Scaling Facebook Ads Campaigns

If your Facebook campaigns are performing well, odds are you might want to give them a little bit more budget to scale up and get more of that good performance out of them. On the flipside, if they’re not doing as well, maybe you want to cut back and get a little bit more efficient before you scale back up. The problem is each time you make a budget change in Facebook Ads, you throw it back into its learning phase where it’s trying to relearn who it should serve ads to within your given budget. 

And that can cause performance fluctuations that, in rare cases, can be a little bit better than normal. But more often than not, your performance usually takes a bit of a dive before it balances back out, and Facebook learns its way back into getting a decent performance. Today, what I want to talk about are some strategies to mitigate those fluctuations by changing your budgets incrementally rather than all at once to try and help preserve your performance while you’re reaching either the increase or decrease in budget that you need. 

As I mentioned, each time you make a change to your budget, you’re going to throw Facebook back into what it calls this learning phase. And when you hover over the eye, little icon symbol, it’ll bring up this window each time that you look at it. It’ll kind of show you the progress.

So obviously, this is relatively early because that little blue bar is very far over to the left. But as it’s got a little bit more time, that bar will kind of take up more and more to the right in that gray area to show you how close it is to completing its learning phase. This is when Facebook is trying to re-adjust who it’s serving ads to within your given budget and making sure that it’s making the most of the budget that you have given it on a daily basis. 

This is really important. This is when it’s trying to test things out, going after maybe a slightly different audience and seeing what type of performance it’s getting in return in the same way that it’s trying to understand what the metrics looks like and how people engage with your ads. It’s also trying to make sure that it’s focusing on the right people on the right placements that are getting you the most return. 

So the conversions that you’re actually going for, or whatever the campaign objective, is here. You can see it says about 50 conversions recommended in that seven day, click one day view after windows. So that’s quite a bit, and it’s something that Facebook needs to try and find some amount of foothold in the data to know where it’s going to serve your ads to. And again, each time you make a change to your budget, it’s going to impact that. 

So I want to do a little bit of a case study example and show you how that manifests in your campaigns. I want to walk through an example of a short run campaign that we had in place that unfortunately had a number of budget shifts throughout and ended up manifesting in the performance that we saw. The bottom line in this chart is going to be the daily spend that we had in the account. And since we’re using the daily budget setting, that effectively means that the green line reflects what our budget was. 

The blue line is reflective of the number of conversions that we have on each day. So when we first started running the campaigns, we had to scale up budget relatively quickly. We saw some fluctuating performance with a couple of peak days, but then also kind of coming back to normal, and then we had to scale down just slightly to kind of get back to projecting where we wanted to for the month, And when we pulled back a little bit, we stopped seeing those spikes in performance and sort of leveled off a little bit. Conversion performance was relatively stable. 

Then we did the amazingly novel thing of leaving it alone. We didn’t make any changes for a number of days, and that’s when we saw the best conversion performance come through. We had already seen conversions come through prior. So Facebook had some understanding of who was going to convert what worked well with the ads that we had in place. 

And since we left the budget alone, it really got to run in a rhythm as it was kind of learning who it needed to serve ads to. So we saw a couple of really big days, but overall, average conversion performance was really strong. And then you can see that we had a slight dip in the daily budget. Then we saw a big drop off in conversion performance. It just threw Facebook out of whack after having a really solid stable set of days of performance.

And we saw a bit of a dip, but then as we kind of left that alone performance came back a bit. We saw a bit of a spike and then unfortunately, we had to cut the budget in half. And that’s when performance flatlined. We didn’t see any conversions for a handful of days, but as we left things alone and projected just at that lower daily budget, we started to see conversion performance come back as Facebook relearned who it could serve the ads to within that audience and still get good performance out of it. 

So what this brings me to is the overall rule when it comes to adjusting your budgets on Facebook whether you’re going to adjust them up or down. And the good news is, it’s very simple: The 20% rule. Don’t make any changes to your budget over 20% of what your existing budget is whether you’re increasing it or decreasing it. 

Obviously there are some times where you can’t really avoid that if you really have to just scale and get a lot of volume really quickly then okay. Or if you really have to cut the budgets heavily because you’re projecting over for the month, or the effort has been pulled back a bit, then you can only do what you can do. But if you can avoid it, don’t make any changes that are bigger than 20%. 

What that means is that if you do need to double your budget or half your budget, something like that, it’s better if you do it in person over time than it would be to just make that change all in one day. So here’s a couple of examples of what that would look like. If you need to double your spend, it effectively takes five days to do that by making a 20% change each day. So we start off with $100. 

As we increase to $120, $144, $173, we eventually get to $207 on day five in this chart here. And that’ll be the same if it comes down to any daily budget that you have in place. So if you’re going to double spend, it’ll probably take about five days to do that. If you’ve got five days that you can slowly, incrementally scale things up, I highly encourage you to do it because it will mitigate any of those larger performance variations and you’ll keep things a little bit closer to your baseline over time. 

The same is true for cutting spend in half. The good news is this one actually takes less time which usually if you have to cut spend in half, it’s because something is going wrong. So it’s nice that it’ll take a little bit less time. So if you need to cut your spend in half, it’ll only take about four days to do that if you’re doing it on this 20% rule. 

Overall, the 20% Rule is super simple, but it’s something that I think people don’t like to do or don’t want to do because they feel like it’s going to take way too long to get there. So hopefully by walking you through one, what the performance fluctuations will look like if you don’t follow the rule, and then showing you that it’ll only take anywhere from four to five days if you need to half or double your ad spend. Hopefully this will save you a lot of performance fluctuations when you’re trying to scale your Facebook campaigns up or down.

Written by Michelle Morgan