Facebook ads can get really expensive really fast if you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

Consider yourself warned!

 

Managing ads across the Facebook platform always comes down to performance.

 

And performance cycles every day. Therefore, ads can get unprofitable if you don’t know how to optimize them continually.

 

Most business owners look at Facebook ads as a revenue generating machine and will continue to scale campaigns without a strategy in hand.

 

This can lead to a huge bill in wasted ad spend and generate a negative return for your business.

 

Today I’m going to talk about the top 5 things to consider when scaling your ad spend and how you can squeeze a better ROI from your next campaigns.

 

 

Choose the right bid strategy

 

Your bid is how Facebook spends your budget and gets you results in the auction. Facebook has different bid strategies that can impact your overall campaign performance.

 

Choosing the right bid strategy will depend on your business’s objectives and how much you’re willing to pay per action in the auction.

 

If you don’t win auctions, Facebook will simply not show your ad to your intended audience.

 

If you are new to advertising on Facebook, I would advise you to stick with lowest cost.

 

This allows Facebook to bid as much as is needed to improve delivery on your campaigns and get you results.

 

Another option you can play with is the bid cap bid strategy. Setting a bid control tells Facebook the maximum amount you’re willing to pay in an auction.

 

Set your bid cap to an acceptable amount and monitor your results over the coming days.

 

 

If your bid is too low, Facebook will prevent you from winning auctions and eventually stall your campaigns.

 

Use the delivery column inside your ads manager to monitor campaign performance. You will see a ‘Bid Limited’ status which indicates your adset is not delivering as expected.

 

On the other hand, having a high bid can lead to unsustainable acquisition costs and a decrease in your profit margins.

 

Target cost is another bid strategy you can use to improve performance. With this bid strategy you can enter an average cost you want your results to come in at.

 

Be mindful to set an amount that is low enough to get you consistent delivery. If your target cost is too high, you can experience performance issues. In this case, lower your cost to improve delivery.

 

Improve your targeting

 

Targeting plays an important role in your ad campaigns. In fact top advertisers say it’s one of the major reasons why your Facebook ads campaign can fail.

 

You need to understand who your target market is and where they hang out. Ask yourself questions like:

 

• Who are my customers?
• Where are my customers?
• What interests might they share?

 

Facebook provides you with a plethora of targeting options so you can dissect your audience by interests, demographics, and behaviors.

 

Layering your audience with these options improves their quality and helps Facebook find you results making your ads more relevant.

 

While narrowing your audience is one way of improving your targeting, you can also go wider if you have enough conversion events on your pixel.

 

 

Over the years, Facebook’s algorithm has gotten so powerful that it can show your ads to people it thinks are most likely to take the action you want.

 

Therefore, unless you have a good reason to narrow your audience, give Facebook full reign, and sit back and evaluate the kind of results you get.

 

You can also create lookalikes from your best performing audience. A lookalike audience shares characteristics of your seed audience so make sure you are using a custom audience of high value.

 

Building exclusions within your targeting is another way of improving performance and saving your marketing budget.

 

For example, exclude your buyers from seeing your cold prospecting ads. If they purchased from you in the past, they fall into a completely different part of your customer journey.

 

Have creatives that resonate

 

Creating a memorable ad experience is as important as targeting. Remember, Facebook always looks to see how it can maximize value for its users.

 

Therefore having creatives that resonate with your audience will improve ad performance and create sustainable campaigns.

 

If your creatives don’t resonate with your audience, it can be difficult for Facebook to spend your budget thereby giving you a higher acquisition cost.

 

Remove low-quality attributes from ads such as comment baiting and like baiting to improve their relevancy and performance.

 

 

Choose automatic placements

 

At the time of writing this article, Facebook has 15 placements to showcase your ads. I recommend taking advantage of this so that Facebook can deliver your ad across its family of apps and services.

 

By selecting automatic placements, you allow Facebook to open your ad to all placements and find people in your target audience that are more likely to convert. This lowers your cost and gives you a better return on your spend.

 

Remember to test

 

I can’t stress the importance of pre validating your audiences and ads.

 

Facebook has a split test feature that allows you to conduct A/B tests on different aspects of your ad and see how it improves performance.

 

Rather than throwing huge budgets on a campaign that you’ve never run before, consider using the split test tool at a lower budget and validating your creatives with your audiences.

 

Once you have your winning ads and audiences, increase spend gradually through vertical or horizontal scaling.

 

It’s important to monitor delivery during this phase in case you need to decrease your budget if results drop.

 

 

Conclusion

 

To have profitable Facebook ad campaigns, you need to know your way around ads manager and have a strong game plan laid out.

 

Be prepared to invest more time and energy in learning the nuances of the platform and how it will impact your results.

 

Doing so will help you scale your business consistently and protect you from losses in the long run.