Do You Have Realistic Expectations About Scaling Your Ads?

Is your ad campaign performing so well that you are finding it time to start scaling your ad spend to see even MORE positive return? If so, that’s GREAT! However, it’s important to read on to find out what you MUST know about scaling before you begin increasing your ad spend. 

When scaling any social media campaign, it’s imperative to do so at a  sustainable cadence. 

Campaig  performance is not always 100% consistent or predictable in an ad account -- it  will fluctuate. Often the factors causing performance fluctuations are entirely outside of your control and in spite of thorough testing. Through our years of Facebook ad management, we have found that there are two common misperceptions pertaining to scaling that should be addressed:

1- Increasing ad spend rapidly is a surefire way to scale quickly, while maintaining the same results

When it comes to scaling and ad spend, we are only able to push a campaign’s (i.e. at the campaign level) or ad set's spend so much. In other words, there is a point where a campaign or ad set spend gets too high which will ultimately cause the CPA (cost per acquisition or cost per purchase) to decline. In other words, you can't just push ad spend quickly on all campaigns that are performing very well and expect the CPA to hold. This delicate balance of CPA in relation to ad spend, is extremely important to be familiar with and to monitor. 

Ramping up too fast in spend or reaching too high of a level with individual campaigns or ad sets is typically unsustainable and is not considered best practice. A good rule of thumb for adjusting ad spend is to do so every other day (or max 1x/day) on live campaigns by ~20%. It is never recommended to jump from $1k daily to $5k daily (as an example) and expect the same performance to magically hold. 

Campaign scaling must be done  strategically and steadily. While duplicating campaigns to help speed up the process is possible, it's very important to understand  sustainable scaling. When a business has a quarter or season that is typically their busy season, you can ramp up as quickly as reasonably possible but it’s really important to be mindful of not scalingtoo quickly or else performance can decline; it needs to be done methodically…not overnight. 

2- Once campaigns are built and are performing well, you can leave them on “autopilot” and see the same success long term

Once in a while, the Facebook ad campaign stars seem to align, and you can leave a campaign running with little tweaking for some time, BUT it’s important to note that it isnot usual. Once you take the time to build, test and monitor campaigns, you will need to continually make adjustments/improvements, often in response to various external factors that directly affect CPA. Ad and audience fatigue happen and performance will fluctuate even on well-tested and refined campaigns – that isnormal. It doesn’t mean there is anything inherently wrong with the campaign, ad sets, or audiences if tweaks and adjustments are needed. 

Continual testing allows you to refine and improve performance to where it can be steady for a good period of time, but you need to remember that this is not the case with all ad accounts and many factors go into play here. In fact, every single ad account is different and every business experiences ad (and audience) fatigue differently. This is why it’s extremely important to continually monitor CPA and spend accordingly, as well as make adjustments to the campaigns, in order to remain in a good CPA level in relation to the spend. 

While it is possible to have some campaigns that can be kept live at a high ad spend for a longer period of time, once again, this is more theexception than the rule. As a rule of thumb, it is more typical to have to introduce new campaigns somewhat regularly and phase out old ones that are not working as well due to ROAS droppingor CPA rising. 

Scaling is one of the hardest aspects of FB ad management and requires skill and experience to do it effectively and sustainably (whether that’s for just a season or for years). If you are struggling to maintain campaign performance while scaling, drop us a line to see if we can help! With nearly a decade in the Facebook ad space, we are Facebook experts who know the ins and outs of scaling and what is required to steadily build a campaign with consistent results.