
If this is the case, you will want to do it gradually; once every 3-4 days in increments of around 20% of your previous budget.
Next up, let’s see what an ad creative that’s worth the budget increase looks like.
10 Facebook Ad Creatives To Inspire You
In this section, we’re going to feature 10 examples of Facebook ad creatives for you to get inspired.
We’ll cover a wide range of industries, so let’s get started with the first one.
1. Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club is a US-based company delivering razors and other grooming products by mail.
By using Facebook ads, it manages to reach the right demographic for each of its products, whether it’s mens’ or womens’ grooming products like in the example above.
2. Kay Jewelers
Kay Jewelers is one of the many jewelry companies leveraging Facebook Ads.
It takes advantage of both images and videos to promote its products, and Facebook is one of the best platforms to do so.
3. The Farmer’s Dog
Another business that utilizes various Facebook ad formats is The Farmer’s Dog, a company which delivers nutritious and organic food for your dog on a regular basis.
It’s worth mentioning that user-generated content has also been integrated into the ads, which makes them more authentic and cost-effective.
4. Teddy Blake
Teddy Blake is yet another company getting tremendous value from Facebook ads campaigns.
By using videos and images - which are sometimes based on user-generated content as well - Teddy Blake manages to reach the right type of people to promote its high-quality handbags to.
Let’s continue, shall we?
5. OSEA
OSEA is a beauty and cosmetics company that’s proud of its vegan and cruelty-free products.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to know that Facebook ads are an integral part of its marketing strategy, where the wide variety of products is being showcased to the right audience.
The best part?
Many ads consist of women trying the products and giving their opinion about them; this tactic enhances trust and can prove to be very effective!
6. Allbirds
Allbirds is a renowned company selling sustainable shoes and clothing items.
Through high-quality images and short videos, Allbirds promotes its shoes in a minimalistic way that captures the user’s eye.
This is a great example of a company that utilizes more than one type of Facebook ad to reach its target audience and increase sales.
7. Word Health Organization (WHO)
The World Health Organization is an exceptional example of how a non-profit organization can use the power of Facebook ads to raise awareness about a certain cause.
Through short videos like in the screenshot above, targeted audiences can get informed about important global issues.
This is one of the many advantages of Facebook ads. Through the wide range of tools, they allow you to convey your message to the right audience that is more likely to be interested in it.
8. Juice Beauty
Juice Beauty is one of the many organic skincare brands scaling Facebook ads.
What’s interesting about this case is the fact that the company not only uses images and videos in its campaigns, but features them as carousel ads where users can swipe and explore the wide range of products offered.
9. Snag Tights
Snag Tights is a clothing company with a vision of creating clothes that fit people of all sizes.
With the number of people on the platform and the tools available, Facebook seemed like a natural choice for the company to promote its products effectively.
10. RedBull
You all know RedBull, the famous energy drink brand.
With no surprise, the company takes great advantage of the benefits Facebook ads provide whatever format they’re in.
One of those is Facebook and Instagram Stories, which 96% of US marketers plan to continue using in the future, considering how effective they are.
All in all, Facebook ads offer a wide range of capabilities and tools to raise awareness, increase sales, and more.
Let’s now see how you can scale your Facebook ads through whitelisting.
Bonus: Efficient Whitelisting in 2 Simple Ways
We promised we’d get back to you on whitelisting and we’re about to deliver!
Whitelisting is a great way to scale your Facebook ads by enabling you to get (limited) access to an influencer’s Facebook Ad Manager in order to apply changes at the campaign level.
This basically means that you will be able to edit sponsored content posted by a creator on their account.
With your digital marketing expertise and the reach and credibility of the content creator, you will be able to reach a broad audience and get your post in front of more potential customers with minimal effort.
On the same principle, you can also create dark posts.
Dark posts are basically ads created from the creator’s profile that will not appear in their feed.
In this case, you can fine-tune the audience targeting settings to your brand’s needs without miles-long emails with instructions and explanations.
To do all this, you can either use the Facebook Business Page or Insense. Take a look at each option below.
Method #1: Through Facebook Business Page
Whitelisting can be tricky when done through Facebook Business Manager.
This method might require you to train the influencer in creating and/or using a Facebook Business Page.
And that might not be ideal if you’re on a tight schedule with no time to spare.
Additionally, mistrust is another issue that might arise when asking a creator to access their account.
If you decide to take this route and your creative content creator already has a Facebook page, they need to follow these steps to be able to give you access permissions to their page:
- Go to “Page Settings” and scroll down to “Page Roles”.
- Next, type in the preferred email address or Facebook account username.
- Then, select the corresponding role from the drop-down menu (i.e., advertiser).
- Finally, click on the “Add” button.
They will then be prompted to re-enter their password for security reasons.
Next, you will be notified that the creator has invited you to become the page's advertiser (or whichever role they’ve selected).
After you accept the invitation, you will have the rights and permissions associated with the respective role.
Alternatively, the influencer can create a Meta Business Account and add you as an employee or business admin - as shown in the screenshot below.
As you can see, giving someone whitelisting permissions on Facebook isn’t necessarily a walk in the park.
The headache-free alternative?
Method #2: Using Insense
Instead of using Facebook’s Meta Business Suite, you can use Insense to start whitelist posting with ease.
When you fill out a brief for your Facebook campaign, go to the Campaign Info section and follow the instructions below:
- Go to Campaign Type and select "Influencer Partnerships" from the dropdown menu.
- Next, click on the “Platform” field and select "Facebook" from the dropdown menu and the "Creator Licensing" option will instantly pop up.
- Then, select the desired time span in which you need access to the creator's account.
And that’s it!
No need to worry about training the creators you’re collaborating with.
Insense simplifies things so that your partnerships go as smoothly as possible without hindering your business operations.
Download our free eBook to see how you can drive results with whitelisting.
Before you get started with scaling, let’s wrap things up.
Now Over to You
You have everything you need to create a killer ad scaling strategy now.
We hope you feel inspired and are ready to reach your audience with great content.
Before you go, have a look at our latest article on how to find the right influencer for taking your Facebook Ads to the next level with powerful ad creatives.
