Here’s How We Scale…

For the longest time, I couldn’t imagine spending $1000/day.

I thought the number was so big.

It was so scary.

Like it’s so much money.

How do people even do that?!

Then, one day, it suddenly happened!

The reason?

Scaling Levers

Every business and every campaign (no matter the traffic source) has scaling levers.

The reasons media buyers can’t scale is because they don’t define the scaling levers in their business and then focus on the wrong levers. 

Imagine pinpointing the exact opportunities for scale, defining a plan to scale with those levers and using those levers to double ad spend over and over again.

This is possible and I’ll show you how.

But first, let’s talk about choosing scaling levers:

    Choosing Scaling Levers 

    At Ad Pros, we run an agency for high growth subscription companies. For every account we manage, we have to choose the right levers (in the right sequence) to scale.

    Meet Femme.

    They sell physical products (supplement) on subscription.

    We started spending $100/day trying to revive an ad account.

    In the past, the team wasn’t able to hit the CPA target. So we broke down the process of the scaling levers. The three scaling levers in their business were:

    This ad account was struggling in the past and after an analysis, we decided the scaling levers that would have the highest leverage were:

    1) Ad optimization
    2) Ad creatives (images/videos)
    3) Targeting

    (I’m going to show you how to get access to these scaling levers and how to use ad reporting to pinpoint levers even faster).

    Once we found the levers, we got to work!

    Scaling Lever 1:
    Ad Optimization

    The first scaling lever we focused on was the ad optimization. 

    The reason was simple: there were clear winners in the ad account that were not being focused on. Here’s what an ad account looks like when we get in there:

    It all looks the same.

    But thanks to ad reporting and defining what success looks like, we were able to isolate the clear winning campaigns (and figure out what to ignore.

    Really quickly, you can see what success (blue) and failure (red) looks like fairly easily.

    But now that you know what success/failure looks like, so what?

    Winning campaigns and ad sets are so powerful because they leave clues.

    We call it the campaign DNA.

    The campaign DNA could include variables of the campaign such as:

    • Campaign structure
    • Budget size
    • Budgets:campaign (CBO) vs. ad set level (ABO)
    • Targeting
    • Bidding
    • Placement
    • Ad type
    • Ad creative / messaging
    • Ad copy
    • And more

    So we took the campaign, realized there were clear winners that weren’t leveraged, set targets to scale/maintain/decrease ad spend and launched more campaigns.

    IMPORTANT: whenever we come into a new account, we rarely start creating new graphics/videos to launch. We take the same assets and exclusively do ad optimization to move the needle.

    Within the first 7 days, we were hitting their target CPA of $45. 

    GAME ON!

    But the goal isn’t to spend $100/day successfully, it’s to spend at least $2000/day or $60,000/mo.

    So we continued to the next lever:

    Scaling Lever 2:
    Ad Creatives

    For the second scaling lever, we focused on the ad creatives. 

    Right now, Facebook rewards volume of creatives

    Yes, you can have “set and forget” creatives but it leads to two problems:

    1) You’re not constantly thinking of new ideas and about your prospects dream result

    2) You get super lazy because you’re not obsessively trying to beat your control.

    You’re just content with life.

    And that’s cool…

    But we are talking about scale and doing it fast and maintaining it.

    So here’s how they were running their creatives:

    They had a few ads running. But because there wasn’t that much spend on Facebook, there weren’t that many resources dedicated to it.

    And that’s ok. 

    But we are here to scale.

    So here’s what we did:

    • We read comments on pain points
    • We read messages on challenges pre/post purchase
    • We interviewed the customer service rep for insights
    • We developed different angles based on their instagram feed
    • We created really different/pattern interrupt images/videos
    • Then we created variations from ads that showed potential with their primary and secondary metrics

    But the biggest takeaway is we created volume of assets

    We want to give Facebook volume and they reward us with performance.

    By testing higher volume of creatives as we scaled ad spend, we;

    • Found more winners
    • Found them faster
    • Used them in campaigns that had proven campaign DNA
    • Leveraged that data to create more assets to create more winners

    As we started finding our groove:

    ✅ We hit delivery metrics: CPM / clickthrough rates / cost per click

    ✅ We hit conversion metrics: cost per content view / cost per add to cart / cost per initiate checkout

    ✅ We hit profitability metrics: cost per acquisition / average order value / return on ad spend

    It worked!

    Then we focused on:

    Scaling Lever 3:
    Targeting

    For the last most meaningful scaling lever was targeting.

    Here’s what happens when things are working:

    ✅ Ads are working
    ✅ Funnel is working
    ✅ Campaigns are profitable
    ✅ Everyone is happy and excited

    So now what?

    You scale baby, scale!

    The way that works is you find more winning audiences.

    Here’s what we are doing at this step:

    We take the campaign DNA, test targeting almost exclusively and find more winners.

    Simple as that.

    That means we keep all the following elements the same and isolate 1 variable (the targeting):

    • Campaign structure
    • Budget size
    • Budgets:campaign (CBO) vs. ad set level (ABO)
    • Targeting
    • Bidding
    • Placement
    • Ad type
    • Ad creative / messaging
    • Ad copy

    Then It Clicked!

    We started with $100/day.

    A couple days later, we were spending $200/day. It happens that quickly.

    We didn’t need to create new ad creatives just yet.

    Then, we were spending $300/day.

    Found more targeting using the campaign DNA.

    The next week, $800/day.

    Within the month, we were able to spend $1000 in one day (while hitting metrics)!

    BOOOM

    It took 42 days to go from relaunch of an unsuccessful campaign to optimization to scale.

    In other words…

    We 10x’d The Budget From $100/Day to $1000/Day Within 42 Days!

    30 days after that, we were able to scale up to $3-5k/day consistently.

    And within 7 months, this physical product subscription business scaled from $100k/mo to $500k/mo!

    So here’s my question:

    What scaling levers are you investing your time, money, attention and resources on?

    If they were the right levers, wouldn’t you be already scaling your ad spend?

    Imagine how your business would change in your business if you could scale from $100/day to $1000/day (or more)?

    Or maybe you are already spending $1000/day. What if you could scale to $3,000 or $5,000 or even $10,000/day?

    What would change in your business?

    Want to scale your campaign like this? Click here to keep reading…