One thing is certain in the constantly evolving world of digital marketing: successful campaigns require constant attention and measurement. Scaling up your efforts, especially within Facebook Prospecting, can be a pivotal move toward achieving your marketing growth goals. But how can you determine the optimal scale that aligns with your objectives? Let's dive deeper and uncover the intricacies of scaling Facebook Prospecting campaigns.

The Art of Scaling

Scaling a digital marketing campaign is both a science and an art. It necessitates a well-thought-out strategy and a keen understanding of your brand's unique dynamics and value proposition. The first step in your scaling journey involves finding the approach that best suits your situation.

Imagine having ample room to scale, a budget to match, and a desire to swiftly seize new opportunities. In such cases, embarking on a scale test is often the logical choice. This method entails running a controlled experiment with a smaller budget, typically in a smaller market or specific target audience. The goal? To simulate what scaling up rapidly would look like.

During the scale test, you're essentially testing the waters, gauging the effectiveness of expanding your campaign on a smaller scale. The insights you gain are invaluable, offering a preview of how a larger budget would perform. By extrapolating these results to encompass your entire campaign, you can pinpoint the ideal budget increase that aligns with your objectives.

The beauty of scale testing lies in its ability to mitigate risks associated with rapid budget expansion. It's like taking calculated steps rather than leaping into the unknown. It also allows you to avoid the pitfalls of overwhelming your campaign by maintaining control over the budget allocation.

Incremental Growth: Step by Step Towards Success

Sometimes circumstances dictate a more measured approach to scaling. Maybe your current budget isn't substantial enough to accommodate a large-scale test. In this case, you might prefer a cautious and gradual expansion.

In such scenarios, adopting an incremental growth strategy is your best ally. You can start by adding smaller amounts to your daily budget while keeping a watchful eye on campaign performance. This gradual approach provides the opportunity to observe how your campaign responds to each budget increase, making it easier to assess the impact.

The advantage of incremental growth lies in its ability to mitigate risks associated with rapid expansion. As you incrementally allocate more budget, you grant the platform sufficient time to adapt and optimize effectively. If performance takes an unexpected turn, this approach allows for course correction without the risk of jeopardizing the entire campaign.

In a typical version of this scenario, each day sees a thoughtful addition of budget based on all previous information available, creating a data-rich journey of performance evolution. This method involves meticulously tracking daily metrics, such as the total budget allocated and the return on ad spend (ROAS).

As you would expect, increasing the budget generally leads to a decline in ROAS. This phenomenon, often referred to as diminishing returns, is a common occurrence in digital marketing. The key is to monitor how quickly ROAS decreases as you add more budget into your campaign. This data-driven approach provides a reliable method for discerning when you've reached your target ROAS.

Notably, while implementing incremental growth, you should be tracking both self-attributed ROAS (the platform's native metric) and advanced attributed ROAS (which reflects the true impact of your campaign). This dual tracking is essential for evaluating performance from both perspectives.

Platforms like Facebook offer an array of sophisticated optimization tools to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. Understanding how to leverage these tools is essential to achieving your ROAS goals.  In the case of Facebook Prospecting, the platform boasts some of the most advanced optimization capabilities. Facebook excels at automating and streamlining the optimization process due to its deep understanding of its own environment and audience.

By utilizing Facebook's optimization features, you can instruct the platform to optimize for value while setting a target ROAS. Although your advanced attribution ROAS goal may be lower, this approach enables Facebook to optimize based on last-touch metrics while you assess performance using advanced attribution data. It's a seamless alignment between traditional and advanced attribution metrics.

In more complex scenarios, such as optimizing for reach or traffic generation, you may need to fine-tune additional settings. These adjustments help ensure your campaign maintains efficiency even as you add more budget.

CPM (Cost Per Million): To ensure a consistent delivery of your ads, you might need to adjust your CPMs as you scale. This can be vital when expanding your budget, as you might need to pay more to secure additional impressions.

Frequency Capping: An essential lever, frequency capping helps you manage the number of times a single user sees your ad. As you increase your budget, maintaining a stable frequency is crucial to avoid oversaturating your audience.

Navigating Lookalike Audiences and New Segments

For those employing lookalike targeting tactics, scalability comes with strategic considerations. As you expand your budget, you may find it necessary to open up your lookalike audience to gain additional reach. A smaller budget often works well with a more restrictive audience that closely resembles your seed audience. However, as you aim to reach a broader spectrum of potential customers, you'll need to widen your audience, albeit at the cost of reduced resemblance to your original seed audience.  Exploring new interests and psychographic segments is another avenue to diversify your targeting strategy - these tactics are instrumental in discovering fresh audiences to engage with.

Operationalizing Advanced attribution

This narrative isn't just about theory; it's about operationalizing advanced attribution within your media teams. By aligning teams to apply advanced attributed ROAS as the new efficiency benchmark, you can streamline the communication between your analytics team and growth marketing team. The key is to transform advanced attributed ROAS into a practical tool that resonates with media teams.

This process involves issuing new efficiency targets for each channel based on your measured ROAS and multiplier. The new targets, expressed in language your media teams understand, guide your media buying decisions. It's about setting performance goals that align with your unique brand objectives and the methods your media teams are accustomed to.

In essence, you're bridging the gap between analytics and media teams, fostering a collaborative environment where everyone speaks the same language, and the goals are crystal clear. This alignment significantly enhances the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Optimization Insights: Making the Right Decisions

As you navigate scaling Facebook Prospecting campaigns, making informed decisions hinges on your ability to understand the evolving landscape of performance metrics and how they align with your goals.

A pivotal step in the scaling journey involves comparing advanced attributed ROAS with last-touch metrics. While your advanced attributed ROAS may paint a different picture, you must recognize that the platform only evaluates its performance based on last-touch metrics.  But by reviewing the platform-attributed ROAS alongside your advanced attributed ROAS, you gain a comprehensive view of your campaign's performance. 

The path to success in scaling campaigns often involves setting and shifting goals. How you determine these goals is a complex task. It's highly specific to your brand, your objectives, and your unique circumstances.  At some companies, financial teams might provide specific target numbers, although they might not always transparently disclose the methodology behind them. In some cases, previous company practices might dictate the goals. But goal derivation is a subjective process, with brands relying on everything from scientific data to gut feelings, or even guesswork.

While choosing your goals may vary, ROAS serves as a universal benchmark due to its simplicity and flexibility. As a rule of thumb in most industries, aiming for a ROAS between $2 and $3 is a common starting point, as these thresholds generally provide room for profitability and growth. In contrast, metrics like CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) can be challenging to set, as they depend on the product's price and your customer acquisition cost.

Comparing Last-Touch and Advanced Attribution ROAS

With the transition to advanced attribution, it's vital to contrast the decisions made when relying solely on last-touch metrics with those driven by advanced attribution ROAS. The two perspectives might reveal striking differences, even in cases where the final decision is aligned between the two methods.

For example, imagine a scenario where the last-touch ROAS for Facebook Prospecting was 6.2, significantly surpassing the initial ROAS goal of 3.5. This clear-cut scenario would prompt a scaling decision due to the exceptional performance.  However, introducing advanced attribution might present a different picture. The advanced attributed ROAS, calculated based on a more accurate model, could be 4.5, revealing a slightly lower (but still robust) performance.  The advanced attributed ROAS unveils an opportunity to make more informed decisions about budget scaling. 

In this case of Facebook Prospecting,assume the revised ROAS goal was 2.5 based on advanced attribution. Despite the lower goal, the brand's decision to scale remained sound, as the advanced attributed ROAS was 4.5, signifying strong performance that justified scaling up the budget.  Remember, it's essential to recognize that the performance gap between last-touch and advanced attribution ROAS could be more pronounced in other channels. 

Scaling a Facebook Prospecting campaign isn't solely about the numbers and metrics; it's about mastering the art of optimization. The third step in this scaling journey is where the real magic happens – refining and optimizing your campaigns for maximum efficiency and impact.

A Roadmap to Optimization

As you embark on the journey of optimizing your scaled campaign, consider this roadmap for your success:

Set Clear Targets:

With your new ROAS goals defined based on advanced attribution, ensure that your campaign objectives are well-aligned with these targets.

Evaluate Platform Levers:

Platforms like Facebook offer advanced optimization features, and understanding how to leverage these tools is crucial. These levers can make a significant difference in performance.

Optimize for Value:

Utilize Facebook's optimization features to instruct the platform to optimize for value while setting your desired ROAS goal. Align this with your calculated advanced attribution target.

Fine-Tune Settings:

In more complex scenarios, such as optimizing for reach or traffic generation, you may need to fine-tune additional settings, including CPM and frequency capping.

Maintain Audience Relevance:

For campaigns relying on lookalike audiences, remember to adapt your audience criteria as you scale. This can involve widening your audience parameters to reach more potential customers effectively.

Experiment with New Segments:

Expanding your targeting to new interests and psychographic segments can diversify your campaign's reach and generate fresh opportunities for engagement.

Frequency Cap Management:

Monitoring and adjusting frequency capping is critical to avoiding audience oversaturation as you scale your campaign.

Monitor and Adjust:

Keep a vigilant eye on your campaign's performance as you scale. This requires continuous monitoring, measurement, and adaptation to align with your advanced attribution ROAS goals.

A Cheat Code for Success

As you navigate the complexities of scaling Facebook Prospecting campaigns, absorb the insights, implement the strategies, and empower your teams to make data-driven decisions that align with your brand's unique objectives.

Unlocking growth through scaling isn't a one-time endeavor; it's a continuous process that demands adaptation, optimization, and alignment with evolving efficiency standards. Embrace advanced attribution ROAS as a guiding principle on this scaling journey and harness the power of collaboration to unlock new heights of success in your digital marketing endeavors.

You can find in depth details about Scaling Facebook Prospecting in our short course - Optimizing Digital Campaigns With Advanced Attribution - Facebook/Search/OTT