How to Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads

Learn how to scale Facebook ads the right way with our tried-and-tested strategies. Maximise your ad reach and achieve better results for your business.

Anyone can run Facebook ads, but scaling them effectively is where the real magic happens. It takes time, effort, data-driven decisions and a well-thought-out strategy to increase ad spend while maintaining strong performance. 

But what does it mean to scale Facebook ads?

In simple terms, it means allocating more funds to your ads without sacrificing profitability—ensuring your return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion rates remain consistent. The goal is to continue delivering strong results while growing the ad spend.

So, if you're spending $100 daily on ads, you've only truly scaled when you can increase that to $200 or $300 while maintaining positive returns. However, challenges like ad fatigue, rising costs, and audience overlap can complicate things, potentially reducing your ad performance. This is where you’ll need a solid Facebook scaling strategy.

This guide outlines nine effective strategies to scale your Facebook ads confidently and grow your ad budget.

1. Use Lookalike Audiences Based on Your Most Valuable Leads

Facebook Lookalike Audiences help you find people who share similar traits with your existing audience—whether it's your previous customers, email subscribers, or website visitors. It’s a great way to expand your reach to an audience that's likely to convert. 

For example, if your source audience is a list of your most recent customers, Facebook can find new users with similar interests, demographics, and online behaviours.

When creating your Lookalike Audience, start with a small size, around 1% to 2%, and gradually increase it as you see success. This approach helps keep your targeting precise, reducing the risk of audience overlap and ad fatigue.

You can also create multiple Lookalike Audiences based on different customer segments, such as frequent purchasers, or highest paying customers. You can then target these groups individually to see which segment performs best, and scale them from there.

Pro Tips for Using Lookalike Audiences:

• Use Facebook’s Audience Overlap tool to prevent different ads from entering the same auction.
• Filter out bots and fake users to avoid wasting your ad budget on non-converting traffic.
• Adapt to privacy changes like iOS 14 by relying on first-party data (such as CRM info) to ensure your Lookalike Audiences remain accurate and effective.
• Continuously monitor and update your Lookalike Audiences based on changes in your customer base or business goals.

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2. Use Advantage+ Placements

Want Facebook's algorithm to do the heavy lifting for you? 

Switch on the Advantage+ placements feature during the ad creation process. This allows Facebook’s algorithm to automatically place your ads on platforms and placements most likely to drive results, such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.

If one placement isn’t performing well, Facebook’s algorithm will automatically shift the ad placements to where they’re most effective. This means your ads won’t be shown to the wrong audience, at least not for long.

Although this Advantage+ placements works, Facebook can sometimes overspend on certain placements. To avoid this, use Ad Manager’s Breakdown feature to spot underperforming placements receiving too much of your budget. Once identified, manually adjust or exclude them to optimise your ad spend and improve overall performance.

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Pro Tips for Using Advantage+ Placements:

• Avoid using this feature if you have specific ad placements in mind. 
• Give Facebook enough time to optimise your ad placements before making changes.
• Make sure your ads are visually optimised for the various formats (like Stories vs. Feeds) to ensure they perform well across different placements.
• Regularly check your ad performance and adjust placements accordingly. What works well today may not work as well tomorrow.

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3. Create Separate Ad Campaigns for Different Audiences

When scaling your Facebook ads, you can segment your audiences and create specific campaigns for them:

For example:

• Campaign 1: Focuses on brand awareness for a larger, new audience.
• Campaign 2: Targets people who have visited your website but haven’t completed a purchase (retargeting).

Both audiences are important to your business, but they shouldn’t be mixed, as their campaign objectives and messaging differ. By keeping them in separate campaigns, you can track their performance individually and optimise accordingly.

You can also use Custom Audiences in Facebook Ads Manager to exclude groups that don’t align with your objectives. For instance, if you're running a sale exclusively for current customers, you can exclude everyone else from seeing the ad. This level of precision in targeting leads to better results and a more efficient use of your ad budget.

Examples for Audience Exclusion:

• Exclude existing customers when promoting offers for new customers to avoid showing irrelevant ads to people who have already purchased.
• Exclude previous purchasers when running a brand awareness campaign to focus on reaching new potential customers instead of those already familiar with your business.
• Exclude recent website visitors from campaigns aimed at cold audiences to ensure you're not wasting budget on people who have already engaged with your site.

And so on—you get the idea! 

4. Increase Your Ad Spend Gradually

It’s common practice to allocate more funds to your top-performing ads. However, you’re often better off increasing your ad spend gradually. 

Here’s why:

• You’ll avoid resetting the learning phase, as disruptions can cause a campaign to lose its learning status.
• You’ll reduce ad fatigue by ensuring your audience isn’t bombarded with the same ads repeatedly.
• You give Facebook the time it needs to optimise your new budget effectively, maximising returns without wasting ad spend.

Start by increasing your ad spend by 10-20% every few days on your best ads, and monitor their ROAS and cost per acquisition (CPA) to ensure they maintain stability. Once you notice diminishing returns, you can move on to another campaign and repeat the process.

Create Split Tests at the Beginning to Optimise Your Campaign Budget

If you don’t have any data points on any of your top-performing ads yet, don’t worry. You can conduct a split test at the campaign level to do so. This allows Facebook to test different ad sets within the same campaign, identify the top performers, and automatically allocate more budget to those successful ad sets.

Begin by setting a large enough upfront budget to give Facebook’s algorithms ample room to experiment and optimise. This approach helps you quickly identify and scale your best-performing ads, maximising your campaign’s efficiency.

5. Use Broad Targeting to Find New Potential Customers

Sometimes, targeting too precisely can limit your ads overall reach. Broad targeting, in comparison, gives Facebook's algorithms more room to find and tap into new and potentially highly relevant audiences. This means you can target a larger and more diverse pool of potential customers for your business.

When setting up broad targeting:

• Set Basic Guidelines: While broad targeting involves fewer restrictions, you'll need to set some parameters to ensure your ads reach relevant audiences. These could include age ranges, geographic locations, and interests related to your business.
• Optimise for Purchases: Campaigns should ideally be optimised for conversions, which can help Facebook's algorithms target your business's most valuable potential customers.
• Monitor Performance and Adjust: Regularly review your campaign performance. If certain segments or regions show strong results, consider allocating more funds to these ads.
• Test and Refine: Experiment with different broad targeting settings and ad creatives to find the best combination for your business. A/B testing can help you identify what works best and fine-tune your strategy.

Broad targeting, when combined with purchase-focused campaigns, can quickly help you find new, high-quality customers cost-effectively.

You Can Also Target Global Markets

Businesses that operate internationally, like e-commerce stores, or drop shipping businesses, may want to target other relevant areas. Facebook offers location targeting options that allow you to expand your reach beyond specific cities or countries.

For instance, if your drop shipping business mainly targets the US market, you're probably running into stiff competition and high costs. To address this, you could expand to target alternative areas with large English-speaking populations, such as Europe, or South America, boosting sales. 

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List of largest consumer markets worldwide, according to data from World Bank.

If you're unsure which demographics or interests to include, you can use your current lookalike audiences based on your existing customer data. This gives Facebook a strong foundation to find similar audiences in your new target locations, helping you expand your reach while keeping your targeting precise.

6. Duplicate Successful Ads

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Once your ads performance has hit their peak, you can duplicate them and show them to non-overlapping audiences. This method allows you to create new ad sets with higher initial budgets for non-overlapping consumer segments. Since ads already have a proven record of success, your risk is reduced.

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So how do you know when an ad is successful? You can set up automated rules to send notifications when certain events are met, such as when an ad reaches a certain click-through rate (CTR) or cost-per-conversion. Once you receive a notification, duplicate the ad and target it to a new audience.

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By the same token, you can also duplicate your less successful ads. Sometimes, it's not the ad itself that's the problem, but the audience you're targeting. You may find success with an otherwise underperforming ad by duplicating and targeting it to a different segment. 

How to Duplicate an Ad in Ads Manager

1. Go to your Ads Manager.
2. Select Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads.
3. Check the box next to the campaign, ad set, or ad you want to duplicate.
4. Click "Duplicate."
5. In the "Duplicate Your Campaign" pop-up, choose how many copies you want and click "Duplicate."
6. To retain existing ad engagement, check "Show existing reactions, comments, and shares on new ads."
7. When ready, select "Publish."

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7. Build a Sales Funnel

Increasing your budget doesn’t always lead to proportional conversion increases as you scale your Facebook ad campaigns. As your budget grows, it helps to add new layers of engagement by building a sales funnel that guides users through their buying journey.

A sales funnel ensures that you reach audiences at different stages—whether they're just becoming aware of your brand or ready to purchase.

Here’s one way to structure your Facebook sales funnel:

Step One: Discover Your Warm Audience

First, you need to turn cold audiences into warm leads, which you can retarget later. This is where Facebook's Brand Awareness objective comes in. Using this objective, you can deliver ads to new audiences who are more likely to engage with it in the future.

To create a warm audience, use brand awareness objectives like:

• Video views
• Content clicks
• Page likes

While these objectives probably won’t lead directly to conversions, they’re cost-effective and set the foundation for future retargeting campaigns.

Step Two: Engage Your Warm Audience

Once you've built a warm audience, you can start retargeting them with more specific ads. The goal now is to push them further down the funnel by encouraging actions like:

• Visiting your website
• Signing up for a free trial or offer

You can also retarget them with more direct, product-focused ads. These are more likely to yield higher conversion rates than retargeting cold audiences.

Step Three: Optimise Your Landing Pages to Drive Conversions

Finally, you’ll want to ensure your landing pages are properly optimised for conversions. For example, if you’re retargeting warm leads with an ad for a specific product or service, they should be directed to that exact product on your landing page with a clear CTA.

During this stage, you should have your Facebook Pixel set up to track conversions and monitor the success of your campaigns. Use this data to continuously refine and improve your audience targeting, ad creative, and overall strategy.

PRO TIP: Focus on Your Most Engaged Warm Audiences for Better Results

Warm leads, while all familiar with your brand, vary widely in their level of engagement. Some are loyal, frequent purchasers, while others may have only shown mild interest, such as watching part of a video. To get the most out of your ad spend, focus on the most engaged segments of your warm audience—those who are more likely to convert—and tailor your ads based on their level of commitment.

Let’s go over a few examples:

• Website visitors: Instead of targeting all website visitors, target ones who’ve explored key areas like your product or pricing pages within the last 30 days. This group shows higher intent and is more likely to make a purchase. 
• Video viewers: Focus on people who watched at least 50% of your video content, as it indicates stronger interest than those who may have dropped off early. 
• Email subscribers: Segment subscribers who opened recent emails or clicked on specific links. These users could be primed for more product-focused messaging or special offers.
• Downloaders or sign-ups: If someone downloaded a guide or signed up for a free resource in the past 60 days, they may be open to more educational or product-focused offers that build trust and familiarity, and so on.

You can now create separate ad sets for these groups with their own tailored messaging and budget. This allows you to test which segments respond best to your retargeting ads. After identifying the top performers, you can reallocate more of your budget to those segments or even create dedicated campaigns for them.

8. Create Different Ads for Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

Want to minimise ad fatigue and maximise CTRs and conversions? Then try using different ad formats, creatives and messaging for leads at each stage of your sales funnel.

Here are a few suggestions on what ad formats to use:

Video ads generally work well for brand awareness and top-of-funnel campaigns. They are perfect for evoking emotions and are highly effective at telling your brand’s unique story, as well as its values, mission, and unique selling points. For example, this AG1 ad is an educational angle that speaks to their ingredient benefits.

Mid-funnel ads can focus on more targeted messaging that addresses your audience’s specific pain points. Carousel ads or Facebook Collection ads, which allow you to showcase several products or features in one ad, are often top candidates for this funnel stage. 

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Bottom-of-funnel ads should have a clear call-to-action and emphasise the benefits of converting. These can include retargeting ads, discount offers, limited-time promotions, or dynamic ads that show users products they’ve previously viewed or added to their cart. For example, this AG1 ad pushes people to a sale by giving them a limited offer.

By creating ads for each stage of the sales funnel, you can guide potential customers through their journey and increase the likelihood of conversions.

9. Choose Relevant Metrics and Keep Track of Them

It’s common knowledge that you should track metrics to measure your ad campaign’s success. However, many marketers focus on the wrong data points, leading to non-actionable insights and ineffective decision-making. 

To scale your campaigns effectively, you need to focus on metrics that drive meaningful growth.

Let’s use a mobile app as an example:

Mobile app businesses typically use Cost Per Install (CPI) as a standard metric to track. But it’s not enough to drive downloads—they also need to monitor retention rates (the percentage of users who continue using your app after installation).

While a high CPI looks good on paper, poor retention rates indicates your ads aren’t meeting user expectations. In that case, a business may need to improve the app’s user experience or tweak their audience targeting.

On the other hand, if retention is high but CPI is low, they may want to ramp up ad spend to capitalise on their success and attract even more users.

Use MagicBrief Insights to Track and Scale Winning Ads

As mentioned, it’s imperative to track the right metrics to successfully scale your Facebook ads. That’s where MagicBrief Insights comes in—it makes tracking and scaling winning ads easy with clear, visual-first creative analytics.

Instead of getting lost in irrelevant data, MagicBrief gives you a clear view of the key metrics that actually matter. You’ll know exactly which ads are ready to scale and which ones are wasting your budget in real-time, helping you make more informed decisions.

Here’s what you can do with MagicBrief Insights:

• Choose and track the highly-specific metrics that matter most, such as 15 Sec/3 Sec Video Retention, Cost per Lead, and Cost Per Add-to-Cart.
• Instantly see which ads are driving the best results with easy-to-read colour metric charts.
• Track ad performance in real-time and turn off spot underperforming ads instantly.
• Track brands and analyse the hooks, ad copy, headlines, and landing pages they prefer to use—and how well they perform.

Join MagicBrief today and link your Facebook Ads account to our platform. You’ll then gain access to a comprehensive suite of tools designed to refine your ad strategies, optimise performance, and drive better results. With MagicBrief Insights, you can confidently scale your winning ads and achieve your business goals. 

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