How to Scale Facebook Ads in 2024 — Best 10 Tactics

Facebook is, without a doubt, the biggest social media platform to ever exist. The app, now known as Meta, garnered 2.89 billion monthly active users for itself, as reported in the second quarter of 2021. Facebook was also the first-ever social media platform to reach one billion users in the third quarter of 2012. With 3.51 billion people using at least one of Facebook’s services, including Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram, every single month, the app has managed to maintain its cult following over the years.

With such a loyal and engaging audience comprising more than one-third of earth’s population on Facebook, the famous social media platform presents a drool-worthy opportunity to brands & companies all over the world to sell & market their products and services to their desired audience and demographic who otherwise maybe never even hear about them. There must be a reason why 48.5% of B2B decision-makers prefer resorting to Facebook for research and why more people buy from Facebook than Instagram and Pinterest. Well, the reason is pretty much as clear as ice; the plethora of marketing and advertising opportunities that Facebook provides is unmatched.

Speaking of using Facebook to advertise products and services, brands often have to resort to scaling their ads in order to reach a more comprehensive and diverse audience. But what is scaling? In short, simple words rising is investing more profits to reach more people on Facebook to acquire more leads and drive more sales.  

Scaling, if done successfully, can be a game-changer & life-changer for brands and entrepreneurs regardless of the scope and size of your business. However, you need to have a sharp eye for detail, a research-backed strategy, patience, and determination for a successful scaling strategy. Or you may just end up losing all your money because your advertising campaign falls flat.

If you also want to learn about scaling your ads on Facebook, you are at the right place. We have covered everything you need to know to scale your ads successfully. But before we jump into the details of the best ways to scale your ads so you can join the 200 million small businesses on Facebook making fortunes for themselves, let’s get down to the basics.

What Does Ad Scaling Mean

If you want to be successful on Facebook, you need to make sure that the niche you choose is profitable and enjoyable. Once you start marketing, you need to invest money in it. Sometimes, as a creator, you have to invest more money in your ad campaign, so you can expand the audience you want to target. That is one example of scaling an ad on Facebook. Another thing you can do is reuse an older successful ad campaign to target a similar (AKA lookalike) audience. This is another example of scaling your ads on Facebook. Normally creators, brand owners, and entrepreneurs use two different ways to scale their ad campaigns. They either scale out or scale up.

What does scaling ads do? When you decide to scale your ads, what you are doing is that you are essentially maximizing the results of your most successful and best-performing ad campaigns. And how do you do that? By making specific changes and adjustments in your advertising campaigns. For instance, you can expand your budget assigned for your ad spend, work on your creative content department, or you can search for more high-performing audiences and work on them.

The end goal of scaling ads on Facebook is to get more leads and drive more sales from already running, successful, and high-performing campaigns.

How to Decide When Is The Right Time to Scale an Ad and When to Kill It

It is not as complicated as you think it is to decide whether to kill a campaign or scale it. You can easily make that decision after letting your ad run for 24 hours to 48 hours and then decide what to do next based on the data acquired. Based on the data, you can either let your ad continue to run to get more information to make a more informed decision, kill the ad entirely and look for why it failed, or scale it up and invest more profits into it for more profitable results.

Let’s look at some amazing recommendations on what you can do in some instances:

• You make multiple sales (more than five): Do we even need to say it? Scale it up! Scale your ad campaign and expand your investment by more than $20 straight away, without a second thought.
• You’ve got zero conversions with little to no engagement: You need to lay your ad campaign to rest right away. And before you start another campaign, review your ad’s text and image and revise your targeting strategy to see where you went wrong.
• You have had zero conversions (AKA no sales), but you have garnered very high engagement: When you have low CPC but a high CPR, it is better to let the ad campaign run for a while (for example, 12 hours). A high engagement rate means that your targeting strategy is on point, but you may lack in the creative department (design, text, images, etc.) However, if you still do not make any sales after letting your ad run for another 12 hours, then turn it off and review the text, image, and design. If, after giving it a thorough review, you start making sales, then let it run but keep tracking the data closely to see you don’t end up losing any money.
• Break-even: This means that the profit you earned by your sales is equal to the budget you spent on your ad campaign. In this case, let your ad run for a while but recheck it after a few hours. As long as you keep getting a profit equal to your ad spend, you should let it keep running. However, keep a close eye on such ads because you have to kill them as soon as your ad spend increases more than the profits. On the contrary, if your sales increase, increase your ad spend by up to $15 ASAP.

Here’s a little secret for you: Many top content creators on Facebook follow a specific process or schedule to run their ads. For instance, they launch their ad campaign every Thursday and then let it run until Saturday. On Saturday, they kill the advertisements that do not perform well and scale the one that has been showing impressive results.

Vertical Facebook Ad Scaling

The first type we have is Vertical ad scaling. Vertical ad scaling is when you assign small ad budgets to cover many different types of audiences. One of the best benefits of vertical ad scaling on Facebook is that you’re less dependent on individual audiences to generate leads and drive sales. The perk of using vertical ad scaling is based on the simple concept that when you’ve more than one type of audience performing well, it does not hurt your marketing efforts too much in case any one of the audiences stops performing.

This, however, also means that you have to cultivate a more extensive library of audiences according to your goals and your niche to target on Facebook. So, it will take a lot of time, effort, and energy to make sure that you develop your audiences well and have enough of them to ensure the success of your ad campaign. Moreover, you may also be required to rotate your audiences from time to time to give them a break for some time, so you have a good volume of an engaging and responsive audience to work with.

One of the best ways to develop an audience is by conducting four different experiments to see the right number of audiences for your Facebook ads account because every ad account works with a specific number.

Choose four different budgets for every day. So, start with 20, $40, $60, and $80 every day and see which ad spend gets the most performance out of your ads from the start. Once you know what budget your Facebook ad account works best with, you can start scaling.  

Horizontal Facebook Ad Scaling

Now let’s talk about the other type of ad scaling, I.e., horizontal Facebook ad scaling. Kind of the opposite of vertical ad scaling; in horizontal ad scaling, you work with far fewer audiences than vertical scaling, but you have a far bigger ad spend budget.

This probably sounds easier to work with, right? Because there are fewer audiences, so it means you will have to do less work managing them and leave the rest to Facebook’s algorithm while you sit back and watch it do its magic in your favor. The reality is far from that. Horizontal ad scaling does not work equally for all ad accounts. It requires a considerable number of experiments to determine whether it will work for your brand or not.  

Before you decide to experiment with horizontal ad scaling methodology, keep these few tips in mind:

• First of all, the majority of Facebook advertisers feel that their target audience has a set point where if they increase their budget for their ad spends, it results in an increase in their cost per conversion. So, you need to experiment to determine how high you can go with your ad spend before it starts raising your cost per conversion.
• Another thing you need to keep in mind for scaling your ads horizontally is to try opening up your strategy for targeting. Instead of narrowing your audiences down by limiting them to a few different interests, try being very broad and vague to get an idea of what AI and Facebook’s algorithm can do for your marketing campaign.
• Be open with your options. When you sit down to develop an advertising strategy for your brand on Facebook and scale your ads, try launching up to a dozen audiences at a time. You could go even higher than a dozen (try 20 audiences at the same time), or you can go lower and try targeting two or five audiences at the same time – whatever you think works the best for you and your brand.  Just keep one thing in mind that the majority of these audiences are going to be nothing but duds and will not work for you at all. In fact, you will be lucky if only two or three of these audiences work for you. Therefore, keep an eye out for the few audiences that are actually doing the work and moving the needle for your brand on Facebook.

Here’s a life-changing tip for you: Facebook’s ad algorithm works the best when you get up to 50 conversions in a week. Let’s keep the math simple and suppose your cost per conversion is around $10 per conversion. Thus, if you multiply $10 per conversion by 50 conversions in one week, you will get $500.

Now, all you need to do is reverse-engineer these numbers to decide the amount at which you should set your Facebook ad budget.

In this example, you’d divide $500 by 7 days in the week, which results in $71 per day. From here, you can start your experimentation with setting your Facebook ad spend budget at $71 per day and see if Facebook’s algorithm works for you and your ads start performing better than before.

How Should You Scale Your Ads: Vertically or Horizontally

This is not as straightforward of an answer as one might think it to be. There is no plug-and-play formula for it to use and determine what scaling strategy you should use; however, there are some questions. If you correctly answer these two questions, you can easily decide which scaling strategy will work the best for you and your business:

Does Your Business Need Scaling Quickly?

Assuming that you have already worked with Facebook ads before and have some experience with how it works, scaling horizontally is likely the best option for you. Horizontal scaling can let you increase your ad budget to any level you wish to right from the very beginning. However, there is one downside. There is more inherent risk involved with scaling your ads horizontally because you have to wait for a long time to see which of your selected ad sets are performing the best. 

Do You Want To Get Rid Of Any Kind Of Risk And Go For Slow But Steady Exponential Growth?

If your answer to this question is a big fat yes, then vertical scaling is your best bet, especially if your first time experimenting with Facebook advertising. Many entrepreneurs, brands, businesses, and content creators like to use this method since it requires minimal testing and once you find the niche that works the best for you (in terms of profit and return on investment), all you need to do is expand your ad spend, and you will be good to go!

1. Try Cutting Your Ad Budget as Cost-per-result Increases by Using Facebook's Automated Rules

This method is similar to stop-loss order in the world of stock trading. Facebook’s automation rules let you automatically lower your ad spend decrease if it stops delivering desired results. For instance, you can tell Facebook’s Ad Manager to decrease your ad set budget by 30% if its cost-per-result becomes more than $15.

Let’s take Reveal Bot as an example here. It has set its settings in the way that its daily budget will decrease by 25%; its cost-per-result exceeds $100 with only two purchases or less than two.

Facebook’s automated ways to decrease ad budgets are a genius way to control any unintended losses when scaling an ad.

2. Increase Your Current Ad Campaigns’ Spending Budget

There are multiple methods to find out if raising your Facebook ad campaign’s spending budget will end up delivering more conversions and subsequently driving more leads or will it just increase your cost-per-result.

For example, one way to find out is by checking the frequency of your Facebook ad campaign. All you have to do is go to your Facebook Ads Manager and adjust the reporting time to the past 30 days. Then choose the "Delivery" report, and you will be able to see your frequency per ad campaign.

• Suppose the frequency is less than 3 points. Then it means that you still have some margin to scale your ad campaign’s budget.
• If the frequency falls somewhere in-between 3 to 6 points, then it means that you may or may not be able to achieve better results when you scale your ads. However, your cost-per-result will most probably be a little bit higher.
• If the frequency is more than 6 points, you should not invest more in your ad campaign. It will help you reach the exact audience but will not convert at a better level. So, it is better to drop it.
• If your ad campaigns already, on the other hand, have a considerably high frequency, then you need to try other techniques such as adding new creatives to your ad or expanding your target audiences.

3. Try Targeting New Interest Groups

This is one for people who have had some sort of success in one specific group of audience. For example, suppose your ad campaign in home-cooking turned out to be successful. In that case, you can try using Facebook’s Audience Insights feature to find out what other topics this specific audience is interested in. This could be home gardening, or DIY Crafting, or even painting, for example.

Facebook will tell you the audience size, affinity score, and Relevance Score of the recommended pages so you can choose whichever page suits your needs the best.

Bear one thing in mind that this is not a cut-and-dried technique. It will require some patience since it needs some testing initially; however, once you get the hang of it, it will definitely beat any targeting random interest groups.

4. Raise Your Ad Campaign Spending Budget Slowly

When scaling your ad campaign’s budget on Facebook, you have two options to do it:

You can either add all the extra scaling budget at once while risking a sudden increase in your cost-per-result, or you can add your additional ad scaling budget in small steps, so you don’t end up confusing Facebook and its algorithms.

How what do we mean by confusing Facebook algorithms? Well, Facebook’s algorithms go through a learning phase so, you must wait for at least 48 hours every time you change something in your ad campaign before you start seeing actual results. So, make sure that you do not make any changes in your ad campaign budget during Facebook’s algorithm’s learning phase.

According to Facebook, when it is going through the said learning phase, ad sets usually have a higher cost-per-result than usual and are also less stable. Therefore, in order to prevent such behaviors that hinder ad sets from exiting the learning phase from happening, here’s what you need to do:

• Wait for Facebook’s algorithm to exit its learning phase before you edit your ad set.
• Do not make repetitive unnecessary edits because they will make your ad sets re-enter the learning phase over and over again. Any change in your ad campaign that affects the way your ad set performs can cause it to re-enter the learning phase, and you will not see real-time results sooner.
• Avoid setting unrealistic budgets (neither too high nor too low). If you set a very high or very low budget for your ad campaign, you will get an inaccurate indicator of the audiences for whom Facebook’s delivery system should optimize. To ensure that you have a successful learning phase for your ad campaign, we recommend you add the extra scaling budget in 15% to 20%u increments.

When you increase your ad scaling budget in small increments, Facebook considers it a reasonably small change to your ad set, and as a result, its algorithm retains most of the data it pickup up from the initial phases of running your ad campaign.

On the other hand, if you increase your ad’s budget way too quickly and way too fast, you will just de-stabilize your ad delivery. This will throw off the algorithm and decrease your ROI.

5. Expand the Lookalike Audiences

If you have already run successful Facebook ads, then you would already know about Lookalike Audiences. Lookalike audiences are one of the most effective ways of locating potential new customers on Facebook.

A 1% Lookalike Audience based on a group of customers is where you can start your targeting. However, you will start experiencing a decline in your ad performance after advertising to this audience because most of your audience would have already seen your ad. The signs that you might have reached this point include a general drop in performance, high-frequency rates, and increased CPMs.

One way to improve this situation is to expand to a 3% or 5% Lookalike Audience belonging to a similar group. This way, you will scale your ad budget without exhausting your audience. Depending on where you are from, a 3-5% Lookalike Audience usually comprises 5 to 10 million people.

You can find the Lookalike Audience creation tool in the “Audiences” tab in your Facebook Ad Manager. Suppose your experience with the 1% Lookalike Audience group was pleasant. In that case, you will find your Facebook Pixel to be full of valuable data that Facebook’s algorithm can use to filter through this large group of people and find even more potential customers for you. This will mitigate the confusion that a new marketer with very little Pixel data might face when targeting a large group of people.

6. Expand To Other Platforms

Most businesses and content creators start advertising on Facebook or Google Ads. While Facebook’s main strength is to let you create an intricate personal of your desired audience based on their behavior and interests, Google lets you pick up audiences at a stage where they are already actively in search of a solution.

Fortunately, there are other places you can reach once your audience starts growing. Here’s how you can scale your advertisement:

You can use YouTube Ads to open for yourself a whole new array of possibilities on the Google Ads platform. Or you can use Pinterest to target specific groups of the audience like women aged 25-54, people interested in lifestyle products, DIY fans, etc. This way, you can drive traffic to your website and build a visual storefront of your brand online at the same time.

7. Create A/B Split Tests to Optimize Your Ad Spend

Facebook has recently introduced a new feature in its Ad Manager that lets you do split testing with your ad campaigns. This split testing feature has made it easier for people to scale their ads because they can now set a large upfront budget in hundreds and thousands of dollars and allow multiple groups of people to compete for that budget. The Facebook algorithm then can do its work and recognize which of the ad sets is performing the best and allocate your majority of ad spend towards it.

Why do split testing? It will reduce wastage of budget and let you scale your ad spend without risking it on a poorly performing audience.

8. Expand Location Targeting

Searching secondary markets when expanding an audience is a genius way to find more customers at a low cost. It depends on the product and distribution system, but if you dropship products internationally or sell lightweight goods, targeting a global audience is the best option.

For instance, the USA has one of the most significant populations of online shoppers, creating a lot of competition. As a result, people often overlook other countries with large English-speaking populations, such as South America, Canada, and Europe.

You can use Facebook Pixel to find more customers abroad by using data about your customer profile. You can also create a 1% Lookalike Audience with countries outside of the USA to skyrocket your reach and use lower CPMs to your benefit.

9. Target Your Current Audiences with New Ads & Offers

If you already have a winning audience that converts well, you can change the ads you are showing them and introduce new products.

Not every user responds to a certain ad in the same way. Users use Facebook and Instagram differently and like to see different types of content such as videos, blogs, images, infographics, etc. So, cater to different preferences and create a larger audience for yourself.

Try using new videos, images, placements, and ad formats, and change your ad creatives. Test different ad formats like static images, carousels, and videos to compare their results. Changing the type of offer on a current product will also deliver great success. For instance, if you are offering free shipping, switch it to a discount code to appeal to a different audience.

10. Try Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)

You can monitor your Facebook ad budget by setting individual budgets for different ads or setting an overall campaign budget. The former gives more control over specific ad sets in a campaign. For instance, you have advertisements that differ in audience size or ads with mixed big strategies or optimization goals. It is better to have control. However, managing a budget manually can take a lot of effort (and time).

Use campaign budget optimization to take some pressure off. All you have to do is decide a budget for your ad campaign, and Facebook will do the work. It will divide your ad spend among your best-performing ads.

Campaign Budget Optimization distributes your budget automatically, delivers more from your ads at a lower cost, and lets you set a daily or lifetime budget. Use it to make it easier to scale your Facebook ads easier.

Conclusion

No matter which strategy you select to make it easier for you to scale your Facebook Ad Campaign to get the most out of your ads without risking wasting your money, make sure that the objects you choose are attainable and realistic.

Plus, scaling your ads on Facebook is not exactly as easy as it looks on paper. You would be surprised to know that even the most experienced Facebook marketers get confused when managing Facebook’s sophisticated and intricate ad structures.

However, before you scale your ads, keep one thing in mind that a bigger budget doesn’t always produce incredible results. It can be tempting to blindly dump all your money into an ad campaign when you start seeing your ads convert customers but do not fall into that temptation. If you ever find yourself in the need of a helping hand, you can always come back to our guide for you to find not one but 10 genius tactics to scale your Facebook ads like a pro.