How to scale your Facebook ads to maximise your return on investment

This involves constantly analysing the performance breakdown of your ads and cutting off the targeting properties that aren’t performing well; resulting in an advert that is hitting the right gender, age group, placement, platform, device, and several other properties, to ensure as little ad spend is wasted as possible. Want to learn how a Social Media agency scales their ads? Here’s how:

The place to start is by running what we call a ‘Test Ad’. Test ads are adverts with generic targeting, scheduling and placement, and are designed to act as a feeler for the market, to test what they are most reciprocal to. Test ads should have a daily budget of between £10-£30 on auto-bidding, and should be allowed to run for at least 3 days. This will give the ads enough time to attract enough attention to show a pattern for you to scale from.

If your advert is producing a return on investment or gaining significant traction after the first 3 days; whether that is in the form of eBook downloads, purchases or link clicks, then go into your ads manager and select ‘Breakdown’ and click ‘Placements’. If one placement (right column, news feed etc.) is performing considerably better than the others, then duplicate the advert set but only have the successful placement selected. Complete the same process for the device (mobile, desktop) too.

Then comes the slightly tricky part. To scale effectively, you’ll need to switch to manual bidding, which is something that we find a lot of businesses are yet to fully understand. Take the cost per conversion (eBook download, purchase, view content etc.) and times it by 100. That is your daily budget.

Then take the cost per conversion again, and half it. That is your initial manual bid. Then monitor your advert every couple of hours. If it is spending money, then let it run, unless the cost per conversion is too high. If it is not spending money, then up the bid by 10% until it begins to spend money.

This will result in an incredibly efficient advert, which will only spend if it is delivering results. Although it is a little technical, don’t be afraid to give scaling a try – and you can always drop us an email if you’d like any further advice!