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Ah, the million-dollar question!

First things first, if you’ve spent more than $5-20 on an ad and you haven’t had a result (we will talk about what kind of results you should be aiming for in a minute) – the ad isn’t working.

There are too many people, and you may be one of them, who just keep throwing money at boosted posts, or campaigns that simply aren’t working. If you’ve got a campaign that’s trying to generate sales or leads, and after $5-20 you have no result, putting more money towards it won’t necessarily help.

There could be a couple of things wrong, this isn’t the place to talk about those issues in depth so check out these blog posts to see if they can help otherwise book in a free Facebook Ad Review session with me: 

-Audience and Targeting

-Split Testing

-Knowing Your Relevance Score

When you’re starting a brand new campaign, you want to aim for an absolute minimum of $5 per day, per ad set. If you saw the split testing post, you’ll know that I highly recommend split testing your audiences. So if you have 4 potential audiences you’re looking at for the first 24-48 hours you’ll be spending $20 a day. 

But once those ads have hit 500-1000 people (if they ever do, Facebook is pretty quick to stop showing ads it knows won’t perform) if you’re not getting the results you want, you need to either change something or kill the ad or ad set. 

The goal here is to narrow down those four potential audiences into one or two that are performing really well and then go from there. For smaller campaigns, you can drop it down to one ad set and have a campaign running for $5 a day, but you need to be able to up that to $20 or even $30 a day every now and then as you test new theories and audiences. 

As with all marketing, the goal is to constantly test and analyze, find out what works and what doesn’t, and continually improve. The market and your consumers are constantly changing. What worked last week, may not work next week. And what worked last year, is highly unlikely to work this year.

How do you scale a Facebook campaign once it’s working?

But what happens if you’re campaign is working really well? Do you stay running on $5 a day? 

The number one rule here is to not change the campaign by more than 20% in one hit. So if you’re campaign is working really well, increase the budget every couple of days by 20% and you’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Alternatively, you can duplicate the already working campaign and start it again with the brand new budget. 

It’s worth testing both strategies, as you may find what works better for you. There have been cases where a campaign was working, and then the increased budget stopped its effectiveness, and campaigns that worked well until they were duplicated and the new campaign never caught up – so always test to see what works for you and your business. 

The moral of the story is there is no ‘ideal amount’ you should be spending on Facebook ads. $5 a day is the absolute minimum you should be running at, and ideally, you want to be pushing that to $10-$20 a day as soon as possible, and scale your good ads as you go.

It’s not a matter of spending as little as possible. It’s about spending as little as possible to see what works, and then scaling up from there!

So what classifies as a result?

I mentioned earlier that you should be turning off ads (or killing them as I say) if you haven’t gotten a result by about $20. 

But, what is the result? There are a couple of things I like to look at.

Firstly, do you have any ‘conversions’? This could be a sale, an opt-in, or a video view depending on the purpose of the campaign. Obviously, if you’re getting these results, you won’t want to turn off the campaign just yet.

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Perhaps you are running a lead gen type campaign so a result to you is an opt-in, but on a smaller budget, it might take you more than $20 to start getting those official leads. In these situations, you need to judge your result based on basic metrics, cost per click, cost per engagement, click-through rate, etc.

If your cost per click is less than $2, your cost per engagement is less than $0.50 (a good campaign can get under $0.05 per engagement) then you still might have a successful campaign on your hands and I’d keep it up!

You also want to be looking at your Relevance Score – it should be above 6 or 7 and make sure you aren’t getting any negative feedback.

If you are trying to make a sale through your store, what’s the cost of an add to cart or a product view? Obviously, these numbers will vary from industry to industry but they should be low enough to still allow you to make a profit.

Now obviously, it’s hard to determine what is right or wrong, what’s working and what isn’t in one blog – so if you’re still stuck, please book in a complimentary Facebook Ad Review here, and I can help you to work out the specific parameters for your business!

Dahna Borg

Author Dahna Borg

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