On the lead-up to November, Black Friday month, our client informed us they weren’t going to be running any extra offers but they were looking to increase their Meta ad spend dramatically. With the current spend sitting at £50,000, the increase of 80% to £90,000 was slightly daunting. How were we going to increase spend by so much without negatively impacting performance? 

The strategies we put in place, not only allowed for this increase in spend but also led to a 35% increase in ROAS and a record month for the client, generating their highest-ever revenue – without running any Black Friday ads on Meta.

So how did we do it? When it comes to increasing budgets, we’re all aware of the 20% rule. That is – to not increase or decrease your budgets by more than 20% or you will reset the learnings of the campaign or ad set. Meta has recently introduced larger budget increases – however, this wasn’t available to our client at the time. 

When deciding where we were going to increase budgets, we took two things into consideration. The performance of the ad set (as we mainly use ad set budgets for this client) and whether the ad set was active or in learning limited. Being in learning limited isn’t the end of the world, and we still see strong performance for these ad sets. However, we made the decision to double the budget of the learning limited ad sets and increase by 20% for the active ad sets. This allowed us to protect our highest-performing audiences while scaling budgets dramatically. We did this on a daily basis until we were pacing to spend £90,000 for the month. 

With the account spending an average of £3,000 a day, performance can quickly spiral out of control, so we needed to keep eyes on the account to ensure we spotted any poor-performing ads that needed switching off. We would also redistribute budgets if we wanted to push more spend towards a higher-performing ad set.

One key part of our strategy was to look back to this time last year and review what was working then. As the year goes by and seasons change, your ads and messaging will differ, don’t disregard all your learnings from last year – we relaunched some high-performing ads from winter 2022 and saw some great success. 

In order to scale an account successfully, you need to have a solid campaign structure in place. The account structure we use is as follows:

Advantage+ Shopping Campaign – This is where we tested new ads throughout the month. Once ads perform within this campaign we launch them into the prospecting campaign however, they are also left on within the ASC. 

Prospecting Campaign – This campaign contained 5 ad sets targeting various interests and lookalikes. These are audiences that we know perform and have good historical data behind them, we also only launch ads that have performed within the ASC.

Retargeting Campaign – Targeting stacked website and social engagers from the last 60 days, plus email subscribers.

This tried and tested account structure, along with stringent performance checks allowed us to successfully scale spend while increasing ROAS – during a period of increased CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions). 

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