Scale Ad Campaign With Facebook Ads
How To Scale Your Facebook Ad Campaigns Like A Boss

So you’re testing a product with Facebook Ads and get some sales. But what’s next? How do we take this campaign and scale it from $100 a day to $1000 a day or even $10,000 a day? Worry not, because I just wrote the complete guide on how to scale your ad campaigns with Facebook ads like a BOSS!

This article will show you the different scaling techniques other marketers use including the one I personally use for my own campaigns. If you had no idea how scaling works, trust me that after reading this article you’ll be scaling like a pro!

find winning products to dropship

 

1. First We Wait

Don’t rush getting out of the testing stage and jumping right to the scaling stage – Wait at least 24 hours before launching new adsets.

It’s important to watch closely how people react to our product and see if we’re still in profit after 24-48 hours. Sometimes we may get sales on the first day and nothing on the second so if you begin scaling too early, you’ll lose even more money.

In this case, we can use Facebook ad reports to check which audience is performing best and create new ads targeting only that audience. And we keep an eye on our original ads, killing the bad ones and keeping the good ones. We’ll need something solid before we can begin scaling.

 

2. Let The Scaling Begin!

After getting solid resutls, we can finally start thinking about scaling our campaign!

It’s important to not rush it and launch too many new adsets because we’re only in the first stage of scaling. We start slow and act accordingly to our campaign’s performance and to our budget. From here on out I’ll introduce you to different scaling techinques and show you what scaling techniques I personally use.

 

3. The First Stage Of Scaling

We start scaling by adding new adsets to our existing campaign and the total number of new adsets depend on our budget. Some people like me start pretty slow by adding 2-3 new adsets but there are others who add a lot more. In the first and second scaling stages, I prefer taking the “safe” route and add a normal amount of adsets and not go crazy.

The number of new adsets to add also depend on your campaign performance and how confident you feel. For example:

If I’m getting really cheap conversions and my campaign just screams a “6 FIGURE WINNER RIGHT HERE” then there’s no way I’m taking it slow. I will jump in and instead of launching 3 new adsets, I’ll launch 15 or even 20 new adsets!

Now that we know what to do in the first scaling stage, let’s jump in to all the different scaling techniques we can use:

Scaling by duplicating winning adsets – This scaling technique is probably the most common and widely used by a lot of successful dropshippers. Simly take a winning adset and duplicate it x3, x5 or even x10 times depending on your budget and how much of the risk you want to take. It’s also best if the adset we’re duplicating has a big audience(200k, 500k, 1m+) and not a small one(10k, 30k, etc).

Once we finished duplicating our winning adset “x” times, we’ll need to keep a close eye on our new adsets and later kill the ones with bad performance. Don’t wait too much and kill the ones that don’t bring sales and already reached the break-even point. Remember that duplicate adsets get much less “grace” time and should be killed faster than regular ones.

And you should also kill these adsets if you see barely any link clicks. Follow the regular “when to kill an adset” rules – You can read about it in my previous How To Test Products The Right Way Using Facebook Ads article(point 6).

Scaling by duplicating winning adsets with a slight change – This is the technique I currently use. If before I was simply duplicating a winning adset, now I prefer duplicating it with a tiny change. There’s no real reason to that as I don’t think duplicated adsets really “compete” against each other, especially if the audience is big enough. It’s just that I found duplicating an adset with a slight change to work much better for me.

This change can be by changing something in the targeting like gender, age or adding/removing an interest. Examples:

  1. If our winning adset targets desktop+mobile users, then a slight change we can make is to target only mobile users. Or to target only mobile iOS users.
  2. If our winning adset targets nurses, then a slight change can be to target nurses with kids(Nursers + Parents[all]). Or to target nurses who are single.
  3. If our winning adset targets men(18-34) who like video games, then a slight change can be to target men(18-34) who like video games AND now in college/university.

This is how I start and scale my campaigns – By making a small change in the original winning adset and let it run.

Scaling by duplicating and raising the daily budget of winning adsets – This is not a technique I use but I tried it and in some occasions it worked and in some it didn’t. I must admit that I am not a big fan of big daily budgets and I usually stick to small $7-$10 budgets. This may lead to me having campaigns with hundreds of active adsets but I’m ok with that.

Nothing out of the ordinary here, simply duplicate your winning adset and give it a bigger budget. It can be $20 daily, $30 daily or even $200 daily. It all depends on your advertising budget and how much you can risk. If you’re new to this and want to try it, then just double your original budget and if it works well, double it again. For example:

If you daily budget for a winning adset is $10, then duplicate it and double the budget to $20. If the new adset gives you good results, duplicate it and double the budget again to $40. This is what I call the “safe” way. Of course, if this is too slow for you then you can always try much bigger budgets and maybe it’ll work for you. You can never know until you try 😉

Scaling by raising the daily budget of your original winning adsets – This is something I do not recommend doing and im my opinion, you should always avoid editing a working adset especially if it brings sales. This is because once you touch a working adset, it goes back to it’s “learning” phase and you can kiss goodbye getting sales with that adset. Even Facebook reps are saying the same thing that you should not touch a working adset but instead duplicate it if you want to make an edit.

BUT, I must point this scaling technique because for some marketers it simply works. They just raise the budget of a working adset and let it run. That’s it… A lot of marketers and even Facebook reps don’t recommend doing it but if you want to try then you’re free to do so.

If you want to know more, you can read my 5 things you should avoid doing when running Facebook Ads article.

Scaling by duplicating winning adsets but with a lowe budget – If you’re tight on budget or afraid of duplicating existing adset with the same buget then you can always lower the daily budget of the duplicates. If you’re running a $10 daily budget adset, duplicate it 3 times with a $5 daily budget.

This way you’ll lose less money if simple duplication scaling technique doesn’t work.

 

4. The Second And Third Stage Of Scaling

Scaling Facebook Ad Campaign

The second and third scaling stages are basically a repeat of the first stage but with us launching more adsets. If in stage one we launch 2-3 new adsets, in stage two it will be 5-10 or even more. If we get to stage three it’s when we definitely have a winner and this is when we really go crazy and launch A LOT of adsets.

This screenshot you can see above are results from an old Valentine’s Day campaign I had. This campaign had about 170 adsets and each adset I launched was always with a slight change. As you can see I prefer having low daily budgets instead of big ones.

Note: The total amount of adsets is different from the total amount of active adsets I had running at the same time. I was shutting down bad adsets and creating new ones every day so I think the number of active adsets running at the same times was probably about 110~120.

Note 2: The same product I was selling during Valentine’s Day is currently selling well for Christmas. If you tested a product and it was selling, give it another try and advertise it as a Christmas gift. It may turn out to be a winner 😉

I also use add to cart optimisation on this ad account and not purchase optimisation. The reason is that each ad account acts differently and for me the purchase optimisation doesn’t bring any results. Only Add to Cart optimisation brings me the results I need.

One important thing you need to remember is that when scaling, your ROI will drop – If your ROI was 100% or 200%, don’t expect it to be the same or higher when scaling. Usually, your ROI drops but this shouldn’t scare you because the profit you’ll make will be much higher.

Would you prefer spending $500 and earning $1000 OR spending $10,000 and earning $5000? Don’t pay attention to your ROI but only to the total profit you make. Remember that scared money don’t make money!

 

To Sum It Up:

You can never know which scaling technique will work for you until you test it for yourself, but after reading my article you’ll know which are the most popular and it’ll be easier for you to decide which one you want to try first. Remember that when scaling your ROI drops but it shouldn’t scare you because the profit you’re about to make should be significantly higher.

I wish you all a successful Q4 and happy selling! (Let me know if you have any questions in the comments)

 

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

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30 COMMENTS

  1. hii daniel,
    isnt it a problem in facebook ads to duplicate adsets with the exact audience?
    it is called audience overlap.
    could you refer to that?

    • It’s not a problem and it’s one of the most favorite scaling techniques by many marketers. Duplicate at will without worries. I had duplicated ads with a total audience of 5k and it was fine, not recommended to do it with such a low audience but it still got me sales.
      So when you have audiences of 500k or 1m+, and you’re running a $5-$10 daily budget adsets then there’s absolutely no overlap to worry about.

  2. Awesome post Daniel!

    So when duplicating adsets, if I wanna do 5 for example, they all would have a budget depending on my budget, but would the audience overlap or not?

    I have good ROAS on a 560K audience, duplicating adsets makes me feel like maybe the same people will see the ad and I’d pay twice or three times and so on extra.

    Do you get what I mean?

    Thanks 🙂

    • They wouldn’t overlap because the audience is big. It’s a common mistake to think that each time you duplicate the ads, Facebook will serve it again to the same people. So no worries about it 🙂

  3. Ok great, makes sense.

    Sooo, I’ve been getting a lot of sales with great ROAS. In the ecomhunt fb group, someone said to scale, duplicate into a CBO.

    So I lowered the budget on current adsets, duplicated the best into 5 adsets for CBO with £100 per day budget, first day ran the whole day (yesterday) with CBO and my ROAS dropped to unprofitable.

    Woke up this morning and it has spent £30 with 0 purchases, usually lately – I wake up and I have morning orders to process. Not today, now.. all day 0 sales.

    Have I done it the wrong way?
    I’ve stopped the CBO.. :/ .. Now I have re-upped the budget on the winner that was duplicated, but still no sales!

    Should I start again? I’ve got a great idea now of who buys and who doesn’t.
    £1,200 in sales on a <£20 product.
    Some people were even ordering 4!!

    I don't wanna lose this or start something new, what would you suggest?

    Thanks

    • SS for the above comment: http://prntscr.com/pz8sz2

      Was nicely growing, switched to CBO then /|_

      The start of the climb is when I followed your blog and implemented the ideas/strategies, so thanks a lot!

      Anyone who reads this, don’t listen to anything else but this blog (in my opinion/experience)

    • Scaling with CBO is not something I do but you can never know if it’ll work for you until you try. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out for you but that doesn’t mean it won’t work for future products. For now, avoid jumping on the CBO train with this product and let’s stick to the regular methods.

      What makes me a bit sad here is the fact that you lowered the budget on your current adsets. As I explained in one of my article blogs, we don’t touch working adsets and if we want to make a change, we duplicate it. But what is done is done and hopefully they’ll continue working and bringing you sales.
      And then you touched again the adsets haha. Well again, it’s already done and just keep them running for now.

      Remember that EACH time you touch a working adset and change something, it goes back to the “learning” stage. Then it can take time till it goes back to work normally. So to answer your question, yeah you did some things wrong 🙁
      So for now let’s do this.
      1. Keep for a bit more time your adsets. See if they start bringing you back sales. If they don’t BUT you feel there’s a chance they wil, then lower the budget if you can’t afford them spending. If the results are bad(high CPC, no events, etc) then just kill some of them.

      2. Create new adset for people who buy. Try adding maybe a new interest or a different age group. Break down your age groups and check which ones bought most. Look for other interests you can try.
      Try targeting only iPhone users, etc.

      3. Create 2-3 more retargeting ads. It looks like people absolutely LOVE your product so jump on them with new retargeting ads. Even exclude the buyers and give them an extra 10% discount, *special deal, 24 hours only!*, Early Black Friday, etc. Be creative with your retargeting ads 🙂 [Budget doesn’t have to be big. 3 new adsets, $3-5 per adset will be fine]

      4. Create custom audience from website visitors, people who added to cart, buyers, etc. Then create lookalike audience and you will have another audience you can try and target. Hopefully these lookalikes will work.

      5. Start looking for more products to sell in your niche/to your audience. Your pixel is HOT and you already know what they like. Try your luck and find more products to sell.

      6. Congratz Anthony! You’re making superb progress with great sales and profit! So cheer up even with some of the mistakes you did and keep up the good work 🙂 You’re doing better than most people. Hopefully this product can take off again!

  4. Hey! Thanks for the fast reply, appreciate it.

    Yeah I am kicking myself that I touched working adsets, it’s something I KNOW not to do, but mindlessly done it when going for the CBO.

    I tried the retargeting previously after one of your comments in the past, I got worried that the frequency was 6, so I paused it until future (of that date) so I could have more of an audience to target.

    Maybe that’s because I did it for content views and at that specific time I’m not sure there was enough without the same person seeing it over and over.

    I do know the ages most likely to buy, and feel like after interest testing that I had chosen the best, but with the knowledge I have now, maybe others will work. Love it!

    Love your steps above, thanks for taking the time, much appreciated. I’ll get on it and will keep you updated!

    Budget isn’t an issue, loving this whole learning curve and process and even if losing – it’s buying data.

    Thanks

    • Don’t let the frequency worry you. Regular cold traffic ads can have frequencies higher than 2 even 3 after some time scaling. As long as you get sales, keep it going.
      And when you launch retargeting ads, use purchase optimisation ok 🙂 Don’t optimsise for view content.

      Seems like you’re on the right path! Good job.
      Keep the updates coming 🙂

  5. Woah!

    Just been checking my delivery times, some packages are being delivered in 4 days!
    I thought 8 days was good, hows that possible from CN? Haha!

      • Yeah definitely from China, 17track says China post > Royal Mail (UK) (Delivery 4 days) and has the logs.

        Originally started like this (translated from Chinese)
        Wuhan City, leaving [Wuhan Tongcheng Jinjiadun], next stop [Wuhan International Processing Center]

        This supplier is on fire though, I process orders and the next day they have tracking info which is great! Especially considering I just found them by chance.

        About retargeting, yeah it was 6 frequency, and the costs started to increase and I had no sales. Felt like the audience was too small and meant that I was spamming them with my ad.

        The optimization would of been PUR, but the audience I wanted to retarget was content viewers who didn’t purchase, does that sound about right?

        Thanks man, really wouldn’t be learning and progressing this fast if it wasn’t for ecomhunt and especially this blog.

        I found the product on here 🙂

        • Seems like this is one hell of a supplier so keep in close contact with this guy 🙂
          About the retargeting: I get what you mean but when retargeting, we use purchase optimisation and let it run. As simple as it sounds.
          You could also try running a PPE retargeting campaign and try your luck there. This has worked for me lately and it can work for you too.

          And back to your supplier… Check his store for more stuff you can dropship and even if he doesn’t have anything you need, ask him to see if he can bring it to his store so you can dropship it. Or ask if he has something “special” just for you to sell. Some sellers may have new items but they’re not yet listed so by asking, you can get dibs on it 😉

          And I’m a bit curious. You found it as one of the winning product articles or a product straight from Ecomhunt?

  6. Hey man thanks for the reply, yeah that sounds like a good plan!

    The longest delivery I’ve seen so far is 11 days so I’m very happy with this.

    Some customers have wanted refunds and after providing pictures I have refunded or solved their problem, customers first!

    After duplicating campaign the 2nd one has been unprofitable after spending £111 to get <£90 in purchases.
    Will keep the main one going.. about retargeting, I set it up again targeting ATC without PUR, the audience is "not yet available" the campaign is active with – results, so I need to wait till the audience populates? (It told me 2-3 days, idk why.)

    I will definitely contact the supplier, I was wanting to ask him about putting my brand logo on the packaging, what's the best way to go about this?

    Yes, direct from ecomhunt while browsing through. Chosen 1 product and stuck with it till it works. Added other niche related products to the store, and also use a pretty good app to upsell in the cart with very similar items to what they have in their cart to begin with.

    I guess negative comments are gonna happen no matter what gets sold, do you suggest just to ban and focus more time on the marketing etc? (Suggested by others in the fb group)

    Thanks man, definitely got me on my way! 😀

    • Good think you did about refunding for bad orders and not making a scene. Not only the customers will love that but also you saved a headache if they opened a case against you on PayPal or Stripe.
      Nothing to do here unfortunately but to try and find new interests, launch maybe new creatives and try it again to the same audience.

      About retargeting – Just create an adset optimised for purchase and run it for your visitors and that’s it. That’s what I meant. ATC and PUR audience will take time to populate. You had like 1k+ in sales so it’s not that many orders and it will take more than 50 orders for the audience to be ready to use.

      Talk to the supplier in a normal way. No special tip really… You can always talk about more “future orders” that will come in for him to agree to your terms.
      Happy you found this product on Ecomhunt. Keep up the good jon!

      I either hide or ban negative comments. If the negative comment is just to sh*t on my product or tell they found it cheaper somewhere else, then I instantly ban the guy. If it’s just a bad comment about the product quality and they tagged someone and are now speaking, then I hide it.
      Why hide? So he doesn’t know his comment doesn’t appear. If I delete his comment, he can come back and start spamming my post that I “delete” legit comments(and this always happens when I sleep lol). So I just hide it and give them the ilusion that his comments are there 😉

  7. Yeah I agree, I’ve seen some dropshippers simply ignore all bad comments and see that the customers have no way to refund or return etc. It’s not good to see that.

    I have way over 50 orders, but that audience still seems to not be available, nevermind I’ll wait. In the meantime yeah, I have setup visitors retargeting just at £5/day to see how it goes.

    That’s an awesome idea about the nagtive comments and it gave me an idea.
    I’m just going to add common bad words or slander to a filter list and it will hide the comments automatically, I always think they need to be deleted, but this is a good point.

    BTW, do you ever see a big difference in pixel purchases vs store purchases? I’m waiting to create a PUR LAA to see if that will be good, but the pixel thinks I’ve had 80 purchases when I’ve really had 95, 95 would mean I am 5 away from a PUR LAA but unless the pixel is delayed a lot it’s always gonna need more than 100 before that can be made?

    • Hi Anthony!
      Can you give me an update about your audiences? Is it already available.

      And yes there’s some difference in the store’s purchase compared to what Facebook receives. I remember back in the good days when we could see an exact audience when it was lower than 1000, to get an audience of 100 purchases I had at least 150+ real purchases. Maybe even 200…
      You can only wait now 🙁

  8. Hey,

    I stopped selling the product, sizes are terrible and been refunding a few people, when they send images they are so small compared to our size chart which I had converted from supplier sizes etc.

    I didn’t want to keep going because of the % of refunds from how many was delivered. Still waiting for ones I ordered to be delivered to judge size etc.

    Someone mentioned about refund % where paypal or payment processors could stop me using them and I think mine was 17 delivered, 4 refunds and yet to see more.

    On the other hand, I’ve started a new one today. £9 spent on ads, £50 in sales. Looks like it may be a good one.

    Back to the other product, my refund policy states that only damaged/defective items will be refunded with proof (in more professional terms). Someone in the ecom group said the policies don’t matter and people will just dispute/chargeback. So what’s the point in having a refund policy?

    Also, now that I’m doing another product, if I reach PUR LAA data, wont that be mostly from the other product stats?

    Yeah those audiences are ready, below 1000 with strict rules.

    Makes sense about the pixel vs actual, silly really but it is what it is! 🙂

    • Hi Anthony!
      It’s good that you’re refunding the bad orders and it’s a good decision to stop selling this product for now till you check it out by yourself. You don’t want any trouble here with PayPal.
      I have no idea about that refund ratio but I don’t think it really matters as long as you don’t get any chargebacks or cases open against you. As long as no official complaint is filed against you, then you’re clean with the payment processors. *Best of course will be to call them and ask about it*

      Refund policy is needed for 3 things for us dropshippers.
      1) For Facebook – Facebook asks your store has all the necessary pages and a refund policy, privacy policy, etc pages are there to keep Facebook calm(and other ad platforms).
      2) For your customers – For them to trust you and for your shop to look professional
      3) To win your money back – PayPal or other payment processors will ask for your refund policies and with a good proof, you’ll get your money back. It’s for you to decide if you want to jump into battle. If it’s a cheap product then it would be best to just refund some of the orders. If the order is big then you can show proof and eventually get your money back.

      Good job about the new product. Sounds good so far, hope it goes well too 🙂
      You’re correct about the LAA data but if it’s in the same niche, then it won’t be a problem. Also don’t forget that people run general stores with 1 pixel only so don’t worry too much about it ok.

  9. Thanks for the reply man appreciate it!

    I’ll keep you updated in future when I scale following this post info 🙂

    Totally understand, good points there.

    Thanks

  10. Hi Daniel….
    I have 2 questions i hope you can help me!!!

    1. Reading several post from you, i think you don’t use the CBO option?????

    2. When you explain tactics to scale ad set, my doubt is > if i want to scale a couple of Ad Sets, i must duplicate those on the same campaign or i need to create a new campaign ?

    Thanks a lot for your GREAT Content

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