How to scale a Facebook ad account in 2023

April 7th, 2023 | Lion Media

Reading time: 3 minutes

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You Are Seeing Success, Now What?

You have gotten to point where your brand is doing amazing and you’re seeing some good success.

Where do you go from here?

There are a lot of different strategies to scale and grow campaigns to reach even more people and to grow the brand as a whole.

During this training, we will cover different options you can implement to grow a campaign by doing more than just adding more budget. 

It is important that during scaling AND testing periods, that we will likely see performance drop.

This is natural. 

Why? Because as you start to spend more money and reach more people, so the FB algorithm needs to relearn and reoptimize.

It is likely performance will eventually pick back up once this has happened.

However, like everything else, these strategies at the end of the day are tests and we can never guarantee every one of them of them will work.

That is why they are tests. 

Strategy 1 - Audience Test Campaigns

Now that you have a good performing Prospecting campaign, a good potential strategy to scale your account even further is to create a campaign solely for the purpose of testing audiences. 

The reason you will want to segment out your audience tests for TOF is to ensure you do not mess with any of the learnings in your existing high performing TOF campaign.

By segmenting it out, you will be able to keep everything entirely separate and you can continue interest and lookalike testing in the new campaign. 

Another benefit of this is to split up budget between campaigns.

Historically, campaigns do not perform amazing when you have a significant amount of budget (over $1k per ad set) being allocated to it.

This is a good indicator that you should start audience testing in a new campaign to spread out your budget in a more efficient way. 

Strategy 2 - Building Out The Funnel

There are also a lot of benefits to having a campaign optimized for higher funnel events like ATC.

One of the main reasons we would do something like this is build up a lot of lower activity within short periods of time. 

For example, we could push a decent amount of budget to an Add to Cart optimized campaign and then retarget people who added to cart in the last 7 days. This would be a highly impactful retargeting audience.

It would also be a relatively decent size because we are running a campaign optimized for it at a relatively big budget.

We may not see the purchase intent in the TOF campaign, but we should see our retargeting audience make up for it. 

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Strategy 3 - Placement Testing 

Reels are taking over IG and FB. We are seeing them also start to take over even in-feed placements.

This is a huge area of opportunity for brands to capitalize on and grow their ad accounts. 

The way you would structure a Reels campaign is the exact same way you would structure a regular conversions campaigns.

The only differences that you will change “All Placements” to “Manual Placements” and select only the Reels options. 

The biggest thing to remember for Reels campaigns is that you need creative that feels almost “TikTok” like.

These types of creatives perform the best in this type of placement. 

Strategy 4 - Branded Content 

Influencer content does extremely well on Facebook and Instagram.

Brands should be utilizing branded content as a part of their strategy on FB & IG. Branded content is ads that comes from the creators page.

It feels more authentic and people respond very well to it. 

We can launch Branded Content only campaigns with high performing TOF audiences to ensure we are pushing budget into the branded content.

This will allow us to effectively scale these ads, while still being able to run our TOF campaigns with evergreen content. 

Strategy 5 - DABAs For Collections

You can also run DABA campaigns for certain collections.

This strategy could be really interesting for a brand that have a variety of products and skews. For example, if you are a clothing brand that has seasonal collections, we could scale by adding in a DABA campaign that only shows a spring collection or summer collection. 

You could also have collections focused on “Best Sellers” or “New to Sale”. There are a ton of areas of opportunities for breaking up the catalog to be a little more focused as opposed to just running all products.

Strategy 6 - Build Out Retention

If a client is looking to scale, it is very likely they have seen success with the brand which means they should have a decent email list.

Email and customer lists are extremely easy wins for Facebook.

They are typically audiences that see a ton of success and great returns. 

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Using integrations like Klayvio to sync email lists and segments are a great way to scale brands too.

You can target past purchasers within the last X amount of days to grow retention and also target user who have just subscribed to their email list in the last X amount of days but who have yet to purchase. 

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The important thing to remember is to try and exclude smaller lists from your larger lists to attempt to make them mutually exclusive. Ex. Exclude frequent purchases from your Everyone audience.

Strategy 7 - Creative Test Campaigns

If you have ads that are working and proving to be successful in your evergreen campaigns but you want to test a new video creative or copy variation, it may be worth launching a campaign for that creative or copy test instead of disrupting your learning in your evergreen campaign. 

If you were to launch a creative test campaign, I would recommend duplicating your best performing ad sets into the creative test campaign and running your creative and copy tests within that campaign.

Once you know what variations are the most successful, you can pull those out and throw them into your evergreen campaign.

This will allow you to run creative/copy test without impacting any of your high performing campaigns.

Strategy 8 - Cross Sale DPA

Cross Sale DPA campaigns are a great way to boost retention on Facebook.

They are essentially a dynamic campaign that shows additional products to someone who has recently purchased.

Facebook is typically smart enough to know what product they ordered and to not show them it again.

However, you could be more granular with it and say if someone bought from the shoe collection, show them a product from the shirt collection, etc.

Budgets

As we scale, it may be hard to understand what amount of budget we should be allocating to a new strategy or campaign.

If the client is open our suggestions and is more flexible with the scaling budget, we should recommend TOF campaign strategies have a starting budget of about 3-4x their CPA (if possible). For retargeting or retention tests, we can start with about 2-3X their CPA. 

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Again, this will all be figured out with the client.

Some clients will want to go conservative to start out a test, which is fine but will extend our testing period and take longer to optimize and to learn/build data. If we have a larger budget, we will be able to learn and optimize more quickly. 

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Budgets will need to be discussed with clients before we implement any strategy.

Always check with them to see if we have their approval for whatever budget you plan on running your test with. 

Looking At The Big Picture 

We know we are not going to see the full picture in FB reporting anymore.

Those days are gone.

It is important as we start to scale on FB that we start to look at other platforms like Google Analytics and Shopify to see how our scaling efforts have impacted the brand as a whole. 

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Have we noticed that email or SMS has had a lift in revenue or new users since we started scaling?

Have overall sales been up in the weeks following our scaling efforts? Has direct/organic traffic and revenue been up in Google Analytics in the weeks following?

These are all things that will be impacted by our efforts in the weeks after we scale. It is important to be looking at everything as a whole! 

Conclusion

Not all strategies will work for every brand.

It is important to have a strategy in place that makes sense for your brand. 

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It will be important for you to set the expectation that ROAS will likely drop while you are testing these strategies in the initial phase.

This is why we will be looking at other avenues (Google Analytics, Shopify) to see how they are impacting other channels and overall sales.

If the strategy is successful, we should see ROAS bounce back once we get efficiency back. 

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