How To Scale Your Ads Quickly During A Launch | 173
Ready to master the art of scaling your ads quickly and effectively during a launch?
This episode shares action steps for both vertical and horizontal scaling to ensure you're able to increase your budget and maintain the success you began with! We'll also dive into additional tips to ensure your budget goes as far as possible... plus a MUST do tip in the event your launch ads underperfom from day one.
Don't miss out on this Saturday Strategy Session!
In this episode, we chat about…
✨ Setting Up Your Ad Launch [00:41]
✨ Boosting Your Ad Spend the Smart Way [02:33]
✨ Pro Tips for Fast Ad Scaling During a Launch [06:31]
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Jenzaia, and this is a Saturday strategy session. How is it that summer is 12 days away If you are listening when this podcast drops on June 8th 12 days until summer. My mind is just absolutely confuzzled about that. It feels like it was just winter, and now I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt every single day and I'm loving it, though it is thunderstorming right now. So I'm not loving that, but it's okay.
Today we're going to be talking about how to scale your ads quickly. I am going to be specifically talking about how to do this during a launch, but you can use these strategies to scale your ads in any situation. If we look big picture, at a launch, you're typically going to have 12 to 16 to 20 weeks of kind of warm up, pre-launch type content where you're getting your audience interested. Maybe you're promoting an early bird wait list or something like that, or you could just have all of your content focusing on topics that you know will bring in the right people to get into your offer. Then you go into the registration phase, where you're getting people registered for your launch mechanism. That could be a webinar or a challenge or a video series, conference or summit, really any sort of event or time frame that you're going to be focused on really, really, really providing a ton of value and also selling your offer, pitching it at the end of that webinar or throughout your challenge, at the end of the conference, whatever it might be, and then, after the launch mechanism, then you have an open cart period. So what we're really talking about is scaling those registration ads, because, as you know, lead generation ads are my number one favorite, and so that would be those registration ads getting more people onto your email list, increasing the registration. So how do you scale the ads quickly? And when I say scale the ads quickly, I mean increase the amount of money you're spending so that you can grow the success of the ads.
There are two different types of scaling. You can scale vertically or you can scale horizontally. Vertical scaling is increasing your budget on what is already working. You're saying, yes, this is great, I'm going to spend more money on it. Horizontally scaling is introducing new audiences and expanding. Now, you're going to need to expand your budget here, but you're expanding your budget by reaching new and different audiences and kind of branching out. So what I like to do is you start kind of with a bit of a smaller audience, that you're going to initially vertically scale and then, as that is showing success and you figure out the best performing versions of ad copy and images, then you can do more of a horizontal spread or scale and spread out and reach new audiences.
The normal and I'm putting normal in quotations the normal rule for scaling is to increase your budget by about 20 every three to four days. The reason that this works so well is that typically and and you can change this, but typically Facebook ads run on an auction system and if you increase your budget too quickly, you're putting yourself into a different category of the auction where people have that bigger budget Because typically you auction, the auction happens with others that have a similar budget as you. So if you've, if your ad campaign has stabilized around like five dollars a day and then all of a sudden you increase it to fifty dollars a day, you're jumping from one group of ads that you're competing against to a completely different group of ads, and it can really throw the algorithm off, and so by increasing just a little bit, that 20 every few days, it gives the ad a chance to increase the budget while staying in the same kind of area, the same territory and competing against very still similar ads, but kind of going to that next level and then three or four days later you increase another 20 percent and compete against those people and then another three or four days you can continue to compete against very similar audiences, but you're just growing it a little bit each time. So that is typically how I would recommend vertically scaling your campaigns, and if you have something that's working and you want to spend more money on it, then that's how I would encourage you to increase your budget, as long as your audience isn't fatigued.
And the way that we tell if an audience is fatigued is by looking at the frequency and making sure that it is below four. By looking at the frequency and making sure that it is below four, if your audience and I look at this at the ad set level, not the campaign level, not the ad level I really do look at the ad set level for the frequency. Once it approaches about three. That's when I start to consider new versions of images and new ad copy and as it gets to four, I want to be able to turn the old one off and put fresh variations up as you're scaling your budget, you just need to be aware that if it's a smaller audience, it will get fatigued faster. So that's something to keep in mind and just to keep an eye on. It's really, really important. With warm audiences so like email lists, engagement on Instagram or Facebook, video views, website traffic those audiences tend to be significantly smaller, whereas lookalike audiences and cold, interest-based audiences are going to be in the millions, if not tens and hundreds of millions, and so they fatigue much less quickly. So keeping an eye on that frequency level helps you to ensure that the ad isn't fatigued.
So let's just say you're in a launch period. You have 14 days to get all the registrations. That isn't really enough time to increase your budget every three to four days. Now I do recommend that you still do that. You find those audiences, those variations that are working, and every three to four days you're increasing your budget by 20%. But you also want to implement some other techniques to help you increase that budget faster.
So the first one is duplicating success. There is a duplicate button. You're going to want to duplicate the campaign and you can leave the successful campaign running in this case. In other situations where these are more evergreen ongoing campaigns. When I duplicate something, I turn the original one off, but in a short focused selling or registration period I would leave it on and I would duplicate with the exact same settings, exact same audience, everything and I would just bolster the the budget. So if I was originally spending five dollars and my goal was to get to fifty dollars, I would probably put it at like 3535 to $40, this new duplicate campaign and increase the budget of the original campaign by 20% until I got it to that $10 or $15, so that together the two of them were $50. That's a really great way to duplicate the success that you already have.
If you don't want to introduce new audiences, making sure also that you are turning off the things that aren't working, and so having your campaign set up in a way that if there are images that aren't working or versions of ad copy that aren't working, you can toggle those off. If there's audiences that aren't working, you can toggle those ones off I do recommend that you have more audiences than you need. So my rule of thumb is I want one audience for every $10 that I'm spending. So with that $50 budget I would have five audiences, but initially I'm going to set up probably seven to 10 audiences, so that I can turn the ones off that are not performing as well as the other ones. So I'm turning off audiences that aren't working. I'm turning off audiences that aren't working. I'm turning off images that aren't working. I'm turning off ad copy that isn't working, so that the budget is more focused on what is working. Now, this is another piece of advice that is everyday advice. That's what I'm going to be doing for all of my clients all the time, not just in a launch, but it is still really good.
The other option is to scale horizontally, so you start a new campaign and you introduce new audiences. So you're not going to just be increasing the budget of what you already had running, but you're going to find new audiences. So let's just say again, back to that original campaign. It was running for $5 a day. I had one audience. I'm going to duplicate it and now I want my budget to be 50. This is where I'm going to introduce those seven to 10 audiences that I referenced a minute ago. This is where I'm going to introduce those seven to 10 audiences that I can start pruning from to get us up to the $50 a day with five audiences.
I also, especially in a situation like this, where you're scaling really, really quickly or if it's just a short window that you don't have a much, you don't have much time to play with, I'm going to recommend that you have extra images and ad copy, or angles for ad copy, already prepped ahead of time so that you can switch them out right away if something isn't working. The worst thing possible is when you get into one of these focused registration periods leading up to a launch and something's not working and you don't have a backup, because then you have to go through the design process or the writing process, and that takes time. It can take 24 hours to get those new images, to get the new ad copy, to get everything approved by the client, any revisions that are necessary. I mean, you may be your own client in this case, you know, but you're still going to need to take some time to make those changes. And if you're also in this focused registration period, there's probably 500 other things you're going to be getting pulled to do. And so, having extra images, extra versions of ad copy, extra headlines already prepped, ready to go in case what you pick as your like best options doesn't work, then you have them already ready.
I also like to use a layered strategy when I have smaller audiences. So this is more like in an open cart period, when I'm only promoting to warm audiences. But you can definitely do this in a registration period as well, where we layer new ads every couple of days so that audiences aren't fatigued as quickly. So this would mean on day one we're starting with a pretty general ad that's going out. Halfway through we introduce a new ad that is just really drilling in the point. You only have seven days left to register. Get on right now. Then we layer in maybe some testimonial ads from previous people who have participated and then, with three days left, you know those really hard pushes for it's almost here. Get in now before it's too late. Those ads 48 hours left, 24 hours less last chance ads layering them in, because that will help your audience not see the exact same thing over and over and over again Again. This is really really great in that open cart period because you typically are not going to be sending ads out to cold audiences.
I always recommend that when you're selling something with an ad, that the person receiving the ad or the person seeing the ad has done some sort of trigger action, which means that they have gone to a sales page, they've clicked a button, they've expressed interest in what you're selling in some way and because they need to do that trigger action, it's just going to be a smaller pool by default. You can't just say I want all moms who have kids between the ages of two and five right. That's going to be a significantly larger audience than people who have been to your website. So when you're selling, you can have those layered ads that come out every couple of days just to keep things fresh and top of mind for anybody who is going to be interested in buying. And when we see the same ad over and over and over again, our brain starts to tune it out. And keeping the images fresh especially the images, but also the headlines and the hook, the first line or two lines of your ad copy helps to not create that effect of people zoning out or tuning it out or just scrolling past because they've already seen it and already decided oh, it's not for me.
So I hope that this episode was really helpful on talking about different ways that you can scale, whether it's vertical scaling by increasing your budget 20% every three to four days, or if it's horizontally scaling by duplicating the campaign and skyrocketing the budget right then and there, or duplicating the campaign and testing it. A whole bunch of different audiences. Again, I like to start out with about one audience per $5. So if I have $50, that's 10 audiences with the goal of cutting it back to one audience for every $10, which would be five audiences for $50. And just keeping an eye on what's working, what's not working, so that you can turn off those things that aren't working. So your budget is doing absolutely everything it can for you and it's really working for you, and it's not spending any money on the things that aren't working.
Thank you again for being here for this Saturday, for this Saturday strategy session. I hope that you enjoyed it, I hope you took something away and I will be back next Saturday with a brand new episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe, so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And, if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday strategy session.
Today we're going to be talking about how to scale your ads quickly. I am going to be specifically talking about how to do this during a launch, but you can use these strategies to scale your ads in any situation. If we look big picture, at a launch, you're typically going to have 12 to 16 to 20 weeks of kind of warm up, pre-launch type content where you're getting your audience interested. Maybe you're promoting an early bird wait list or something like that, or you could just have all of your content focusing on topics that you know will bring in the right people to get into your offer. Then you go into the registration phase, where you're getting people registered for your launch mechanism. That could be a webinar or a challenge or a video series, conference or summit, really any sort of event or time frame that you're going to be focused on really, really, really providing a ton of value and also selling your offer, pitching it at the end of that webinar or throughout your challenge, at the end of the conference, whatever it might be, and then, after the launch mechanism, then you have an open cart period. So what we're really talking about is scaling those registration ads, because, as you know, lead generation ads are my number one favorite, and so that would be those registration ads getting more people onto your email list, increasing the registration. So how do you scale the ads quickly? And when I say scale the ads quickly, I mean increase the amount of money you're spending so that you can grow the success of the ads.
There are two different types of scaling. You can scale vertically or you can scale horizontally. Vertical scaling is increasing your budget on what is already working. You're saying, yes, this is great, I'm going to spend more money on it. Horizontally scaling is introducing new audiences and expanding. Now, you're going to need to expand your budget here, but you're expanding your budget by reaching new and different audiences and kind of branching out. So what I like to do is you start kind of with a bit of a smaller audience, that you're going to initially vertically scale and then, as that is showing success and you figure out the best performing versions of ad copy and images, then you can do more of a horizontal spread or scale and spread out and reach new audiences.
The normal and I'm putting normal in quotations the normal rule for scaling is to increase your budget by about 20 every three to four days. The reason that this works so well is that typically and and you can change this, but typically Facebook ads run on an auction system and if you increase your budget too quickly, you're putting yourself into a different category of the auction where people have that bigger budget Because typically you auction, the auction happens with others that have a similar budget as you. So if you've, if your ad campaign has stabilized around like five dollars a day and then all of a sudden you increase it to fifty dollars a day, you're jumping from one group of ads that you're competing against to a completely different group of ads, and it can really throw the algorithm off, and so by increasing just a little bit, that 20 every few days, it gives the ad a chance to increase the budget while staying in the same kind of area, the same territory and competing against very still similar ads, but kind of going to that next level and then three or four days later you increase another 20 percent and compete against those people and then another three or four days you can continue to compete against very similar audiences, but you're just growing it a little bit each time. So that is typically how I would recommend vertically scaling your campaigns, and if you have something that's working and you want to spend more money on it, then that's how I would encourage you to increase your budget, as long as your audience isn't fatigued.
And the way that we tell if an audience is fatigued is by looking at the frequency and making sure that it is below four. By looking at the frequency and making sure that it is below four, if your audience and I look at this at the ad set level, not the campaign level, not the ad level I really do look at the ad set level for the frequency. Once it approaches about three. That's when I start to consider new versions of images and new ad copy and as it gets to four, I want to be able to turn the old one off and put fresh variations up as you're scaling your budget, you just need to be aware that if it's a smaller audience, it will get fatigued faster. So that's something to keep in mind and just to keep an eye on. It's really, really important. With warm audiences so like email lists, engagement on Instagram or Facebook, video views, website traffic those audiences tend to be significantly smaller, whereas lookalike audiences and cold, interest-based audiences are going to be in the millions, if not tens and hundreds of millions, and so they fatigue much less quickly. So keeping an eye on that frequency level helps you to ensure that the ad isn't fatigued.
So let's just say you're in a launch period. You have 14 days to get all the registrations. That isn't really enough time to increase your budget every three to four days. Now I do recommend that you still do that. You find those audiences, those variations that are working, and every three to four days you're increasing your budget by 20%. But you also want to implement some other techniques to help you increase that budget faster.
So the first one is duplicating success. There is a duplicate button. You're going to want to duplicate the campaign and you can leave the successful campaign running in this case. In other situations where these are more evergreen ongoing campaigns. When I duplicate something, I turn the original one off, but in a short focused selling or registration period I would leave it on and I would duplicate with the exact same settings, exact same audience, everything and I would just bolster the the budget. So if I was originally spending five dollars and my goal was to get to fifty dollars, I would probably put it at like 3535 to $40, this new duplicate campaign and increase the budget of the original campaign by 20% until I got it to that $10 or $15, so that together the two of them were $50. That's a really great way to duplicate the success that you already have.
If you don't want to introduce new audiences, making sure also that you are turning off the things that aren't working, and so having your campaign set up in a way that if there are images that aren't working or versions of ad copy that aren't working, you can toggle those off. If there's audiences that aren't working, you can toggle those ones off I do recommend that you have more audiences than you need. So my rule of thumb is I want one audience for every $10 that I'm spending. So with that $50 budget I would have five audiences, but initially I'm going to set up probably seven to 10 audiences, so that I can turn the ones off that are not performing as well as the other ones. So I'm turning off audiences that aren't working. I'm turning off audiences that aren't working. I'm turning off images that aren't working. I'm turning off ad copy that isn't working, so that the budget is more focused on what is working. Now, this is another piece of advice that is everyday advice. That's what I'm going to be doing for all of my clients all the time, not just in a launch, but it is still really good.
The other option is to scale horizontally, so you start a new campaign and you introduce new audiences. So you're not going to just be increasing the budget of what you already had running, but you're going to find new audiences. So let's just say again, back to that original campaign. It was running for $5 a day. I had one audience. I'm going to duplicate it and now I want my budget to be 50. This is where I'm going to introduce those seven to 10 audiences that I referenced a minute ago. This is where I'm going to introduce those seven to 10 audiences that I can start pruning from to get us up to the $50 a day with five audiences.
I also, especially in a situation like this, where you're scaling really, really quickly or if it's just a short window that you don't have a much, you don't have much time to play with, I'm going to recommend that you have extra images and ad copy, or angles for ad copy, already prepped ahead of time so that you can switch them out right away if something isn't working. The worst thing possible is when you get into one of these focused registration periods leading up to a launch and something's not working and you don't have a backup, because then you have to go through the design process or the writing process, and that takes time. It can take 24 hours to get those new images, to get the new ad copy, to get everything approved by the client, any revisions that are necessary. I mean, you may be your own client in this case, you know, but you're still going to need to take some time to make those changes. And if you're also in this focused registration period, there's probably 500 other things you're going to be getting pulled to do. And so, having extra images, extra versions of ad copy, extra headlines already prepped, ready to go in case what you pick as your like best options doesn't work, then you have them already ready.
I also like to use a layered strategy when I have smaller audiences. So this is more like in an open cart period, when I'm only promoting to warm audiences. But you can definitely do this in a registration period as well, where we layer new ads every couple of days so that audiences aren't fatigued as quickly. So this would mean on day one we're starting with a pretty general ad that's going out. Halfway through we introduce a new ad that is just really drilling in the point. You only have seven days left to register. Get on right now. Then we layer in maybe some testimonial ads from previous people who have participated and then, with three days left, you know those really hard pushes for it's almost here. Get in now before it's too late. Those ads 48 hours left, 24 hours less last chance ads layering them in, because that will help your audience not see the exact same thing over and over and over again Again. This is really really great in that open cart period because you typically are not going to be sending ads out to cold audiences.
I always recommend that when you're selling something with an ad, that the person receiving the ad or the person seeing the ad has done some sort of trigger action, which means that they have gone to a sales page, they've clicked a button, they've expressed interest in what you're selling in some way and because they need to do that trigger action, it's just going to be a smaller pool by default. You can't just say I want all moms who have kids between the ages of two and five right. That's going to be a significantly larger audience than people who have been to your website. So when you're selling, you can have those layered ads that come out every couple of days just to keep things fresh and top of mind for anybody who is going to be interested in buying. And when we see the same ad over and over and over again, our brain starts to tune it out. And keeping the images fresh especially the images, but also the headlines and the hook, the first line or two lines of your ad copy helps to not create that effect of people zoning out or tuning it out or just scrolling past because they've already seen it and already decided oh, it's not for me.
So I hope that this episode was really helpful on talking about different ways that you can scale, whether it's vertical scaling by increasing your budget 20% every three to four days, or if it's horizontally scaling by duplicating the campaign and skyrocketing the budget right then and there, or duplicating the campaign and testing it. A whole bunch of different audiences. Again, I like to start out with about one audience per $5. So if I have $50, that's 10 audiences with the goal of cutting it back to one audience for every $10, which would be five audiences for $50. And just keeping an eye on what's working, what's not working, so that you can turn off those things that aren't working. So your budget is doing absolutely everything it can for you and it's really working for you, and it's not spending any money on the things that aren't working.
Thank you again for being here for this Saturday, for this Saturday strategy session. I hope that you enjoyed it, I hope you took something away and I will be back next Saturday with a brand new episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe, so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And, if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday strategy session.
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