This post is about how to scale your winning ad campaigns.

What that means is that we take what’s working and we do more of that. And by doing more of that, we increase our results at the same rate.

That last part is important.

Because it’s easy to get more results from your Facebook ads. Just by simply increasing the budget by 10 or 20 times, you will definitely see more results.

But that won’t mean you’ll have good returns. And we want to scale our results along with its costs.

That’s why it’s called scaling.

It’s an increase of what we already have while keeping every other metric proportional with each other.

To illustrate, say we have a winning ad set running at P100 a day and gets 5 purchases a day. That’s a P20 cost per purchase

What we want is to increase the number of purchases per day by 50 a day.

The initial thought would be to increase the ad set budget to P1000 right?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always follow that increasing the budget by 10 times will increase the result by 10 times.

If you do this, chances are, you can increase the number of purchases to 20 a day but will cost P50 per purchase.

The growth we want is a sustainable growth keeping everything proportional with each other.

Before we discuss how to facilitate this growth, keep in mind that what we will be doing is based on the data you have gathered. No guessing.

This also means that these should be implemented once you have a good amount of data on hand.

I recommended checking these out with around 2 weeks worth of data considering ad spend is fairly aggressive.

If you are running with a low budget, 2 weeks might not be enough to gather enough data. Just feel it out for yourself.

So here are 4 ways to scale your Facebook ad campaigns in order of importance and priority.

Increase Budget Systematically

I want to reiterate that increasing the budget by a lot won’t always and won’t immediately translate to results at the same cost.

Why?

When Facebook runs on a given budget, it acts like we do in that situation.

When we stick with a budget and have been doing so for a while now, we know where to allocate our resources.

So it would seem that people would know how to handle their spending right?

Why then do we hear of lottery winners eventually going broke?

Because when you give people or Facebook a sudden influx of money to work with, it breaks their routine with their previous budget and end up spending more.

So how then do we do increase budget without affecting all the other metrics?

I recommend increasing the budget systematically depending on what you’re comfortable with.

My most aggressive scaling would be increasing the budget by 50% every week. But my go-to increase is by 20-25% every 5 days. I like to be on the more conservative side.

Increasing budget by this much may sometimes cause a spike on the first day and maybe even the second day.

But as long as you have a well-targeted but relatively big audience size, It should be good.

If you have a small audience size, this is not recommended because increasing the budget will only increase the frequency. This affects relevance score which ultimately raises your costs.

RELATED: Finding Your Customers on Facebook | 5 Ways to Find Your Target Market on Facebook

Take Away the Losers

Apart from doing more of what works, it also makes sense to improve overall results by removing what doesn’t work.

You can start by pausing poor performing ad sets and ads.

The fun part is when you take a deep dive into your numbers.

You can do this by selecting the parameters under the Breakdown tab on ads manager.

This view allows you to see different demographic data and how each performed.

You can view how much more women take action more than men and you can also see the cost per result per gender.

One thing I also like checking is Placement. Use it to check whether your spending to show ads in a channel which is not performing well.

Once you identify demographics which are costing you but are not producing results, all you need to do is to remove them from your targeting.

Split It Up

Using what we did above, take this scenario.

Your ad set is doing well but you wanted to check how men performed against women.

You find that both are converting well but women are converting at a much better cost than men.

Do you cut out the men from the targeting?

I wouldn’t. I recommend splitting them instead. Here’s how I’d do it.

I’d edit the existing ad set to target only women then I’ll duplicate it.

Then for the new ad set, I’ll set to target only men.

So now I have 2 ad sets with basically the same targeting and the same ads but they are now split by gender.

And because I know that women convert much better, I can now increase the spending for the women ad set while keeping the men ad set the same.

Splitting up campaigns by demographic data help you scale the specific targeting that actually matters.

In this case, it all we did was to increase budget, CPA would still be relatively high because of the men.

On the other hand, if we completely cut out the male demographic, we’d still be losing out on good conversion.

So don’t just look into the data at surface value and just go with the best performer. Analyze each data point and come up with the best decision

Do Additional Research

If you find a successful audience, the last way to multiply its success is by trying to find ways to target a similar audience.

You can do this with the help of Audience Insights.

Once in Audience Insights, fill in the targeting parameters with the data on the ad set you want to scale.

Audience Insights will then show you more interests related to that specific audience.

Pick out the interests which are related to your offer and create new ad sets out of those.

This allows you to find more interests to target to help get your ads in front of more people.

RELATED: Facebook Ads Targeting Research | How To Use Facebook Audience Insights

Conclusion

Scaling is great and it’s eventually how you get more leads, customers and sales.

But always do so as objectively as possible. Don’t rely on your instinct.

Let the data tell you what is happening and where you should take it.

The name of the game is scaling, not just growing and getting more results.

I just really wanted to use the word trifecta.

But seriously, as the title suggests, I have found that there are 3 very key elements to a successful Facebook ad.

The first 2 is rather obvious especially if you’ve been running Facebook ads already.

But there’s a third element that I have found that even experienced advertisers miss the mark on.

And yes, that includes me.

In this post, I want to share these three key elements in the hopes of helping you to craft much better ad campaigns on Facebook.

The Targeting

Every Facebook advertiser will always recognize how refined and how detailed Facebook’s targeting options are.

It is known.

via GIPHY

Marketers like me love using Facebook as an advertising platform because it has the ability to put our ads in front of the right people.

And that’s what makes an ad campaign successful: targeting the right people.

You may have the greatest product in the world but if you put it in front of the wrong people, then you won’t find any success with that.

Specificity is also a key thing to remember when setting your targeting.

With the vast amount of targeting points on the platform, it’s almost a waste not to do well-defined research to find your exact audience.

So do your research and get that targeting right.

RELATED: 7 Questions to Ask for Target Audience Research for Facebook Ads

The Offer/Copy

Yes those are two different things but let me clarify.

For an ad to be successful, it basically has to be a good ad which is received well by the audience. Meaning a lot relies on the content of the ad.

If you have the targeting right but you have no offer in place, your audience will not take the action you want them to take.

The reason why the ad copy is tied into this is because it is what will verbalize the offer.

The offer doesn’t even have to be a product for sale. It can be anything that you call your audience to act upon to improve your relationship with them. That includes signing up for a lead magnet, visiting the website, consuming content or watching the video.

Ad copy is basically your online salesman. It has the power to improve an unsatisfactory product and it has the power to decrease the value of an amazing service.

So do not underestimate those few lines of text because they can make or break not only your ad campaign but your business.

The Third Element Which I’m Not Saying In This Sub-Headline

Because if I put it there, you might just scan through the whole article without reading what I had to write.

The third element in the Facebook Ad Trifecta is Timing.

Think about this: You have the perfect audience: children. You have the perfect offer: candy. So you make the offer to the children.

It makes perfect sense because we all know children love candy!

But (ideally), just because the perfect audience is offered something they like for free, chances are they won’t take it.

The audience is right. The offer is right. But we are not at the right time to make such an offer. We’re strangers to them at this point and children don’t talk to strangers.

We know this.

But so many times, both online and offline, salespeople and marketers forget about taking timing into consideration.

They make offers to people who don’t even know them.

Remember, just because you’re giving away something for free doesn’t automatically mean that people will get it.

Don’t be that guy at an event where everyone is having fun then you come in and start selling.

Like in any relationship, it’s important to nurture it first before you make any type of ask. And usually, the bigger the ask, the more nurturing is needed.

Timing. Timing. And timing.

RELATED: How To Turn Prospects Into Paying Customers (The Five Types Of People In Your Target Market)

How To Improve

So if you’ve found yourself guilty of not taking timing into consideration, the hope iI that you’d want to improve your ad campaigns.

Here’s how to do it.

First, identify the key conversions that happen throughout the customer journey.

It’s different for every business but in general, it can usually be divided into three main stages.

The first stage is the awareness stage where we make the prospect aware of our brand and business. Not so much the product.

This is best done with value-filled content which seeks to address a specific problem your audience is having which your product or service and address.

Second is the consideration stage where you can now make a small offer to your audience just to test whether or not they are interested in the product you are ultimately selling them on.

This is usually done with a lead magnet offer where the business offers something of high-value to the lead in exchange for their contact information.

Lastly would be the conversion stage where the business now does the hard selling of their product or service as a solution to the customer’s problem.

The key is to identify where your audience is and to craft offers for them to ascend to the next level of the customer journey.

Do you now see how all this ties up?

Conclusion

I call these the Facebook Ad Trifecta because they are three separate elements but are key ingredients which contribute to a successful campaign.

The right offer at the right time will not sell to the wrong audience.

Regardless of timing, if the right audience fails to appreciate the offer, no transaction will be done.

And offering the right thing to the right people at the wrong time risks you losing customers altogether.

They all work hand-in-hand so it’s highly recommended that all three are taken into consideration when crafting the ad campaigns.

“Facebook ad don’t work”

Have you ever said those words?

I think a lot of people have. Especially those who spent a lot but got no clear results.

As a Facebook ads guy, that makes me both sad and excited.

I’m sad because they actually do work and I’m sorry that they haven’t for a lot of advertisers. But excited because I’m eager to hopefully change your mind about it.

So without any further ado, I’d like to get to the 6 reasons why your Facebook ads didn’t work.

You’re Not Measuring Results

Maybe the issue isn’t whether you are getting results. Maybe it’s because you are not able to measure results correctly.

Don’t worry, it’s understandable and it happens more often than you think.

The main point of any advertising effort is always to spend and get the money back through sales.

I’ve seen advertisers spend lots of money just to promote their business but do not have the proper tracking in place.

In order to properly track the sales coming into your website, you must make proper use of the Facebook Pixel. The pixel is a piece of code advertisers are given to place on their website. This code gathers data from the behavior on your site and sends them all back to Facebook. This includes how many people purchase on your website and how much they spent.

If you’re able to measure this, you can compare it with your ad spend and determine whether or not you are getting proper returns.

But what if your business does not allow your customers to transact online?

For these instances, we use what is called Offline Events where advertisers upload customer data and matches it with the people who have interacted with your ads. For every match, Facebook counts it as a conversion on the ad and allows you to measure your success.

Key Action: Set up the Facebook pixel and standard events for conversion tracking

RELATED: Facebook Pixels: What Are They & How Are They Set Up?

You are Using the Wrong Ad Objective

When creating ads on Facebook, advertisers are asked for their ad objective.

More often than not, I choose conversions. That’s because I define conversions on the website and optimize for those actions.

Sometimes, when I ask a business owner what he or she did with their ads, all they say is “I boosted some posts”.

Don’t get me wrong, boosting posts are great and they lead to sales. Definitely. But they optimize for post engagement which is usually what the client is not hiring me to get for them.

If you want to optimize for actions such as purchases, I highly recommend using the conversions campaign.

When Facebook asks you what your objectives are, it’s best to clearly state your objectives for the specific campaigns you create.

Another common thing I see would be advertisers who want to sell their product through a video. Just because they are using a video, they tend to choose “Video Views” as their campaign objective. This tells Facebook to show the ads to people who are more likely to watch the video. That’s just watching. Not buying.

On the other hand, even if you use the video and select conversion as your objective, Facebook will show your ads to the people who are more likely to purchase.

Key Action: Use the proper campaign objectives as needed by your business model

RELATED: Differentiating Between Facebook Campaign Objectives

You Are Not Retargeting

Retargeting is the process of reaching out to the people who have already interacted with your business and/or website.

A lot of times, we run ads to our target audience with the hope that they visit our site and convert that same visit. When they don’t we just wait again for another person to come in and hopefully buy.

It’s not an immediate thought for advertisers to run ads to the people who have already visited before.

But the key thing to remember is that just because people did not buy on their first visit, it doesn’t mean that they are not interested to buy ever.

Think about it.

How many times have you yourself gone into a store, online or offline, and bought on the first visit?

Retargeting allows you to reach back out to these people and talk to them about why they should go back to your site and why they should take action.

So before you restart your paused Facebook ads, I’d recommend running retargeting ads first aimed at the people who already visited before.

Key Action: Run a retargeting campaign

RELATED: Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Remarketing

You Are Selling to Cold Traffic

Cold traffic is what I call the group of people who are not even familiar with your brand or business.

These people don’t know you. You have not yet established any relationship with them. But yet you’re already asking them for money.

What’s the one thing TV parents told their children?

Don’t take candy from strangers.

But what if the candy came from someone familiar? Someone who you knew and trusted. Someone you had a relationship with. Candy for you!

It’s the same online. You’re the stranger.

Before asking for something, build that relationship first. Get them to know you and trust you.

Key Action: Lead with value by providing content that educates and/or entertains.

RELATED: How To Turn Prospects Into Paying Customers (The Five Types Of People In Your Target Market)

Your Targeting Is Off

I’ve written quite a number of posts here in this blog about how I rave about targeting as one of Facebook’s best features for advertising.

The data is so vast that it’s actually very easy to get this wrong.

For example, a local gym may want to promote itself. Though it makes sense for the advertiser to target ‘Health & Fitness’ in general, we also have to remember that not everyone who is into health and fitness are into bodybuilding and exercising. Some prefer sports while others may fall under that category for diet and wellness.

Assuming that the gym is focused on bodybuilders, the advertiser may want to target specific body building icons like Lazar Angelov. People falling under the Health & Fitness interest who are not bodybuilders will probably not be interested in Lazar Angelov so you’re able to remove them from your audience already.

A lot of times, advertisers get targeting wrong not because they are missing the mark but because their targeting is too broad.

Key Action: Narrow down the targeting by asking “What interests (or combination of interests) would appeal to ONLY my specific target market?”

RELATED: 7 Questions to Ask for Target Audience Research for Facebook Ads

You Don’t Have a Call To Action

This usually happens to beginner advertisers, including me when I got started.

The first few ads I ran were basically just a big sign to ask people to “check out our site”. But merely visiting the website did not do much to move the business forward.

Some advertisers now still do ads with the basic message of “look at this!” instead of “do this”.

If you want people to buy, ask them to buy.

If you want people to sign up, ask them to sign up.

Most of the time, it will require you to have an offer as an incentive for them to take the action. This is why there are a lot of websites giving away free but value-filled e-books to get you to sign up for their list. Or at the very least, there are blogs which you sign up for in exchange for regular access to their content.

You can’t always expect your audience to know what to do. Guide them by calling them out to the different actions you want them to take.

In the ad copy, tell them what to do after they click.

Your audience makes a lot of big and small decisions throughout the day which depletes their willpower. Don’t add to that.

Key Action: Make your calls to action clear. And measure it.

Conclusion

The points I gave are common reasons I have personally seen in different ad accounts. These are normal and are part of the process of growing as a Facebook advertiser.

I personally have been guilty of all these which is why I am able to identify these issues and recommend an action point for each.

So if you’ve given up on Facebook advertising before since you did not get the results you wanted, I recommend reading through this again, identifying what applies to what you did and take the recommended action.

Facebook advertising works guys. You just have to also work with it.

There’s nothing like it.

For the past 2 years, I have been helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses online. I do it with the help of various tools and platforms. And nothing among those I’ve tried are as great as Facebook ads.

I am a big advocate of the use of Facebook ads for business growth regardless of what business you have.

This year, 2017, I promised myself that I would aim to help Filipino business owners get more success from their business by teaching Facebook ads.

So if you are a business owner looking to grow your business and want to learn the power of Facebook ads, this post is for you.

When I started this blog, I wrote articles about the very basic building blocks of Facebook ad campaigns. So in this post, I will provide the links to the specific articles which will help you learn how to get started with Facebook ads.

This way, you can learn at your own pace since the main sections are broken down into separate articles.

Getting Started

Begin with learning why you should consider Facebook ads for your business.

Then learn what the ad campaign structure looks like.

At this point, you will start to come across jargon so you will want to make sure you know what the words mean.

Now you’re ready to create your ad campaigns starting at the campaign level where you choose your campaign objective.

You’ll also start to find your target audience at the ad set level.

Those are the very basics of creating and running Facebook ad campaigns. If you’re in the mood for some added learning, check out these additional topics. They will definitely level up your Facebook ads game:

• Facebook Pixel
• Audiences
• Remarketing

Hopefully, these articles give you the basic tools to run Facebook ads to help your business grow and level up.

If some concepts are still unclear, please do let me know in the comments. I’ll help clarify it for you and for others who may have the same question.

On the previous article, we talked about how to track certain events on your website with the help of the Facebook Pixel.

This article will discuss another layer of event tracking using the pixel and is very beneficial for sites with multiple funnels.

So if you haven’t checked out the first article, I recommend going over it here before proceeding with this piece. This is specifically because you would need to know the basic event tracking in order to understand how to set up event parameters.

What Are Event Parameters?

Event parameters are bits of information advertisers place alongside the event tracking pixel snippet. These allow us to track what specific events take place in what part of the site.

Say you have 2 separate funnels for two separate audiences. For example, you have a fitness coaching program and you have a funnel for crossfit and a funnel for power lifting. It would make sense to have two separate lead magnets to attract the different audiences. If you went with standard event tracking, every lead that comes in will be under the ‘Lead’ event. But since those two audiences have a big difference within the same niche, it may confuse the data in the pixel making it more difficult to optimize.

Enter event parameters.

Imagine if you could segregate which leads came from the crossfit funnel and the power lifting funnel. Adding event parameters help differentiate the different events by adding in additional information.

Event parameters you can add in include:

• Value – usually used for purchases to tell Facebook the price of the purchased item
• Currency – goes hand in hand in value
• Content_name – Name of the product
• Content_category – The classification you would put the product in
• Content_type – The type of item the product is

So using the fitness example, I could have 2 different funnels where when users sign up, they are tagged as a Lead with the Lead event. But, we will be able to differentiate which lead comes from which funnel if we properly tag each lead pixel with the proper content_name.

How to Install Advanced Tracking

We’ll get a bit technical here.

I would recommend starting by mapping out all the conversions you want to track. This will ensure that everything is covered and that you won’t leave any stone unturned.

I use an excel sheet listing down all the events classified by the funnel and I already label each event parameter. This ensures that I won’t have any duplicates.

Once you’re ready, it’s time to put in the parameters on the pixels. The assumption here is that pixel standard event tracking is already in place. If not, I recommend doing that first.

If standard events are properly in place already, all you’ll need to do now is to label each one.

The parameters go after the standard event in the code. Here’s how it looks like:

Image Source

To make sure you’ve correctly set this up, just visit the page you added the pixel on and check on the ever reliable Pixel Helper. It should be able to identify each individual parameter as well.

So what are the uses of being able to track these individual parameters?

Well Defined Custom Audiences

You know about custom audiences right?

One way to create custom audiences based on standard events. So for example, I can make a custom audience based on leads. The problem with this is if I have multiple audiences, they’ll all fall under the same custom audience. It will then be difficult to analyze this one big audience.

However, with the help of custom parameters, we can create custom audiences for specific lead magnets and campaigns. To do this, all you have to do is identify the parameter you set during the creation process.

Start by going to the Audiences tab and selecting to create a custom audience. In the pop-up, select website traffic to start setting it up. From the drop-down menu, select the event you want to track and put in the number of days applicable. Then click on ‘Refine by’, select ‘URL/Parameter’ and select your chosen parameter.

This process will allow you to segment an audience who took a very specific action on your site. You can create a more refined lookalike audience this way.

Custom Conversions

The other benefit of labeling each event is the ability to create custom conversions.

Say for example a user converts on one of your ads for a lead magnet and for some reason, opts in for another lead magnet. If you are just tracking standard events, Ads Manager will show 2 conversions from the same campaign.

Custom conversions allow us to track specific conversions happening on our websites. In addition, having these allows us to optimize for very specific conversions.

Here’s how to set up custom conversions.

First, go to the Custom Conversions tab from Ads Manager and from there, select to create a new custom conversion.

A pop-up will open and this is where you’ll create the custom conversion.

You can choose to create conversions based on URLs but for our current topic, we’ll select defining a conversion based on events. So in the example below, you’ll see that we picked ‘Event’.

Choose the particular event you want to track in the field next to it.

Below it is where you’ll input the parameters you set.

When you select ‘Next’, you will be asked to label the conversion. For purchases, you can also choose to assign a value.

And now you’re able to track specific conversions.

You’ll also want to set this up on Ads Manager. To do so, just click on columns, select ‘custom’ and find the custom conversion you just created.

Conclusion

Advanced events tracking can get a bit daunting but it’s definitely something very useful if you have a website with a high volume of traffic or if you have multiple funnels.

This is especially helpful for businesses who serve different customer personas.

If you don’t segment them properly, you’re left with a big audience whose details and interests can be all over the place and misleading.

It may seem very technical, but I promise that after immersing yourself in it a bit, you’ll get the hang of it. Even if you know nothing about coding, like me!

I know we got advanced here so if you need any clarifications, send them in in the comments below.