Scaling Ad Spend is a very sensitive topic and in my experience and each ecommerce business is different, unfortunately there is no template for successful campaigns and you only can understand the campaigns behavior by testing and start scaling your business based on a strategy.
How to Tell When Your Business is Ready to Scale?
As I mentioned above the first important step is testing.
Testing creatives, testing audiences and once you find the winning audiences & creatives, you can start combining them into new campaigns or leave it in the existing campaigns and start scaling it. Everyone has its own startegy that works for their business model.
What Are The Top Metrics to Watch When Scaling?
What it is important to check in the first days of the campaign are the following:
- Click through rate – it is an important indicator to check as you can easily understand if your audience is engaging with your ad, if CTR is too low, you are likely targeting an audience pool which is not interested in your product/ad.
- CPM & CPC is also an important factor to check on as you can easily spot trends and see if you are paying too much. There are periods when CPMs and CPCs are lower other times higher such as holiday season or public holidays but the costs of these two metrics should always be in the loop.
- After the first 3-4 days there is already some data with key indicators, such as add to carts, initiated checkouts and of course purchase. Purchase is the most important metric, but in case there is no purchase, our next indicator is ‘add to carts’ and ‘initiated checkouts’ and in 3-4 days you should be able to see if a campaign or ad set is bringing enough results, otherwise you can pause it.
At the scaling stage this is the point where you start increasing budgets.
What To Do First When Scaling Ad Spend?
After the 3rd/4th or even 7days when scaling begins, although not everyone has the same daily budget – it can be $100 or $1000 – the process is the same for everyone, and spend starts increasing between the 3rd to 7th day after a campaign or ad set has shown some consistency. The increase shouldn’t be too much because the algo will restart the learning phase. Ideally it would be 20% to 30% increase daily or a few times per day depending on your budget and results or if on a low budget every 3-4 days.
In the beginning of scaling, I personally don’t use rules and prefer to give some space to the algo and let it optimize without any limitations. Now depending on the Ad Account budget I start setting up rules for campaigns spending $1.5K+ daily, till then is manual work.
When budgets are high it is very important to check the size of your audience pool, it should be large when you scale. Checking frequency it’s a good indicator to stay on track, especially on the retargeting campaigns as you don’t want to annoy your potential buyers too much.
Now something very important to keep in mind when scaling is that unfortunately not all days will be positive and it is hard to accept that a campaign spent $1000 for example with a few purchases only… it’s hard to believe but it’s completely normal. It’s difficult to keep your emotions in check and not pause the campaign or ad set, but best practice in this case is to use rules and/or start pausing when looking back at least 3-4 days and results are consistantly under delivering. Checking the past 7 and 14 days helps to see a trend and make decisions based on a bigger time frame and not sudden decisions based on one day data.
Scaling Ecommerce Facebook Ads is a challenge, nowadays as there are millions of advertisers out there and it’s very competitive, however if done right it can be successfully scaled. It is super important to continuously test even if you found winning audiences and creatives as fatigue can kick in at any time, and you should be ready with a fresh set of creatives and audiences.
Last but not least do not forget to have a clear strategy before you start scaling.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask.
Also, if you’re spending over $500 a day on paid advertising and want to scale your brand you can book a call below:
Have a great week!
Ago from the DimNiko Team 🙂
