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Everyone knows for Facebook ad campaigns, having a high budget equals more results (leads, sales, awareness), but for most advertisers it also means more expensive result. If you are an advertiser on Facebook, you have most likely been in this situation. You build an ad and have it running at $20.00 per day. The ad is bringing you leads and performing well so you then double your budget to $40.00 per day and then maybe $60.00 per day. It seems things are still going well until you realize your cost per lead just doubled or even tripled. As you put more money into your ads the cost per your result skyrocketed! But why?

Most advertisers on Facebook will build one campaign, one or two ad sets and then have one or two ads in each ad set, something like this below:

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As we all know, the budget for the ads is at the ad set level. When your ads begin to perform well of course you want to scale the budgets up because the more budget you put into your ads the more results you will get. The way 99% of advertisers on Facebook do this right now is they go into the ad set level and just edit the “budget” section. For example, they would go into the ad set that is performing well and move the budget from $20.00 per day to $60.00 per day.

The problem with this strategy is that you will notice a few things:

  1. Increasing your budget in the middle of the day will negatively effect your ads (Wait until early morning).
  2. Increasing your budget by more than 100% in one day will negatively effect your ads. (Example: If your budget is at $40.00 per day do not increase the budget to anything higher than $80.00 per day).

The strategy we created at Social Vantage and now use for all high budget clients is called Lateral Scaling. This strategy is what we use when a client’s initial split test go well, we have a winning ad set and we want to put more budget behind it. Instead of scaling the budget “vertically,” as in, moving one ad set from $40.00 per day to $80.00 per day we analyze which ad set is performing the best and DUPLICATE that exact same ad set however many times we want.

For example, if we have 1 ad set spending $40.00 per day, we are spending $40.00 per day total. Let’s say that ad-set starts driving us leads and is performing really well and we want to scale that budget up to $120 per day. What most advertisers would do is just go to the “budget” section of the ad-set and change it from $40.00 to $120.00 per day. We now know that is the WRONG way to approach it.

Using Social Vantage’s Lateral Scale method, we would go to the ad-set that is performing well at $40.00 per day and duplicate it 3 times. So now we have 3 ad-sets running at $40.00 per day which equals $120.00 per day.

Here is an example of what the Lateral Scale strategy will look like in your ads manager. You can see in the example below. We wanted to run $60.00 per day total. Instead of making one ad-set $60.00 per day, we created 6 ad-sets at $10.00 per day.

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I have personally been implementing this strategy for my clients in the fitness industry, real estate industry and many more and I can honestly say the Lateral Scale strategy will work for any business in any industry if implemented correctly.

Now it’s your turn! I am excited to hear what type of results this strategy brings your business. Let me know if you have any questions I would be happy to help!

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About Marissa Esposito

Marissa Esposito is an Account Executive at Social Vantage. She uses her strong background in public relations, communications and marketing to drive consistent, high quality results for her clients. Marissa has a strong client portfolio that includes high level real estate agencies and business to business (B2B) restaurant clients. This Account Executive one day aspires to become a mermaid!