Facebook advertising has been a staple of virtually every major brand over the past five years. Without a doubt, the platform provides value and can help you introduce your company to new buyers. Many companies have been trying to make the most of this social network channel to scale Facebook ads and generate profits. However, improperly scaling your Facebook ads can backfire and put you in a tough spot. If you don’t know how to do it right. So what will you do? Here are some of the most effective ways to scale your ads and increase profits for your business.

Six effective ways to scale Facebook ads

Increase your budget

There are two main levers for scaling Facebook ads: audience and budget. It may be completely out of the question, but to get more out of your Facebook Ads account, the easiest first step is to simply add more budget. Scaling a budget on Facebook is not as straightforward as on other platforms like Google or Microsoft Ads.

Each time you change your budget on Facebook, you change one of the data points that feed its algorithm and determine who sees your ads and when. So, every time you make a budget change, you risk resetting to the “Learning Stage” – the period in which Delivery takes time to analyze and understand the ad campaign. Regardless of whether you are using a daily budget or lifetime budget, there is a general guideline for scaling with this method: all budget changes should be 20% or less original budget. If you want to adjust your budget by a higher percentage, it’s a good idea to do it in multiple stages, and no individual period should exceed the 20% rule.

Discover lookalike audiences on Facebook.

What is a Lookalike Audience? Why should you care? Lookalike Audiences is a segmentation tool developed by Facebook that helps you find users who share similar characteristics (demographics, interests) with your existing audience and are more likely to be interested in your business.

How do you start building a viewer-like audience? Here are some helpful ways that you can apply to your business

Open your Facebook Ads Manager and go to “Audiences”.  Click the “Create Audience” drop-down menu and select “Lookalike Audience”. Select your source audience. Source audiences can be created using pixel or app data, data from existing customer file lists, newsletter subscription lists, or page fans. Your source audience needs to be at least 100 people from the same country, but you’ll get better results using your best group of 1,000 to 50,000 customers.

Select the countries or regions you want to target: Select the desired audience size using the sliders. The smaller the number, the higher the similarity to your source audience and the more likely it is to find a match. However, if you want a wider reach, you choose numbers at the higher end of the scale.

Click “Create Audience”. It can take 6 to 24 hours to create a lookalike audience, but you can create your ad while you wait for it to complete.

Scale your Facebook ads by discovering lookalike audiences

When creating lookalike audiences, most advertisers start with 1% of an audience that is similar to their existing customers. However, you will notice that your ad performance will eventually degrade over time. It usually happens when the majority of your lookalike audience has seen your ad. Once you reach this point, consider expanding to the 3% to 55% range. While you’ll probably target people with less similarity than your original audience, this will significantly increase audience size, reducing CPA (cost-per-acquisition) and CPM ratios (cost per thousand impressions) and increase your conversion volume.

Increase the size of the saved object list.

What is a saved object? And how can you use it to scale your Facebook ads? Essentially, “saved audience” refers to a target audience that you create by defining your target audience’s demographics, behaviors, and interests. You can create a saved audience list in Audience Manager during the campaign setup phase.

While this can be a good option for reaching potential new customers, it may not be as effective as custom and lookalike audiences, since these people don’t even know you. Who is? They only match the ad profiles you’ve specified for targeting purposes.

Build a community channel

If you’re a B2C or B2B advertiser looking to scale Facebook ads to generate leads, you’ll need to build community by engaging and nurturing potential shoppers. Facebook delivers great results for e-commerce purchase campaigns that don’t require a lot of consumer knowledge. However, if you’re going to promote a product that most people don’t know about, you’ll need to try a different approach.

The best way to do so is to build an “enthusiastic audience” through a Facebook ad funnel design optimized for higher channel goals. Introduce your products to your target audience and collect valuable lead information. Providing free controlled content through things like ebooks, tutorials, videos, podcasts, and running contests or polls. With their contact information in hand, you can retarget these people with your core offering (for example, a free demo of your product).

A great example of a brand that has recently done this well to scale Facebook ads is Seal Skin Covers. Seal Skin Covers, a manufacturer and reseller of car covers, held a contest on Facebook for 3 days. The target audience of the contest is set out to be those who meet two criteria: One is the owner of a Mustang model and the other is the user who is not a follower of Seal Skin.

The competition tested the extent to which these car enthusiasts “knew their Mustangs,” offering a range of models that would be rearranged based on production date. One participant who correctly placed the Mustang images from oldest to newest was entered into a random draw to win a Mustang tire. Despite running on a tight budget, the contest was able to generate a lot of engagement for Seals Skin, resulting in the retargeting of 25,900 people for their product.

Did all these users become Seal Skin customers immediately? Of course not. But now they are all familiar with Seal Skin’s brand and offerings, making them prime targets for downline targeting. The contest turned them from a “cold” audience to a “warm” audience, which is key to Facebook’s growth.

Retargeting an enthusiastic audience comes with several benefits. First, you can expect a better ROA (Return on Assets) because these people have already been referred to your product and are more likely to convert. Second, higher channel goals (clicks, content views, video views, add to cart, initiate checkout) cost less to bid. As a result, you can use your savings to retarget purchases.

Discover and use “Facebook Power 5”

Power 5 is Facebook’s best in-house method for scaling Facebook ads. It includes:

• Simplify accounts: With account simplification, Facebook automatically checks which ads and ad placements deliver the best results and optimizes them in real-time to improve performance more.
• Campaign budget optimization: You don’t even have to manually allocate budgets at the ad set level. The system automatically distributes your budget to the best-performing ad sets in real-time. As a result, you’ll spend less on less-performing ads.
• Automatic placements: Building separate ad sets for each placement can be tiring, so Facebook has removed this. With automatic placements, you can deliver the right ads to the right people at the lowest possible cost.
• Dynamic Ads: This feature allows you to show the right product ads to the right audience, based on the interests they show on your website, apps, or other sites on the internet.

There are a few other ways, you can scale Facebook ads, but you can start by implementing the tactics mentioned in this article. Just check which method is right for your business. You won’t know which method will give you the best results unless you try, so act now!