Spend (and Make) 4x More on Facebook with this One Simple Trick
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’re an author advertising your books on Facebook. You found an ad that is performing REALLY well at $5/day. It’s been running for weeks with no drop in performance, so you decide to add some budget and crank things up to $25/day – only it doesn’t go quite as well as you’d hoped. The performance starts dropping. Your clicks get more expensive. Sadness prevails.
You immediately think of all those people who told you it was dangerous to scale an ad up by more than 10% or 15% per-day. Were they right? Did you, in your hubris, break the algorithm by adding budget to your campaign?
Let me reassure you: you didn’t break anything. You just didn’t give your ad enough help.
It’s no secret that FB ads have a limited lifespan. The more budget you pump into an ad, the more its performance decays. And while a very mediocre ad can survive for months on $5/day, things get much hairier when you start cranking up the budget. In fact, in the thousands of ads that I’ve run, I have yet to see one that can handle $100/day by itself for more than a few days.
So how do you scale up your FB campaign profitably? It's simple - stop looking for something great and stack the deck with ads that are just Good Enough.
How do you find more ads that are Good Enough? You Test.
Good Enough is Good Enough
Let’s say a Great ad is an ad that can handle $50 in spend per-day while hitting my target conversion costs. I run ads for a living. I spend all day testing creatives. And I only hit on a genuinely great ad about 5% of the time. So how am I able to scale up a campaign to $100+ per-day? I don’t waste my time hunting for Greatness. I find a handful of ads that are Good enough and spread the budget around.
You don’t need the world’s best ad to scale up a Facebook campaign. A Good-not-Great ad can survive for MONTHS in a $100/day campaign as long as it has some company to help spread out the budget. And if it can’t hold up to the spend? You can survive for months at that budget level by replacing it with more decent ads. Want proof? Here’s data from real campaigns that I’ve run.
As a note: I sweep all my ads daily. A loser is any ad that runs to 50 or 100 clicks and does not hit my target Cost-Per-Acquisition. If you want to know more about Cost Per Acquisition you can check my previous post.
Amazon Top-10 Book Launch:
Total Ads Tested: 189
Winners: 88
Losers: 101
Median Run Time: 31 Days.
Median Lifetime Clicks: 449
Average Daily Spend: $32
Best Ad: 203 days runtime, $16,900 in spend ($83/day)
Amount of Money spent testing Losers: $2,112
Amount of Money Spent Testing+Scaling Winners: $168,379
Ongoing Backlist Campaign for a 10+ Book Series (Running 18mos):
Total Ads Tested: 590
Winners: 130
Losers: 460
Median Run Time: 16 Days
Median Lifetime Clicks: 122
Average Daily Spend: $4.19
Best Ad in the Set: 429 days, $10,822 in spend ($25/day)
Amount of Money Spent Testing Losers: $13,059
Amount of Money Spent Testing + Scaling Winners: $76,472
Completed Backlist Campaign for a 6 Book Series
Total Ads Tested: 186
Winners: 37
Losers: 149
Median Run Time: 8 Days
Median Lifetime Clicks: 159
Average Daily Spend: $10.65
Best Ad in the Set: 284 days, $8,227 in spend ($28/day)
Amount of Money Spent Testing Losers: $2,858
Amount of Money Spent Testing + Scaling Winners: $27,149
Completed Backlist Campaign for a 3 Book Series
Total Ads Tested: 102
Winners: 26
Losers: 76
Median Run Time: 4 Days
Median Lifetime Clicks: 120
Average Daily Spend: $20.18
Amount of Money Spent Testing Losers: $2,170
Amount of Money Spent Testing + Scaling Winners: $14,004
Best Ad in the Set: 99 days, $6731 in spend ($67/day)
Each of these campaigns is for a different author and genre. The performance is all different as well - but you see a trend here? In each of these sets I was able to increase our spend by testing a hundred or more ads, loading up the campaign with 20+ ads that were Good Enough. And while it wasn’t cheap to burn budget on losers, the winners I found allowed me to spend (and make) exponentially more money than I lost.
So the next time you’re wondering why that lonely ad doesn’t seem happy at 2x its normal budget – test some friends for it. They won’t all be winners, but you’ll be surprised how far a handful of half-decent ads can take you.