Credits to Aamer Nawaz, founder of Branding bytes
$600,000+ profitably spent on Facebook Ads in last 30 days!
I see a lot of people having issues scaling their Facebook Ads. I scaled this account to $45k/day profitably and thought to should share my learnings with this group. I am sure there are people who are spending more than this and we can learn from each other.
1. Look-Alike Audience
Using big audience size helps when you are spending a lot. I used to have LAA 10% for most of my Assets but from last 2 months, I changed this and have seen better spending and improved ROAS.
Instead of using a single LAA 10% Adset, I divide this into 5 Adsets (LAA 2%, LAA 4%, LAA 6%, LAA 8%, and LAA 10%) and put them in a single CBO campaign with bid caps. The highest budget I have assigned to a single campaign is $280k for 30 days. I am using life time budgets because we have to run Ads during selected hours each day due to the nature of the product.
2. Broad Interests
First technique that I used was to broaden the interests and used more general targeting options instead of detailed targeting. We were using layered audience in start; I changed that to broader interests which gave us an audience size of 66 million on one of the Adsets. This proved to be the best audience for us contributing more than 40% of our total sales.
3. Clubbing the audiences
When we find 3-4 working audiences like ‘Yoga’ ‘Meditation’ ‘Sleep’, we combine them all to get bigger audience size and spend more on a single Adset instead of spending a small amount on multiple adsets with different audiences. This helps in spending more money and optimizes the Ads quickly.
4. Open Targeting
One of the most interesting techniques I use for scaling is using smaller audience size then larger audience size and then ‘Open’ audience. Open Audience means just use the country+age and that’s all. This sounds silly but this has worked best for all of my high spending clients. This is my own developed technique and it works because when you are spending a lot pixel gets mature and it can find the right people for you if you don’t narrow down the audience. Don’t forget to place a bid cap when doing this 
5. Worldwide Targeting
When we started working with this client we targeted 5 countries only, thinking that other countries may not have the purchasing power. Few months ago, we tested worldwide audience with a smaller budget. We are still doing worldwide targeting but now we keep looking at breakdown and start a new campaign for countries which are doing better than others. This helped us finding15 more profitable countries.
6. 7 Day Optimization
On optimization part, we did a split test with $100,000 budget to find out what works best and 7 day optimization was doing much better than day optimization.
7. Campaign Budget Optimization
We are CBP and that was not doing well for us but recently it has started to perform. It takes a little more time to optimize as compared to campaigns with Adset budgets but results are more consistent in long term. We are shifting more and more campaigns on CBO now.
8. BID CAPS
I noticed that Facebook is not spending much on our bid caps and we have to increase them. Like, I was using $40 bid cap for US and now I have to use a bid cap of $55 which sounds like Ads are getting expensive but interestingly my cost per purchase came down from $35 to $27(average).
9. BID CAP VALUE
This is the most difficult part of Facebook Ads and everyone has his own views about how to use optimal bid cap. There are few formulas available in Facebook blue print as well.
What I believe is that Bid Cap value depends on Country you are targeting and also the audience using you are using so we now use different bid caps for same country but different audiences. To test, we duplicate the same ADset 5 times with different bid caps and keep that running for a week to see which bid cap performs best for us. Normally, you need to change your bid caps every 3 months.
10. NO BID CAP Campaigns
Most of my campaigns have bid caps enabled on them because we can’t take risk with such high budgets. But when I have enough results for a particular audience I put that in a campaign without Bid Cap. This is high risk because some days you may spend a lot without good results and one bad day means $10k-$20k lost. (Just to mention, when we have bid caps most of the campaigns don’t spend their full budgets. so to increase spending we put successful Adsets in a campaign without bid cap)
11. Automated Rules
Normally, when we have placed bid caps on all the campaigns we don’t need automated rules. But to control costs on NO CAP campaigns we have automated rules enabled. To place automated rules you must know your numbers for each step (like for eCommerce you should know your average CPC, CTR, Cost per ATC, Cost per IC, Cost per purchase) and setup the rules accordingly.
12. Placements
Very important thing I recently learned is how Facebook spends on each placement. Just 2 months ago our setup was like this.
a- One Adset for Facebook and Instagram feeds.
b- One Adset for Facebook and Instagram stories.
c- One Adset for other placements.
I realized that most of the budget was spent only on 1 placement in each Adset. Whatever placement is doing well, Facebook starts spending all the budget on that placement. So now I changed my placement structure to this and we are able to spend more
a- One Adset just for Facebook feed.
b- One Adset just for Instagram feed.
c- One Adset just for Facebook/Instagram stories.
d- One Adset for other placements.
Although Facebook recommends Auto Placements but I don’t find that useful when spending is very high.
13. Creatives
We have tested tons of creatives and simple 15 second videos have outperformed all other type of creatives for us. So now we are using different videos and combinations but all are just 15 seconds. This may vary depending on the product, niche and audience.
— If you have any questions or you can add some value to this post, please do.
