We are bringing you a case study from Ryan Steenburgh, the Founder, and CEO of Ryan Dale Media. A Facebook marketing agency that focuses on scaling its clients' marketing campaigns.
In this article, we are going through how Ryan was able to scale an e-commerce store of his client to $2 000 000 in monthly revenue at a 9.0 ROAS. He shares his methods, tips, and Facebook Ads strategies that he uses to scale Facebook campaigns successfully.
Case Study Figures:
- Period: 1st July to 30th September (3 months)
- AOV: $79.96
- Niche: Men’s Grooming/ Beauty
- Blended ROAS: 9.01
- New Customer ROAS: 5.4 (40% of total sales were from returning customers)
- Total Spend: $713 461.28
- TOF Spend: $563 634
- BOF Spend: $149 826.81
- Total Revenue: $6 422 144.92
Pitchfork Campaigns
This is the name he gives to his ultimate scaling technique. It involves 3 main tiers which are initial testing campaigns, mid-tier scaling campaigns, and high spend scaling campaigns. This is essentially his ‘bread and butter’ scaling technique that works across all niches on Facebook ads.
Its the exact strategy that helped him scale this e-commerce store to $2 000 000 per month and we are going to break it down and show you how exactly he used it:
Ryan starts out all accounts by testing 10–12 different audiences, and 27 different creative variations with a 3x3x3 dynamic creative setup.
The setup basically looks like this:
1 campaign
- Adset 1 ->> ad (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
- Adset 2 ->> ad (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
- Adset 3 ->> ad (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
- Adset 4 ->> ad (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
- Adset 5 ->> ad (3 headlines, 3 creatives, 3 copy angles)
Copy Angles
The 3 copy angles are just the different top lines of the ad copy. They aren’t completely new copy angles.
Assume, you’re running something like this:
Ryan won’t change the 3 benefits, or the review, or the CTA but rather the top line "Buy One Whitening Powder, Get One Free // 48 Hours Only".
He does that because it's clear that this style of body copy converts, and it’s the hook (top line) that’s responsible for bringing in people who are interested in the offer.
But what about people who are more interested in the benefit? Or more interested in how quickly the product works?
So, we’ll change the top line to something about the benefit, or about the speed of results. This is because it’s clear that the rest of the ad will still convert the way it always has. All we need more people to be hooked in.
Ryan does this in lead generation as well for coaches and consultants.
"We’ll write long-form copy, and once we have something that converts, we just swap out the very top line since that's the ‘hook’. We won’t change the whole ad, because we know the body of it converts. We just need more people to be hooked into the body. This is how we are able to test so many angles.
Coming up with an entire ad is hard, but coming up with one line is pretty easy. Something I’d recommend is taking your top-performing angles of all time, and just slightly tweaking the top line and see how it performs again!", Ryan explains.
Initial Test Campaign
Ryan’s initial test campaign uses an ABO budget, typically with the lowest cost unless the account history shows us that bid caps or cost caps work better.
Once he identifies the top-performing audiences and creatives, he moves them into his Mid-tier scaling campaign.
Mid-tier Scaling Campaign
This campaign uses only the top 3 performing audiences and top 3 creatives in this campaign. It requires a set up of a CBO budget, 3 adsets, and 3 ads in each adset.
It’s set up like this:
1 CBO Campaign
- Adset 1 → ad 1, ad 2, ad 3
- Adset 2 → ad 1, ad 2, ad 3
- Adset 3 → ad 1, ad 2, ad 3
Ryan typically launches these at around a $300-$500 budget per day on lower spend accounts, and upwards of $2 000 per day on higher spend accounts. This is just a mid-tier scale campaign, the adspend must be adjusted accordingly.
Ryan suggests spending about 20% of your regular scaling budget per day. If you’re only spending $1 000 per day, You can set it up at around $200 per day.
The 3 ads are got by pulling the post id’s from top performers in the dynamic variations or remaking the ad with the top variations just so we can have post id’s.
"We have an entire campaign setup just for this, it’s our creative conversion campaign. You can just set up a new conversion campaign, turn it off, and have 1 adset in there, and put up to 50 ads in that adset and have them stockpiled there as post id’s.
This way when you’re ready to do the next scale campaign I’m going to tell you about, you have somewhere to go pull ads from in bulk. It’s important to use existing posts when you start scaling up because you want the social proof to build so it adds more authority to your brand.
We literally have ads running from March of 2021 with Hundreds of thousands of likes that are performing better than any of the new stuff we put out, all because of social proof.", Ryan says.
When people see ads that don’t have much engagement they’re less likely to click on them. So having the engagement prior to running the ads makes you stand out more from all of your competition if you take the time to do it.
It doesn’t take long, but its’ worth it.
High Spend Scaling Campaigns
This is Ryan’s third-tier scaling technique. It takes a little bit longer to launch because you need to have 16 proven ads that have converted in at least the initial test campaign. It’s a single CBO campaign launched at a higher budget with your top 2 broad audiences, and 16 existing post id’s as ads in each adset.
It looks like this:
CBO Campaign
- ADSET 1 → AD1, AD2, AD3, AD4, AD5, AD6, etc
- ADSET 2 → AD1, AD2, AD3, AD4, AD5, AD6, etc
The goal of this campaign is longevity and consistency.
This campaign always works because it’s using your top-performing ads and top 2 best performing broad audiences. Facebook is able to essentially just sort through your highest performers every day and figure out which one on that specific day is going to work best. It helped Ryan to decrease a lot of the volatility that he was dealing with when trying to scale initially.
So that’s essentially Ryan’s ad-buying formula to test, find winners, and scale them. It's that simple and straightforward.
Blitz Offers
Another important segment of Ryan’s success was using “blitz offers”. The goal with a blitz offer is to try and find out how you can have an offer that is perceived as more valuable than any of the competing brands in your space.
The thing with offers is that they don’t have to actually be more valuable, but rather they just have to be perceived as more valuable.
Offers are all about perception. If you can make the prospect feel like they’re getting a great deal, they are more likely to convert.
"I see tons of people running 20% off. If you’re able to run 20% off, I’m willing to bet you’re able to run "25% off". Which is the same thing as “buy one, get one 50% off!"
"25% off 1 item", is the same as “buy one get one 50% off in terms of margins. But "buy one, get one 50% off" seems more valuable.", Ryan says.
A great offer can boost your AOV without cutting into your margins. Here are examples of solid offers that Ryan has run:
- Buy One Get One Free
- Buy one Get one 50% off
- Buy ___ Get ____
With offers, it's all about being creative enough to find something that is perceived as high value but doesn’t have the same price tag.
Ad Copy
Ad copy directly affects CTRs, which in turn affects your CPC, cost per purchase and your ROAS. A strong copy will certainly improve your results from the CTRs to the ROAS.
This is the template for Ryan’s ad copy so that you can plug and play it into your ads:
- Lead with the offer and mention the offer scarcity.
- Mention the 2 biggest benefits of the product or the 2 biggest reasons why you’re better than any competitors.
- Mention the 3rd benefit which is always the shipping time.
- Add a customer’s review to handle objections, give a testimonial, and recommend the product.
- Offer scarcity
- Link
This is how the template is set up on the ad:
Conclusion
By applying these strategies, Ryan was able to scale his client’s store to $2 000 000 per month and over $6 000 000 in 3 months. The strategies aren’t limited to one niche but rather can be used across many niches. They are simple to implement and can really help especially when you need to scale campaigns really fast from scratch.
