Boosting your marketing budget won’t achieve much if you’re following the wrong strategy. This article examines a technique that will help you scale your Facebook Ad budget.

Facebook Marketing is one of the toughest things your business has to do.

When it all goes well, you get more clients and everything’s rosy. But if you’re using the wrong digital marketing strategy, you may not even realise until it’s too late.

By that point, you’ve wasted thousands of dollars trying to reach people who’d never have become customers anyway.

That can make you a little wary when trying to grow your business.

How do you scale your Facebook Ads without blowing your budget?

This one technique will help you…

Split Testing to Determine Ad Effectiveness

When you create a Facebook Ad campaign, you’ll notice that Facebook offers to automate a lot of it for you.

You have four major placement options:

  • Facebook
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Instagram
  • Facebook’s Audience Network

And as you go through the process, Facebook recommends that you let it handle placements automatically for you.

It’s likely that you’ll get some good results this way. But they may not be the best results possible. And when you’re scaling your budget, allowing Facebook to take control could lead to wasted money.

The key here is that you may not think that one of the placement options will work for you. For example, if your target market isn’t young adults, Instagram may not be the best place to advertise.

This is where it’s best to take control and conduct your own split testing. This involves splitting your marketing budget between two different platforms. You then collect the data to see which works best. As a result, you don’t waste money on a less effective platform.

Happily, Facebook offers a split testing feature to help you do this.

Let’s look at how you can take advantage of it to see if you get better results from Facebook or Instagram.

Tip #1 – Set Up the Split Test

This is where the bulk of your work will take place.

Let’s run through all of the steps you have to follow to create your split test.

Step #1 – Set Up an Ad Campaign

Open your Facebook Ads manager and set up a brand new campaign.

Facebook presents you with a set of campaign objectives. These include goals such as increased traffic, conversions, and lead generation. You can also set less tangible goals, such as increasing brand awareness.

Choose whichever is the most important to your campaign and turn the “Create Split Test” option on.

Step #2 – Choose Your Variable

Work your way through the ad creation wizard. You’ll come to a section where Facebook asks you to select your variable. This is where you select what you want to test during this campaign.

Click the “What Do You Want to Test” option to see the following variables:

  • Creative
  • Audience
  • Delivery Optimisation
  • Placement

You want to select Placement so you can judge the performance of Facebook and Instagram. However, keep these other options in mind for later split tests. Creative is especially useful for testing two ads against one another.

Step #3 – Choose Your Ad Sets

Facebook will again try to automate where it delivers your ads. It creates a pair of Ad sets that you’ll need to edit.

Click “Edit Placements” for Ad Set A. Here, uncheck everything except for the Facebook option. Keep all of the sub-options underneath Facebook checked as well.

Then, click on “Edit Placements” for Ad Set B. Uncheck everything except the Instagram options here.

This ensures that one set of ads only appear on Facebook and the others only appear on Instagram.

As a side-note, you can also click the Mobile Devices & Operating Systems to break the test down so that the ads only appear on specific devices. Make sure you do this for both ad sets if it’s a route that you want to follow.

Step #4 – Set Your Budget and Duration

Follow the ad creation wizard again until you get to the budgeting section.

The key here is that you want to work with a low budget and a limited duration for the ads. This is a test, so committing a lot of money to it isn’t the wisest idea.

Select “Daily Budget” when choosing your budget type. Facebook will automatically try to get you to commit $200 per day to your ads. Change this to a number that’s more suitable for your business.

Keep the split at 50/50 and elect to run your ads for seven days.

Complete the set-up and your ads will go live on the start date that you selected.

Tip #2 – Find the Data

Facebook will collect data during the course of the week-long campaign.

To find it, open your Facebook Ads Manager. You should see a little bottle icon by the campaign that you’re running the test on.

Select the campaign and then click the “Ad Set Level” option to see your data.

Tip #3 – Analyse Your Results

You should now see a table that contains all of the key data for the campaign.

Confirm that the campaign split the ad spend evenly between Facebook and Instagram. Then, look for the “Cost Per Result” column.

Whichever platform has the lowest figure in this column is the platform that works best for this particular ad.

Now, you can scale up on the right platform safe in the knowledge that you’re not wasting money.

The Final Word

The great thing about Facebook’s split testing feature is its versatility. This article shows you how to run split tests for different platforms. You can repeat this test for every ad that you create.

However, you can also create different split tests for your ad copy and other things. Repeated use of these split tests will help you determine your most cost-effective ad channels.

From there, you can scale your ad budget up from $1,000 to $150,000 without worrying about waste.

Of course, this is only one part of creating a successful social media marketing campaign. There’s so much more to learn from the Growth Marketing Systems team.

 

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