Facebook advertising has become a core strategy for almost all major brands in recent years. The platform undoubtedly delivers results and can introduce your business to a wider customer base. In fact, a frequent challenge I encounter is businesses seeking to further expand their reach within the Facebook Ads platform. Companies are witnessing positive outcomes and aim to maximize this channel’s potential while it remains effective. With this objective in mind, here are several approaches to explore for scaling your Facebook Ads accounts.

6 effective methods to scale Facebook ads

There are two primary levers for scaling Facebook ads: audience and budget. A crucial point to note regarding audiences: Over my years of experience in Facebook advertising, I’ve observed that everyone seems to have their own unique method for identifying their target demographics. As it’s practically impossible for me to discern your specific strategy, I’ll simply outline some of the most successful ones I’ve come across. However, let’s begin with the budget.

1. Boost your budget

This might appear self-evident, but to enhance your Facebook Ads account’s performance, the easiest initial step is to simply allocate a larger budget. Despite the simplicity of this advice, scaling your budget on Facebook isn’t as straightforward as on other platforms like Google or Microsoft Ads. Every time you modify your Facebook budget, you alter a data point that influences its algorithm, ultimately determining who sees your ads and when. Consequently, each budget change carries the risk of resetting the Learning Phase, or as Facebook calls it, “we’re currently analyzing the situation, so please be patient”. Regardless of whether you utilize daily or lifetime budgets, a general guideline applies when scaling using this method:

Any budget adjustments should be limited to 20% or less of the initial budget. If you aim to modify your budget by a greater percentage, it’s advisable to implement it in stages, ensuring no single stage surpasses the 20% rule. Here’s a video you can watch for a more detailed walkthrough of this strategy, but for the purpose of this post, simply remember that increasing your budget is a readily achievable tactic for scaling on Facebook, provided you proceed in increments of 20%.

2. Target interests that are not as precise

If you’ve maximized your budgets within your existing audiences and are still seeking further expansion, it might be worthwhile to broaden your reach to encompass new user segments. Here are Fortunately, and unfortunately, Facebook’s targeting isn’t flawless, implying that you might not discover the exact products you intend to sell, but you might encounter something comparable. I’ll assume you’re already targeting the ideal products for your business in your initial campaigns. With this approach, the objective is to identify “not-as-spot-on” interests that are nonetheless connected to the products/services you offer. Perhaps these are substitutes, complementary products, or simply fall within the same industry as your offerings. Capitalize on the flexible associations Facebook can establish with its targeting options and leverage these closely related targets to unlock further scale.

3. Pursue competitor brands

Everyone enjoys capturing a portion of their competitor’s market share. After all, it’s a competition, isn’t it? Strategies exist to help you locate your competitor targets on the Facebook platform as well. Initially, you can check if your competitor’s brand name appears as a targeting option. This will likely only apply to prominent brands, but you don’t have to be a large corporation to utilize them. If you provide local products or services and there are targetable brands offering similar services nationally, you can leverage their interest to attract new customers to your local business. For instance, I have a luxury furniture company as a client specializing in high-end, custom-made pieces. Regrettably, the income targeting options were removed from Facebook some time ago. So, we expanded our list to include other high-end brands like Arhaus, Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, and others with comparable price points and larger market presences.

As an added bonus for your ad creative, you can gain inspiration from your competitor’s creative strategies by analyzing their live Facebook ads in the Facebook Ad Library and identifying elements you appreciate and can adapt for your own campaigns.

4. Utilize affinity brand audiences

Similar to competitor brands, you can also leverage affinity brands to expand your reach beyond your existing lists. Consider other brands that complement yours or that your customer base might also patronize. Using these as a means to acquire new customers has consistently proven successful for me. Using the same furniture company as an example, we recognize that there are numerous brands people are likely to purchase from that also occupy the higher, more expensive market segment, but aren’t directly within the furniture or home decor industry. We utilized the aforementioned targeting options to identify new customers based on their affinity for these other brands.

As you’ve likely gathered from these illustrations, none of these strategies are foolproof. Just because Facebook perceives you as interested in Burberry and Versace doesn’t guarantee you’ll purchase an $8,000 sofa. However, if scale is your goal, this is an excellent method to tap into a form of machine learning that could also yield the right customer mix.

5. Expand lookalike models

Lookalike models are among my preferred targeting options on Facebook. They’ve consistently delivered impressive results for me, provided the seed audience I employed had a strong underlying pattern. For those unfamiliar with Lookalike audiences, they essentially comprise an algorithmically-generated audience of potential new users to target on Facebook, modeled after a list of users you provide. The primary issue I observe with advertisers is their failure to fully exploit these lists in one of two ways: They rely solely on a single model The most intuitive starting point for Lookalike audiences is to generate a new list based on your current customer base. This is the model most individuals employ because, logically, we all desire more customers. Therefore, creating a Lookalike audience from our existing clientele is the most logical starting point. However, if you’re observing strong performance, you can readily expand into other models of high-value users to uncover new groups. Lookalike models on Facebook are a function of population and consistently contain the same number of users. So, by generating multiple seed audiences, you can effectively broaden your Facebook campaigns’ reach. Consider these ideas for supplementary seed audiences for Facebook Lookalike audiences:

• Users who have added products to their shopping carts
• Newsletter subscribers
• Lead generation form submissions
• High-value customers exclusively As long as the user list you create exhibits a distinct pattern, you can generate a Lookalike audience from it.

They limit themselves to the 1% expansion As previously mentioned, Lookalike audiences are determined by the population within a specific region. The most specific user model is 1%, representing those most closely aligned with your seed list’s persona. But if this list is yielding positive results, why not expand the model to 2% or even 3%? Experiment by incorporating incremental percentages into your lists and observe their performance. In my experience, each account will have its own threshold, whether it’s 2% or 8%, but you won’t discover it without testing these expanded increments.

6. Experiment with broad targeting

If you’ve exhausted budget and audience optimization strategies on Facebook and are still seeking further scale, a final option exists that could prove beneficial, albeit with a significant caveat. Let’s first examine the strategy: With broad targeting, you utilize a conversion-focused campaign and define the desired conversion action you want to increase. Then, you entrust the rest to Facebook. Yes, literally.

Apart from exclusions to prevent targeting existing customers or those within your retargeting audiences, you add no other targeting options to the campaign and allow Facebook to work its magic. Now for the caveat: This strategy is best suited for accounts generating substantial volumes of the desired conversion action. It’s not intended for those barely surpassing the conversion minimums required to exit the learning phase. For optimal results with broad targeting, you should aim for a minimum of 100 desired conversion actions per week within your account. If this isn’t the case, it might still be worth testing, but I recommend starting with a conservative budget and scaling up only if you observe positive outcomes.

Explore these methods to scale your Facebook ads

Although I’ve primarily focused on two main levers for scaling Facebook campaigns (budget and audience), numerous individual strategies can help you achieve this in a manner compatible with the Facebook algorithm. If you’ve implemented all these tactics and still require further scale, it might be time to broaden your horizons and explore other platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and others to connect with new users.