You have an audience, but you're not sure how to grow that audience and increase sales.
In a nutshell, you can increase spend efficiently using three key elements:
- Lookalike Audiences for acquiring new customers
- Website Custom Audiences for selling new products/bestsellers
- Product/SKU retargeting campaigns to increase conversion rates.
Here's how you implement these three key elements to scale Facebook ad spend.
1. Begin with a good base audience.
To efficiently scale ad spend on Facebook you must begin with a base or "seed" audience. This is done by creating a Web Custom Audience (WCA) from existing customers or visitors to your website. The base audience will be used to build other audiences and increase customer acquisition, as your spend increases.
Top ways to create these base audiences:
- Create WCAs for product categories that perform best for your business
- Create a WCA from people who have landed on your checkout page
The more segmented base audiences you have, the more Lookalike Audiences you can create, which we cover in the next step.
2. Create lookalike audiences.
Once you've created these base audiences, you'll need to create Lookalike Audiences for each of the base audiences. Start out by creating the Lookalike Audiences based on "similarity" (1%) to the base audience, rather than based on "reach." By creating them based on similarity, you'll maximize your ROI when increasing spend. Later you can expand these audiences to gain more reach and scale your spend even more.
3. Retargeting campaigns for all products.
Create retargeting campaigns for all of your products at SKU level. This will maximize the spend and increase conversion rates. Visitors who have viewed a particular product/SKU, or viewed multi-products on your site, will be presented with an ad for these products later. Retargeting for products and seed audiences will also balance out your spend and result in a better ROI overall. Where Lookalike Audiences will have a higher Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), retargeting will have a lower CPA—the result of this combination is a balanced CPA and efficient scale in spend.
4. Negatively target customers who have purchased a particular product.
To ensure that you are only advertising particular products to new customers, you'll want to negatively target customers who have purchased particular products/SKUs. This is done by creating a custom audience of people who have purchased particular products/SKUs on your website. This is beneficial for two reasons:
- You will not annoy existing customers with ads for products they've already bought—giving them a better experience with your brand(s)
- You will not spend unnecessarily on ads to people who previously purchased from you—giving you greater efficiency in your spend
Scale Facebook Ad Spend & Grow Sales
The combination of prospecting with lookalike audiences and retargeting ensures efficiency as you scale spend and grow sales. Following the steps above, a StitcherAds client increased spend over three weeks—resulting in checkouts increasing by 332%.
