In Depth Guidelines for Testing & Scaling Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are doing really great these days and so the competition has also increased drastically. But is it just enough to create a great ad and then leave it for months on the Facebook page? Such things will actually not deliver you with a good result.

Even if you have scaled your ads properly, still it may happen that you may not get results after a certain period of time. Even if you have come up with the most successful ad, it may lose out in a few months.

So, what can be the solution for all these?

An ideal solution that can be talked about is getting a new creative for your ad or also displaying the ad in front of a new audience.

This is the reason it is always said that if you are not testing the Facebook ads, you cannot get long term results out of it. That is why, testing and scaling Facebook Ads are of great significance and in this post, we will be diving deep into those.

There are a few guidelines that you should follow while you are testing and scaling your ads on Facebook.

Table of Contents

Guidelines for Testing and Scaling Facebook Ads

1) Single Element at A Single Time

It is always important to select one single element at a single time. For example, if you are testing for the headlines, you should make sure that the other things such as the images or the audiences are the same for all the ads.

This is quite very important because it can cause trouble in delivering you with the right results. Often when you come up with different ads for the testing purpose and have decided to test a number of elements together, this can confuse things up.

Facebook will pick up one result based on just a few statistics and then will start delivering the budget on that particular winner. All the other ads here will not have the chance also to prove their presence or potentiality.

Hence, if you really wish to get the best result, it is always needed to test with one single element so that a proper analysis can be made.

2) Get Started

When you are starting to put up ads, testing your Ad copy is the most important thing that you need to do. There are various options in elements that can be used to test the ads.

Make sure that you do not make use of the weakest elements as it will be waste of time and effort. Plan your testing elements and variables in this case well.

If it is about an image ad, you can use 10 different texts for each image to check which one works best. Be sure that all the texts are dramatically different from each other so that you can get a proper result soon.

Also, make sure that the variable you are choosing for the text is the best one. Here, the variable should be the audience and hence you should choose those audiences that are best performing. In this way, you will get a proper result of actually which ad is going to work on your other audiences too.

4) The Winner

After the test that has been conducted with different texts, a winner can be chosen. But do not stop here, it is important to go further ad test again. This time, you have got a winning text for the image. Now, it is the turn to test the images. Keeping the text same, go for 10 different images for the test.

Again, you will come up with a winner. This way, you can make use of different elements, but one at a time, and test the ads to get a proper winner that you can use.

There can be a number of elements that you can make use of in testing the Facebook ads. Some of them can be the placement of the ads, emojis, attribution windows, and many others.

5) The Audiences

It is also important to test the audiences for your ad. While you are testing the audiences, make sure that you are keeping the creative of the ad same.

This way, you will be able to understand which audience group is responding to your ad the best way and hence you can target that particular audience set for the promotion of your brand using the ad.

6) Data To Pick Winners

It may happen that you have created a great ad for the Facebook page and you actually proud of it. It is quite known that creating an ad will take a lot of effort from the creative minds to come up with something like this.  But make sure that you are not getting too much attached to the ad that you have created. If it has worked great at a time, it does not mean that it will provide you the same result after a couple of months.

Hence, one of the prime things that you should do is to not judge the ads depending upon the primary objectives of the campaign.

In this case, if generating conversions is the goal, your primary KPI should be the cost per conversion. This is quite obvious that you should turn off the ads that are not yielding profitable conversions. Your main aim should be to promote those ads that are actually bringing you profits.

While judging on the results, it is always necessary that the tests are conducted properly and the budgets are provided in a proper way. You should make sure to check the statistics that are relevant, before you kill out the others to get the winner.

7) The Budget

It is quite ideal to invest about 15% of the budget for testing and the test should be allocated for the scaling purpose.

Understanding of how to use the budget can be a tricky thing. It is needed that you allocate a budget that is almost ten times than the target cost per conversion. You do not have to worry in this case also because normally, the losers are identified much faster and they can be closed down quick.

But the major problem comes up when the budget for cost per conversion is quite high and you do not want to spend such higher amount on it. In this case, you can make use of other metrics in order to identify the poor performers.

Other Metrics

The performance rate of the campaign can be also determined by many other metrics such as CPC, CPR, and others.  There are a lot of times when the cost per click is quite high but the ad is not getting much of engagement. In this case, it should be noticed about the cost per conversion. If it is high too, it can be regarded as a profitable option.

It is not that CPC and other metrics can be taken as the finalized ones to check and say about the performance of a campaign. But yes, these can be surely checked out to know an overall condition and performance of the campaign that you are about to start.

1) Scaling Up

The story just does not end up at the testing of the ads. After the testing is done and you have got a proper winner ad to be used, it is important to scale it up.

There are three different ways how you can scale up your ads.

2) Increasing the Budget

This is quite obvious that when you have got a winner, you will allocate a good budget to it. Normally, it is said that while testing a budget of about 10% or so can be allocated. But after you have got a winner, you can increase it up. But be sure not to increase the budget so high all of a sudden.

Take baby steps such as starting it with about 20%. Also, make sure that you do not increase the budget so randomly. Facebook takes at least 24-48 hours to adjust and hence you should make sure that you do not make an edit before this time each time when you are increasing the budget.

3) Changing Objectives

After you have got a winner, you can change the objectives also at times to display the ad in front of some other audiences too. If changing the objective can get you more traffic, this can be also useful for you at times. If your objective is to make the audience purchase things, you can also change it to people adding up things in the cart.

There are so many people to who add up things in the cart but do not purchase it. These audiences can be covered up with objectives and then they can be retargeted with other options.

4) Duplicating Ads

Similar to changing the objectives, you can also duplicate the ads for different audiences. These audiences can be tracked based on their interests, and many other factors.

Lookalike audience groups can be really helpful in getting more views on your ads and then getting more traffic on your website.

Conclusion

Facebook ads are simply magic if you can do it properly. Make use of the method of testing the ads to get the best one and then scale it up to get the best results. If you try out this method, you can be sure that you will come up with great results and you will have an amazing ad campaign done.