The Art of Online Business
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The Art of Online Business
When is the Right Time To Scale Your Meta Ads and Common Mistakes to Avoid
My wife Jamie and I unpack the essentials of scaling Facebook ads effectively. We discuss recognizing the right signs from Meta Ad Manager that signal it's time to increase your ad spend and how to do this without disrupting the algorithm.
Whether you’re managing small-scale campaigns or large ad budgets, understanding these nuances can make a significant difference in your advertising success.
Watch the episode on YouTube.
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In this episode, you're going to learn when is the best time to scale your ads and what are the signs that Facebook Ad Manager is telling you or Meta Ad Manager, if you want to call it that that you can scale your ads and also what are the best ways to scale ads. Because if you scale too much and I'm going to tell you more about this later you will break your ads, ie you will upset the algorithm, ie your cost per lead or your cost per sale will go up. Your ads just won't work as well, so you can't scale too quickly. I'll break that down right after we start talking about the signs. You can see this beautiful lady next to me. This is my wife, jamie.
Speaker 1:Hi she's also a Facebook ads manager and we're just gonna have a chitchat because we thought this kind of episode is more natural and conversation between us, and then, as you continue, you already have a couple of Facebook Ads clients and as you continue to add more skills on, it just makes sense that you can ask some of these questions to me too, and the listener will benefit.
Speaker 2:so let's dive right in so, basically, when is it time to scale your ads and what is the best way to go about doing that?
Speaker 1:well, when they're profitable is when you should scale them easy answer that's the easy answer. Right, the more nuanced answer cases. There's like three kind of ads that I put in the notes right here lead magnet ads, slo funnel ads as in self-liquidating offer funnel ads, and then launch apps, because those are primarily the kind of ads that I run for my clients. So right.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about lead magnet ads first. This is a free offer that you have and this is where you are growing your audience, you're building your email list, those kinds of things, right, and so say, those are going well. How do I know? What do I do next? How should I scale that?
Speaker 1:Well, you need to know your data, you need to have calculated that you're making money per lead and then you can scale. Because there's a saying that as the email list grows, so the business goes. The bigger the email list, the bigger the business, right, but we don't just want to be scaling our lead magnet ads because we have a low cost per lead.
Speaker 1:Because if we do that let's say we're not selling anything, then why are we scaling our lead magnet ads? Why are we growing our email list if we have nothing to sell now? Yes, for example, I have a client. She's an author and she is scaling her email.
Speaker 1:She's growing her email list before her book is ready to purchase because, she anticipates selling lots of copies and maybe for contractual reasons, like she has to sell, she needs to sell a bunch of copies right you know, in order to have gotten the deal with a publisher I'm not saying she has a deal, I know I know nothing about her contract, but I have talked to another lady named megan stevenson who is a coach for people to help them get six figure book deals with like actual, with like Penguin and Random House and these kind of things, right, and you have to sell a lot. I remember I had another friend of mine, jamie Sears, and she definitely she had pressure when her book launched. She had to sell and hit these numbers and so, like I really was happy when I found out that to sell effectively and communicate effectively, you just need to speak. You need to think like a genius, but you need to speak like a third grader. It's true.
Speaker 2:Hey, we're about to have a third grader in our house.
Speaker 1:We are, oh my gosh, she's getting too grown up. She thinks she's like an eighth grader, though my gosh, yes, but yeah, I've been speaking like a third grader since I graduated third grade. You know, so, and it hasn't gotten much better than that.
Speaker 1:So, I felt like, hey, this is great, just got to keep doing more of the same. Anyway, what I'm trying, or what I was telling you, is that you need to have your numbers down, starting from like do you regularly launch or do you regularly sell something? Like I had one client who every month he would send a promotion to his email list and then he knew, like, what percentage of people bought and he knew how much revenue. So then he told me oh, if you just bring in leads under this lead cost, I will be profitable as a business, because he knew his numbers. So if you're launching regularly, then know your launch numbers how much revenue is generated, how many leads come into the launch and what percentage of your email list usually signs up for that launch. It's probably gonna be around 3% of your email list will sign up for a launch. But yeah, that's when you can scale lead magnet ads so for lead magnet ads.
Speaker 2:Basically, you don't want to just keep scaling them if you have nothing that you are eventually going to be selling to. Yeah, you gotta be able to monitor. Gotta have, yeah, you gotta have something to sell to after. Sure, makes sense, makes sense.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:All right, so the next one. Then what about an SLO funnel? When should we scale that?
Speaker 1:All right when it's profitable.
Speaker 2:I have a feeling I'm gonna keep getting this answer. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe, no, but look at the make sure that you're looking at the right metrics. Inside of Facebook ad manager, one column that is key is the ROAS column, r-o-a-s, and that is the return on ad spend column, and when it's positive, when it's one, you're breaking. Even. When it's above one, it's positive. When it's one, you're breaking. Even. When it's above one, it's positive. If it's like 1.8, all that means is you're giving a dollar to Facebook and Zuck is giving you one dollar and eighty cents back your revenue positive. And, of course, if it's like 0.75, you're negative so scale okay, once it's positive.
Speaker 1:But I Guess when you do scale, keep in mind best practices. Ideally you have more than one ad that's converting for you, so as in your ad set might have two or three ads in there. Ideally, that way, as you start to pump more money into your SLO funnel ads, the algorithm meta, if you will, can kind of ping ping pong between the ads that are working for you and show one ad or a combination of ads to one person and thus make you money. It kind of has more ads to work or to make work on your behalf and yeah, otherwise you also can look at the cost per the CPR column, cost per result.
Speaker 1:It's a contextual column. It could be cost per lead If you're running lead magnets. It could be cost per sale If you're running ads directly to something you're selling, like an SLO funnel. But you want to look at that cost per sale and just double check Because sometimes the data gets a little wonky. So if you see that you have positive ROAS, but then you look at your cost per sale and you see that you're selling a $27 thing and the cost per sale says like $80, like how could I have a cost per sale of $80 if I'm positive on my $27 thing? Like I do have one client who's like that but it's because he has lots of things for sell in the following email sequence like after somebody buys one thing and then also also if you have like upsells and downsells that can change.
Speaker 1:Like your ROAS, for example, and maybe depending on how you set up your ads in the first place, facebook Ad Manager is only recording that initial sell. Like your ROAS, for example, and maybe depending on how you set up your ads in the first place, facebook Ad Manager is only recording that initial sale, but it's not recording the upsell. So this is a plug to make sure your analytics are set up correctly Right.
Speaker 1:And then make sure you have the right metrics enabled so that you can read the results inside of Facebook Ad Manager and make sure that you are reading the signs correctly to scale Right.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of data, a lot of things to look at.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of factors. That's why people will say oh yeah, I tried Facebook ads but it didn't work Like well. Some of those folks just tried boosting from Instagram, which I would say is not really running Facebook or Instagram. Don't do that, but others. You know you go inside and you think you have a hold on it, but like it's like, you have to pay ignorance tax.
Speaker 2:We all do.
Speaker 1:When we first start using Ad Manager, because there's so many settings in there that if you don't know how to use it, you're going to lose money. It's right.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so okay. So that's it for SLO. That's okay yeah once.
Speaker 1:Once they're positive, you scale. We're gonna talk about in a while how you actually scale, okay so you don't scale too fast, you know in strategies, but yeah, look to see if you're profitable. Okay so, you don't scale too fast, you know in strategies, but yeah, look to see if you're profitable. It's the answer.
Speaker 2:And so so my next question, then, is what about launch ads? How do we scale launch ads? And I have a feeling you're going to tell me if you're profitable, if the previous launch was profitable and there was a healthy we're just speaking high level here.
Speaker 1:If there is a healthy like profit margin previous launch, then you probably want to increase your launch ad budget. That is one way to scale. Okay, but you might also be looking at your cost per lead, let's say for a launch, and realizing whoa, this cost per lead this time is only $3. Whereas last time it was $5. But you have the same budget, so maybe you want to increase your budget so you get more leads.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, Right yeah. I mean generally from launch to launch. You want to be increasing your profitability each time, Right?
Speaker 1:Or maybe you have a launch that also has something for sale, like you could be doing a type of webinar and it has an upsell a paid upsell where they can get the recordings. Or maybe your launch is a workshop a paid workshop and there's a VIP access sort of deal where there's where people paid to get extra access to you during the launch. Maybe it's a bonus launch session, bonus Q&A session, recordings. You know this sort of thing, but the it still boils down to you. Notice that you're profitable right so you scale.
Speaker 1:Or you notice that you're profitable Right, so you scale. Or you notice that you already had a budget, but somehow your leads are a lot cheaper for this launch than the previous one. So you scale After you do your due diligence and look into why your leads are a lot cheaper. Like I always get skeptical if something is cheaper or more inexpensive, less expensive than it should be. I'm always going to look and make sure. Oh, did I make a mistake setting up the ads? You know, did something change? You know, like, was there a mistake on the sales page? Like that happens all the time before I just go scaling and you should do that too.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, okay. So then how? How do we go about doing the actual scaling?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't scale wrong. So I've had a number of coaching clients. I do one on one coaching. It's three calls over the course of 28 days and then in between those days you'll get access to me, unlimited access, where I'm looking at your Facebook ads, and the result is that you will have successfully run a Facebook ad campaign, either for your first time or I'll make your currently running ad campaigns a lot better. Plus, we'll take a look at your funnel, a little funnel analysis, and you'll know what you need to change to make your funnel more profitable. There, that's the plug. The link is theartofonlinebusinesscom.
Speaker 1:Forward slash call if you want to set that up with me Now. So there are several mistakes you want to avoid. There's one big mistake, which is if you are running your ads and you see, oh, I'm profitable, let's go ahead and 4X this thing and increase your budget by 4X. Do not do that, please, because you will break the algorithm.
Speaker 2:Because that's too much, that's too much.
Speaker 1:It's too much, too soon. If you quadruple your budget by going in and clicking on that little edit pin you know inside of Facebook ad manager and quadrupling the budget, you will see your cost per sale jump up Like you'll. You'll just you'll break the algorithm because it's used to the price or the daily ad spend that you've given it, and so it's like optimized there. And when you throw a huge budget at it, all of a sudden it's going to be like oh, what's going on, I don't know what to do. And then, since it doesn't know what to do anymore, your cost per sale goes up.
Speaker 2:Just kind of. Right. So what is a reasonable amount that you should increase by?
Speaker 1:So if you want to say, quadruple your ad budget, you should do something very straightforward, like take that ad set that you're running and duplicate it, so you're making an identical ad set, but on the new ad set that you're going to schedule to go live in the future, you will have that budget much higher from the get-go.
Speaker 1:Now I also need to say and this is a finer point but ad accounts are optimizing around meta is optimizing your ad account around what it usually spins mm-hmm so there's also this thing that happens, the situation where, if an ad account is normally spending $3,000 a month in ads, mm-hmm then we might not get as a good results initially if we jump up to $10 thousand dollars a month in ads.
Speaker 1:Right all of a sudden, because the account just isn't used to that kind of ad spend right though I've seen that in accounts that have a good offer and then change of course by the client to where they're like. You know what I want to. Take this one launch, evergreen, and I used to only run lead magnet ads to the tune of like two thousand dollars a month and a launch and I spent like seven thousand dollars on a launch budget. But now that this launch is repeat, it's like doing well over and over again. I want to put this on evergreen and run like fifteen thousand dollars to it. Then, like usually, that first month cost per sale can be a little higher or cost right it can be a little higher. So that's how you scale.
Speaker 1:If you need to like 4x your budget, but you might be asking I guess the listener might be curious what if they just want to incrementally scale? There's two. There's also two different scenarios. One is if you're using campaign budget optimization, which is also known as advantage campaign budget plus, all right, it's at the campaign level of your ad and it's one of those options there. If you're using that, which I don't like to use it initially, I like to test ads first. So I manage the ad budget at the ad set level. So I manage the ad budget at the ad set level. But if you're managing it at the campaign Level, the good news for you is because your budget is managed at the campaign level, because you're using you have that advantage campaign budget plus option turned on you can scale your ads up to like 40% per day.
Speaker 1:No-transcript too quickly, so I just conservatively 15% per day, Realistically. If you're doing this for yourself, Meta can probably handle like 19, 20% per day. You can jump your ads up as much as 23%. That I've seen in one day, but maybe wait an additional day. So on the third day jump it up again.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you're listening to be conservative, 15% a day Yep, got it.
Speaker 1:Can't go wrong with 15% a day.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, sounds good. So this is at the ad set level, though You're not making a whole new campaign. This is just at the ad set level. You're gonna duplicate the ad and then from there, you're gonna bump up the ad spend by 15%.
Speaker 1:Well, no, if you have a currently running ad set One or two or three or how many ever ads in it, ad set with one or two or three or how many ever ads in it. Usually I don't put more than five ads in an ad set. By the way. If that's already doing well, you just start scaling that one up by 15% a day. The only time you need to duplicate an ad set is if you need to give it a very like a much higher budget right away. Like if I want to go from like $50 a day to $300 a day, I need to duplicate that ad set and give the new ad set a much higher ad spend.
Speaker 2:Okay, got it. Yeah, and so does Meta, automatically, kind of, if, say, you have two, three, up to five or so different ad creatives in there, different ad creatives in there, and so you jump up the ad spend and Meta is going to kind of automatically even that out a little bit or just push ad spend to the different creatives it's going to push ad spend to the ads that convert the best. It should.
Speaker 1:We have to monitor it right and that's why, like, that's what we do as ad managers. We look at ads every day. But, like, yes, if you have five ads in an ad set, meta most of the time will send the ad spend to the ads that are converting the best for you Either that's the lowest cost per lead or the lowest cost per sale. But you do have to look at the process and monitor it, because sometimes the algorithm just makes stupid mistakes and it's sending more money to an ad but that ad doesn't have the lowest cost per lead. You know, like I see this all the time, and so then I have to troubleshoot, so to speak, and begin to look at certain metrics that I look at in order looking at the link click-through rate next, in order to establish which ad is actually Probably the best performing one, and then look at, like, the frequency, to see if, like an ads being shown too often.
Speaker 1:I even look at the reach column the number of unique people who have seen an ad to see like, oh, meta sending Adspin to this one ad, it's getting me a three3 cost per lead and 6,000 people have seen it.
Speaker 1:I can trust, statistically that lead will stay around $3. Maybe there is this other ad that's getting me like $1.50 cost per lead, but only 70 people have seen that ad. I can't necessarily trust that. If I shut off the more expensive ad that had 6,000 people see it, that that one that only had 70 people see it but had half the lead costs, I can't trust that lead cost would stay low. And so there's a lot of nuance when it comes to managing ads, but we're trying to keep it simple for this episode, which is don't scale too quickly. 15% a day is conservative and good if you're managing your ad budget at the ad set level, and good if you're managing your ad budget at the ad set level and if you're managing your ad budget at the campaign level using Advantage Campaign Budget Plus that's what it's called now could change.
Speaker 1:They're always changing the names. Then you can scale up to 40% per day.
Speaker 2:So how long should you wait, I guess, to turn off an ad that isn't performing as well, and then that way you kind of find your winners and you can make sure that your ad spend is going towards those that are performing well. So how long do I wait, or how do I know when to turn an ad off then?
Speaker 1:I can give you some milestones for lead magnets ads that I do in client accounts. I know the main answer is it depends kind of, but I won't give that marketers cop out. There's milestones that I used to check in on an account, right? So when ads go live, I make sure to look 24 hours so the next morning, because I always set ads live in the morning, early in the the morning, early in the morning. Anyway, if you know me, I'm always singing random songs.
Speaker 2:This is true.
Speaker 1:I don't know the end of that song or even the next part of that verse, but I know that tune. Yeah. Somewhere from long ago, in my childhood, a long time ago. So ads go live in the morning and so, 24 hours in, I check in to make sure that ad is actually spending money showing to people, right, make sure it's running three days in. I want to look at that ad. Let's say that there were three ads inside of that set right.
Speaker 1:I want to shut off the outliers right away. An outlier just means maybe two of the three ads have like a $5 cost per lead, but one of those ads is like a $30 cost per lead, so that's an outlier. I shut it off and then I wait. And if there's no outlier, it doesn't mean that day three you must shut off an ad. This isn't ads management, this is just shutting off the outlier. The other scenario could be that you got Two of the three ads that are getting a cost per lead. One ad is just sucking up ad spend but getting zero leads. Shut that off, it's an outlier. And the reason that we have these milestones in place is because, like we live in Mexico, like they dance bachata and salsa here. We tried for a year actually, and then I hurt my foot and then I smashed my face in in a bike accident yeah, so we're gonna try again.
Speaker 1:The point is is like managing your ads is like a partner dance, because it takes two to tango suited it right, and your dance partner, though, is is the algorithm, and so if you over tinker, it can't look good, it can't do its part to optimize ads on your behalf and find the right people To opt into your ads or buy from your ads, so you have to give it time.
Speaker 1:That's why you have these milestones and you don't over tinker. So day three, you shut off the outliers, because sometimes the algorithm does wonky stuff, and then on day five, you need to. You can do some ads management, and I'll explain that in a moment, but the first thing you need to do is establish a trend like okay, so day five, I look at the cost of the leads on day five, then I look at the cost of the leads on day four, and then I look at a range of from day one to day three, and I I look at the cost of the leads on day four, and then I look at a range of from day one to day three and I answer the question is the trend going up? Are things getting more expensive, or are things getting less expensive, or are they pretty stable? And if they're ping-ponging kind of up and down, that also can mean stable, right.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, because we're not trying to look at one day performance. We're trying to look at an average performance here, but we look for a trend. And if that trend is downward in lead cost, then we don't do anything on day five.
Speaker 2:We just wait.
Speaker 1:Right and see how low the algorithm gets the lead cost to go. And how low can you go? I never was good at that in skating rinks on skates. Trying to skate under the bar, yeah.
Speaker 2:Skates or no skates, I was never good at it.
Speaker 1:The chicken dance, though that was fun. Yes, I can do it. See this is why you got to watch the YouTube channel right now, because you just missed that. If you're not watching us on YouTube, but if that trend is going down, you don't do anything, you wait you know, another three days, so that would be five plus three, eight to the eighth day.
Speaker 1:If the trend is upward, though, then it's time to take action, and so what you do is you use like the first step of my Olympic gold medal testing framework. It's like track and field, right? Or, since we live in Mexico and I just saw Pisto y Campo, pisto y Campo, which seems weird to me, like why, would you say.
Speaker 1:But then I'm like oh, it's literally track and field so then you have to do some ads management, which means that you look at the winning ad, you keep that one running, you shut off your two loser ads and you bring in some new contestants. What this looks like is if you started off with three different pieces of ad copy, well which ad? And they're all paired with the same ad creative, like the graphic or the image or the reel, the video. You shut off the two losers. Now you have a winning piece of ad copy and you pair that ad copy with some new images or some new reels.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Test for another three days.
Speaker 2:Right, just keep repeating the process.
Speaker 1:How well does that explain things.
Speaker 2:Sounds good.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. If you want to know more and you don't want to lose your money, then I have a free guide for you. It's not fluff, it's the seven most common mistakes that I see when coaching clients that they make in their Facebook ad manager, and so I show you the mistakes in a video for each mistake and the solution, so that you can not make that mistake or fix your mistake if you already are making that mistake and losing ad money. So you can get that in the show notes below there's a link to it, and until the next time you hear me or see me or us, be blessed and we'll see you the next one take care thanks bye.
