Spend $21,000 thousand in less than 30 days and lower the average cost per result by 60% during the most competitive ad buying time of the year (December aka the holiday season).
This was the task given to me and my team from a company that historically always sees average cost per results spike during the holiday seasons by over 60%.
And if the pressure wasn't already on enough they told us that they assigned another agency to do the same task and if we don’t hit their goal and beat the other agency we won’t win their business for the following year.
1. Over the course of 30 days, we generated over $150,000 in sales.
2. We made a 7.14x return on ad spend off $21,000.
3. We lowered their cost per result by 89% achieving the lowest cost per result. (Even in comparison to any other month that year.)
4. We won their business to manage an ad spend budget of $300,000 per year.
Myself and my team built, managed, and scaled a campaign of this magnitude to achieve those results in 5 steps…
STEP #1: BUILD YOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLAR FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGN FOUNDATION
If you want to maximize your potential ad spend on a newish Facebook ad account, there are four vital things to know...
Your ad account spending limit starts at $750 a day.
This is not something that is initially obvious to most people, and getting it raised can be a pain.
This is where having a Facebook rep is critical.
Generally speaking, you will be assigned a rep when you reach a certain level of spend, but having an agency partner that has a permanent rep can expedite the process.
Especially over the holidays, we recommend putting these requests in weeks ahead of when you plan to scale.
Create multiple ad accounts (we created two).
This is a redundancy that protects against running into any ad spend issues on peak buying days.
The last thing you want is to have ad delivery issues or suspended accounts when you’re planning on spending over $1,000 a day.
Ensure your credit limit is set high enough to support your rapidly scaling spend.
Don’t count on your ability to keep up with frequent payments on your credit card (to stay below the limit) while the campaign is going on, as you’ll get stuck waiting on payments to process on weekends and/or holidays.
Check that the website won’t break under the weight of all that traffic.
If you’re on Shopify or have a dev team who manages the site this should never be an issue, but for all other providers run some projected numbers on anticipated concurrent website sessions and load test your site.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR 7X ROAS & 89% LOWER COST AD CREATIVE
If you're going to rapidly scale on Facebook during the holidays, you'll need massive reach at the top of the funnel in a very crowded and competitive buying environment.
To achieve this, enter that landscape with a piece of creative you KNOW will drive massive engagement (shares = free impressions) and is already pre-loaded with validation.
This is the only time I would recommend this is, for the holiday season.
For us, we created a total of 1,781 ads during the 30- day push to find our #1 ad creative.
Going live with BRAND NEW creative on peak days just a few days before Christmas is one of the biggest mistakes we see people make.
You want to use your absolute best piece of prospecting creative to drive the cheapest possible clicks and allow your site to communicate the close.
It's about allocating a testing budget you can afford, and finding your best ad relative to all the ones you are testing.
Dropping an ad that’s loaded with engagement/perfect creative into auctions against terribly boring “20% Off Sitewide” text ads is like bringing a gun to a knife fight.
Spending budget on a few engagement-objective campaigns to find a high-performing piece of ad creative ahead of peak buying days can give you a massive advantage.
While you may not hit 3,500 likes, comments and shares on your winning ad creative you should still have a solid level of validation for your ad that will help drive high relevance scores, broader reach and lower frequencies during the holiday bid war.
STEP #3: CREATE NEW AUDIENCES FOR YOUR 7X ROAS & 89% LOWER COST AD CREATIVE
Now you’ve found one piece of ad creative and loaded it with a ton of likes, comments, and shares, who should you target when trying to scale?
The answer is everyone. Or at least anyone you have reason to believe might be interested.
Start with what you know: Lookalikes based on all stages of your funnel, then move to custom audiences on large pools of visitors, Prime interests, then get wacky (Kardashian interest anyone?)
We'll even break out all these audiences into separate placements.
The key to scaling is always, always agility.
By that, I mean the ability to create options for yourself.
The more ad sets you can come up with at the start, the higher the likelihood of finding something that works.
In the beginning, you want to have as many ad sets as your little fingers will allow you to create.
For us, we created a total of 121 ad sets during the 30- day push.
• 80+ were lookalike audiences (1-10% lookalike audiences on a variety of funnel behaviors)
• 15+ were custom audiences
• 20+ were variations of our lookalike and custom audience ad sets broken out by placements, bid type, etc.
Start with reasonable daily budgets on each campaign, then be prepared to kill off underperforming ad sets quickly!
But give yourself options.
Trying to predict the right audience campaign and applying a massive budget to it is a fool's errand, unless you have loads of historical data.
This is especially true on peak buying days when consumer intent is sky-high. Having loads of ad sets will give you lots of flexibility in where and how you scale.
P.S. Make sure to include a few super-broad audiences — even try a default “open” audience. (It’s the secret weapon)
STEP #4: DECIDE WHEN TO KILL OR SCALE YOUR AD SETS & ADS
In poker, great players say that there are only two decisions you need to know how to make in order to win: when to raise, and when to fold.
The same is true of Facebook ad buying.
Your job as a media buyer trying to rapidly scale is to determine what information you need to decide to kill or raise an ad set, and how fast can you get that data.
This starts by deeply understanding your unit economics to set a target cost per result or ROAS then correlating leading indicators against that.
As soon as we got 4-5 results, we made a call on whether to kill or scale an ad set. If it was too close (within 10% of our target on either side) to call we would wait to see the result move out of range.
Don't worry too much about statistical significance early on – it's OK if leading indicators aren't 100% accurate every time.
If you've created enough ad sets, this should help you hone in on the winning ad sets pretty quickly.
STEP #5: DUPLICATE YOUR WINNING AD SETS AND INCREASE YOUR BUDGET
Once you begin to see winning ad sets emerging, it's time to start milking those audiences for everything they're worth!
While we recommend starting with tons of ad sets and killing them based on leading indicators, we would recommend allowing yourself to see those ad sets reach your target cost per result with a meaningful number of results (minimum 10-20) before deciding to scale the ad set.
But once you do, it's go time.
In a traditional buying scenario, where you're trying to accomplish normal growth over time, you may simply decide to increase a winning ad set budget 10-20% per day.
But when you are trying to go zero to 100x ad spend in 30 days, ain't nobody got time for that (and we don't recommend you simply 100x your ad set budget because placing all of your eggs in one basket is a recipe for scale stall outs).
So the second we have a winning ad set, we immediately duplicate the ad set with a higher budget (sometimes 5 to 10 times depending on the size of the audience) using the same low-cost bid strategy (the default bidding strategy in conversion campaigns).
We also use a spread of manual bid targets because each bid type is going to create different auction dynamics, and if you have a strong piece of ad creative, you’ll even be able to overbid your CPR target, win more auctions and still hit your result targets.
This strategy will allow you to get the absolute most out of every single winning audience/ad set combination.
HERE ARE THE KEY TAKEAWAYS WE HOPE YOU GET FROM OUR EXPERIENCE
Plan Ahead. Scaling like this won't happen without planning. Making sure you have your financial, technical, and creative ducks in a row is a must.
Start Broad, Narrow Down. Then Multiply. Give yourself as many potential winning ad/audience combinations as possible to start.
Kill losers quickly to protect your budget, then duplicate and manual bid your winners.
I hope this motivates you to go get some awesome results for your clients or yourself for this soon approaching holiday season!
Because it’s going to be the most competitive bid war yet.
P.S.S. This strategy will work for this coming December but with changes coming to Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) it's important to stay ahead of the curve and use the best systems and methods out there to achieve success with Facebook Ads...
Want to get consistent Facebook Ad Results...
Schedule a 1-on-1 coaching session with Chase here.
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Get started with the Facebook Ads Expert Mastery Class.
To your success.
- Chase
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