What Is the Right Moment to Scale or Kill Your Ads
The question that we get so much in our Facebook Ads Rockstars group – when should we stop or continue running our ads?
Overall, this is a very tricky and delicate moment. Everything depends on your product, your creatives, and the way you built your funnel.
However, we have discovered some tendencies to follow throughout our practice.
Ok, You’ve Started Your New COOL Creatives. What Are you Doing Next?
After your ads have run for 24 – 48 hours, you can make some data-based decisions on what to do next.
You can let the ad continue to run to collect more data, scale the ad and invest more money, or kill the it and look into possible reasons for its failure.
Here are some general recommendations on what to do next:
– No conversions (i.e. sales) but high engagement (low CPC, high CTR): Let the ad run for at least another 12 hours (because those stats imply that you have good targeting but maybe the design is not appropriate).
If you still don’t have any sales after extending the ad campaign, turn off the ads and review your design.
If sales start to pick up, then let the ad continue to run and monitor the data closely during the following days to make sure you are not losing any money.
– No conversions and little engagement: Kill the ad immediately. Revise the targeting and review the ad image and text.
– Break-even (profit generated by sales equals the ad budget):Let the ad continue running and check it again a couple of hours later.
As long as the campaign breaks even, you should let it run on during the tests. As you know, it takes some time for Facebook algorithms to optimize.
Always monitor these ads very closely because as soon as the ad spend exceeds the profits made by sales, you should turn off the ad.
If sales pick up and your campaign becomes profitable then you can increase your budget by up to $10.
– Several sales (5+): Scale the ad campaign and increase the budget by up to 30% of the current budget.
Keep in mind that many top Facebook advertisers use a specific schedule or process for running ads (see the next chapter).
For example, every week, launch your ads on Wednesdays and let them run until Friday. On Friday cut the losing ads and scale the winning ads over the weekend.
So what does “scale” actually mean?
Once your company has found a profitable niche, they invest more money in ads to expand their target audience or reuse a successful campaign to target a similar audience.
These are two examples of scaling.
The most common ways of scaling a campaign are scaling up or scaling out, we’ll discuss these two scaling strategies in more detail below.
Scaling Up: Increase the budget and expand your audience
One of the most common scaling strategies is “scaling up” – investing more money to increase the daily ad budget or to expand the target audience.
Some other ways you can scale up is to launch more ad sets for the campaign, launch multiple ad creatives at one time, add a variety of different ad types, etc.
– Increase your budget:
Let’s say that the morning after you launched the ad you see 4-5 sales and you decide to increase your budget by 20-30%.
Facebook will now start serving your ads to more people in your chosen target audience. Once you’ve increased the budget, keep a close eye on the performance of your ad during the following hours and days.
If the ad continues to produce very positive results (i.e. sales) and is exceeding your expectations, keep increasing the budget but continue to watch the ads.
If you notice sales decreasing, you should consider scaling down or stopping the ads if you’ve exhausted that niche (i.e. your ad frequency is over 1.5 and sales are declining). Here are some general guidelines for scaling budgets:
– If your campaign is selling a few items, use a budget of ~$100 a day
– If your campaign is profitable, use a budget of $250 – $500 a day
– If your campaign is very profitable, use a budget of $1000 a day and run the ads until you’ve exhausted the niche (i.e. until sales begin to decrease).
– Expand your audience:
When searching for available interests in your niche, you must have noticed that some groups were smaller than others.
After you manage to reach the majority of those smaller groups (for example, the UK Karate Association), try adding the broader interests (ex. karate, karate fighting, etc) and adjust your targeting.
In addition, you can add more age groups or delete some filters (ex. relationship status, education, work, etc.).
Scaling Out: Find similar niches and adjust your design
Have you found a design that works for one specific niche? Awesome!
Most likely it will work just as well for another niche with a similar interest.
For example, if you had a successful listing in the Mechanical Engineering niche, you could change the design slightly and target Civil Engineers, Chemical Engineers, etc.
By making some slight adjustments you can keep the momentum going and continue launching successful listings.
Before launching a new design, you should research the niche first.
Some other ideas:
– Adapt your design for a different sport, activity or hobby;
– If you have success with a “Hockey Mom” design, why not try it with dads, grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc.
– Adapt successful listings for global markets; if your design was really successful in the US, why not try it in the UK or Australia?
– Add new layersto successful designs to attract new audiences.
Killed an ad? Find out why it failed!
If you get no sales and little engagement within 24 hours of running your ad, you’ll want to review the whole campaign process.
There are a lot of factors that could cause an ad campaign to fail; review your efforts starting from the beginning (audience and design research) all the way to the ad itself – is there anything you missed or something you could do better?
For example, ask yourself these types of questions:
– Are your product prices too high? (lower prices)
– Is the design not suitable for that niche? (review design and message)
– Is the design right but your ad is targeting the wrong people? (review targeting and audience on Facebook)
– Does your ad catch the attention of your audience? (change ad image and text or update the product description)
– Are you offering the right products? (For example, are there only men’s products but a lot of your ad engagement is coming from females?)
– Are there any mistakes in the design, description, or ad? (check particularly if you use foreign languages)
If you have tested a niche with three different designs and you still don’t get any sales, then move on to a new niche!
Maybe that audience is not passionate enough to purchase your products or your design and message aren’t resonating with them.
If this happens go back tofinding buyers and start researching a new audience; every failure is an opportunity to learn, get back to the drawing board and don’t give up!
To Wrap It Up
Overall, this is it – as simple as that! Do the optimization regularly, fish for->scale winners and KILL losers.
Let us know if you are using the same techniques in your practice.
If you are, please let us know your thoughts and experiences. What are the pros and cons of this approach? Maybe, you are having other KPIs showing youwhen to GO and when to STOP. Feel free to post below!
Let’s share our ideas and boost our sales together!
Every month I choose a few entrepreneurs to personally help them scale their Facebook ads and businesses.

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