Brad Callen
ECOMMERCE
The Before:
Ever see a doodle explainer video online? You know.... the ones with the hand drawing on the chalkboard that you just can't seem to scroll past. What about an animated cartoon video? If you've been on Facebook since 2006, we will assume your answer is yes.
Well.... Brad is "the guy" when it comes to selling this type of software. He has multiple products to help customers create engaging and informative animated videos without having to pay thousands of dollars for custom videos and ads.
Brad had been selling his products for some time and was not new to FB ads. However, his major struggle was remaining profitable when scaling his ads.
Check out the steps below to see how we were able to keep his cost downs while scaling his doodle campaigns to a whole 'nother level!
The Details:
The Strategy:
We started scaling Brad's account when Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) was relatively new. With CBO ad managers are not able to set bids and budgets at the audience level. Instead, campaigns will automatically, in real time, optimize towards the best performing, lowest-cost audiences based on what Facebook deems most efficient and scalable. This is another instance where Facebook is moving towards machine learning based on the pixel data to optimize ad campaigns.
In order to have success with this new format we did a lot of experimentation with two types of campaigns. One type of campaign had a huge budget with 10+ ad sets per campaign. The other was a smaller budget campaign with only 3-5 ad sets. This allowed us to start campaigns as high as $4k a day in some cases, and to know within 24 hours whether to scale or turn it off.
Our goal was to mainly scale horizontally, increasing ad spend with new interest targeting and look alike audiences. This also helped prevent campaigns/ads from burning out all at the same time - we were launching new high spending campaigns every day, so when something stopped working we always had another campaign in the pipeline to build on and replace the struggling one.
We made sure to constantly be testing new creative, with a focus on brightly colored, wacky images. We tried to launch new creative multiple times a week, and run new ads against old ads to see which continued to outperform. With our high ad spend we also built up lots of positive social proof on his ads, which further helped conversions.
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The Results:
With the multiple campaigns and constant testing we were able to keep Brad's cost per acquisition under $76 while scaling his ads. Not an easy thing considering that he was spending $30,000 a day on Facebook!
Takeaways:
Multiple Ways To Scale
The common way to scale ads is to increase your ads budget. This works, but there is a maximum that you can increase each day while still being effective. If you increase the campaign budget too quickly for one campaign, you will not be spending your money optimally.
However, you can also scale horizontally. This means that you create more ad sets so that you can spend a larger budget and still remain in the recommended daily increase.
While adding more campaigns you can also choose to test more audiences so that the same people are not seeing your advertisements too often.
Bigger Budges Require More
Larger ad budgets will generally mean more campaigns which require more ads. It is important to have a stockpile of ads that you can switch out in campaigns as not all ads will be winners. We were consistently refreshing the copy and creative in Brad's ads to make sure that he continued to stay under his budget while scaling.
CBO And Facebook Updates
Facebook has made it clear that they want advertisers to rely on their pixel data and algorithms. We have found that the more we base our campaigns off of Facebook's data the better the ads perform.
With Custom budget optimization there is no more tweaking ad spend on the ad set level, rather Facebook adjusts the spend in real time, based off of each ad within the campaign. We predict that Facebook will continue to push advertisers to rely on their data in order to optimize and streamline ad performance.
