SSA #050: How I Scale Facebook Ads

Inside Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors, which I updated last week, I share my new Facebook Ads scaling strategy.

And that's what I'd like to share with you today – how I scale Facebook Ads.

When To Start Scaling

Scaling your Facebook Ads boils down to spending more money; that's it, in a nutshell. It does of course get a little more strategic than that, but in essence, that's what it is.

So, you should only be scaling things up when you've identified some winning Ads, which you do through testing, testing, and more testing.

Even if you find 1 winning Ad, that is driving sales and/or page reads for you, at a sustainable cost, that's all you need to scale things up.

I've spent $10,000's on 1 single Ad.

The 2 Cadences For Scaling

I now scale our Facebook Ads every single day, provided the performance of the Ads meets the targets we need to hit.

Scaling daily is an aggressive strategy, so if you'd prefer a more conservative approach to scaling Facebook Ads, then weekly scaling (i.e. scaling up once a week), works well too (it's what I did for 2 years straight, up until recently).

How To Scale

My overarching Facebook Ads Strategy uses Advantage Campaign Budget, which means that I set the budget for my Facebook Ads at the Campaign level.

This then allows the Facebook Ads algorithm to spend your budget on the Ad Sets within that Campaign that are delivering the best results for you based on your Campaign objective, such as Clicks, Purchases, etc.

When it's time to scale, I simply increase the budget at the Campaign level, and allow Facebook to figure out where to spend this additional budget.

This strategy works so well because I'm not forcing budget into Ad Sets that don't deserve it. I'm letting Facebook decide where to spend the budget.

Facebook knows 1000x more than I do about its user base, which Ads are going to resonate with people, which Ads will drive the most results for me, etc.

I leave the decision-making entirely down to Facebook; which is actually very freeing.

How High To Scale

If you give Facebook too much money to spend, too soon, your performance will drop like a stone.

It's going to spend your money showing your Ads to people who aren't a good fit for your books, just so that it can spend your entire daily budget.

To put this into context for you, if you were to increase your Campaign budget from $20 to $200 in one fell swoop, you're 99.9% likely to see a significant drop in performance.

Instead, I scale Facebook Ads by increasing the Campaign budget by 10% - 20% per day.

Here's how that would look with 7 days of consistent scaling at 10% per day:

Monday: $50
Tuesday: $55
Wednesday: $61
Thursday: $67
Friday: $74
Saturday: $81
Sunday: $89

In just 7 days we've almost doubled our Facebook Ads budget. And you could do this even quicker if you were increasing the budget by 20% per day.

If scaling this fast seems a little overwhelming, scaling once per week (i.e. increasing budget by 10% - 20% per week) will work just as well; it will just take a little longer to scale up.

The Number 1 Metric I Use For Scaling

I mentioned earlier that I only scale up when we're hitting our targets. So, what are our targets? And what metrics am I looking at to decide if and when to scale?

The number one metric I use is ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

But this isn't Facebook Ads ROAS I'm looking at, because this doesn't take The Big Picture into account.

What does take The Big Picture into account is Overall ROAS.

Overall ROAS refers to the ROAS of the entire author business, which includes:

– Amazon Royalties

– Direct Sales Royalties

– Ingram Spark Royalties

– Audiobook Royalties

– Nook, Kobo, etc. Royalties

– And any other income streams

The reason I look at Overall ROAS is because Facebook Ads have an impact on how your brand and business grow as a whole; not just how much you earn directly from the Facebook Ads sales; that's small fry compared to your overall earnings.

If my ROAS over the past 3 days exceeds my Target ROAS (i.e the Return on Ad Spend I want to achieve), I increase my Facebook Ads budget by 10% - 20%.

If my ROAS over the past 3 days is below my Target ROAS, I reduce my Facebook Ads budget by 10% - 20%.

N.B. If you scale your Facebook Ads weekly rather than daily, I would recommend looking at your Average ROAS over the past 7 days instead of the past 3 days.

Wrapping Up...

Scaling Facebook Ads doesn't need to be overwhelming, complex or intimidating.

Keep everything as simple as possible, and lean into using Facebook's machine learning with Advantage Campaign Budget; it can do a far better job than we ever could.

Hope you enjoyed this week's edition of The Saturday Self-Published Author.

Thanks for reading.

See you next Saturday for the final edition before Christmas, and enjoy your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt