| Hey, The #1 question I get about Facebook Ads – once people wrap their heads around the interface and create their first profitable ads – is how to scale. Because if you just turn up the budget… well, that can work for a bit, and then stop working all together. Or it can go off the rails immediately. Scaling your spend is simple – Facebook rarely has an issue with spending your money at any daily budget, no matter how poorly your ads are performing, or how unattractive your offer is to readers. Scaling your results is much trickier. This is probably the biggest pain point for authors looking to level up their Facebook Ads results. The solution is straightforward – kinda – but getting to the point where you can successfully implement the solution is a long and careful process. This is a higher-level look at Facebook Ads intended for more experienced author-advertisers. If you are still at the stage where you are learning the ropes or struggling to create profitable ads, I still recommend reading this as it can be useful to see what you are ultimately aiming for. Alternatively, you can dive into this giant set of free Facebook Ads resources for authors to help steer you towards profitability and then come back to this for when you want to embiggen your moneys. The Hidden Secret To Scaling When you are launching a book, the last thing you need is unpredictability. Wasting your budget on underperforming ads can be disastrous. Even if you had a magic money tree to replace that cash, you can't run back your launch. You get one shot at being shiny and new. So, when authors hear that I've run lots and lots of book launches for bestselling authors where the budget was five-figures for Facebook Ads alone – launches that were exceedingly profitable BTW – then I always get asked how I scale the ads up to that level. The answer is super complicated, so I usually just say something annoying like, "I don't scale, I start big." In other words, I don't start small and scale the ads up, step-by-step – which seems to be the approach recommended everywhere. I start big. Why does this work for me when that usually leads to disaster? Because I've already done the scaling up. Scaling up is about much more than increasing your budget, it's about honing your offer, expanding your audience, increasing your geographical spread, and adding multiple touch points to a campaign. It's also about eliminating any variables that will act as a drag on ad performance because turbulence can be much stronger at higher altitudes. It's about having multiple ways to grab attention, elicit that precious click, and turn those browsers into buyers, running a multi-pronged campaign aiming at audiences from a number of angles. It's not like you can just press the SCALE ME UP, SCOTTY button and start adding zeroes to your Amazon checks. It's a process. Often a long process, that requires having both patience and a budget for ads – but one where you can also bootstrap yourself along the way. Because scaling up isn't a destination, it's a journey maaaaaaaan. Before I break down that journey in slightly more helpful terms, we need to slay a big ol' myth. The 25% Rule? When I hear other people talking about how to scale Facebook Ads, well, I can understand why people are struggling. Standard advice is not usually that helpful here. Typically, I hear things like "increase your daily budget by 10%-20% every 4-7 days to get good results." Or something like, "don't increase your budget by more than 25% at a time to let the algorithm scale with you." You can Google it yourself and see different people recommending different percentages, to raise your budget once a week, once a day, once every three days – and so on. Calling this a myth is perhaps a little bit unfair, especially when the official guidance from Facebook on this is so very poor. I think all these people are somewhat right that something goes on when we raise our budgets, but wrong about why. And very wrong about how you should handle it to scale effectively. Here's what's really going on – as far as I can tell, anyway. Learning Phase 2: The Return When you create a new campaign on Facebook, it will automatically enter what's called the Learning Phase – where the system serves your ads to different segments of your audience to see who responds better, and then doubles down on any winners. Typically, it takes about 50 clicks to exit the Learning Phase, and performance can be variable during that period. Facebook warns that the performance during the Learning Phase might not be indicative of how the ad will perform once it is running normally – because the system is trying different things. In practice, I often see slightly higher CPCs during the Learning Phase, and then the ad settles down to cheaper clicks. Ads can also reenter the Learning Phase if you make what Facebook calls "significant edits" – things like changing your targeting, changing your ad text/image, adding a new ad to an ad set will always cause that ad set to reenter the Learning Phase (this is all determined at the ad set level, rather than campaign level BTW). And then there are things which "might" cause your ad to reenter the Learning Phase, such as changing your bids and changing your daily budget. Facebook doesn't give an official number for where the threshold is, simply saying rather unhelpful things like changing a budget from $100 a day to $101 a day won't trigger this, but changing from $100 to $1000 a day almost certainly will. Gee, thanks Facebook. I see a lot of people running tests and trying to figure out how to avoid the Learning Phase but my approach to all this is very different. I'm not scared of the Learning Phase at all, because it's temporary. Any variance in performance will be a minor blip and when the ad exits the Learning Phase once more performance should resume on the same trajectory. I usually have strong confidence that the ad will remain profitable at a higher level because I've already done the scaling up carefully over time – a combination of horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is when you simply increase your budget on an existing campaign. Horizontal scaling is increasing your spend by adding more campaigns. For example, if I write suspense, and I have a campaign spending $20 a day targeting fans of Dean Koontz, and I increase my budget to $40 a day, that's vertical scaling. But if a keep my $20-a-day campaign targeting Koontz and add a new one targeting Stephen King, then I'm horizontal scaling. These terms are pretty common in the Facebook Ads world, but I think there is a more helpful way to look at it, which actually maps out the steps you need to take, in the order you should take them in. 4-Dimensional Ad Scaling I view scaling up as a four-stage process which plays out over time. If I was trying to sell you a $1000 course, I'd probably call it something fancy like "4D ad scaling." 1. Scale the offer. 2. Scale the interests. 3. Scale the audiences. 4. Scale the budget. Note that increasing spend is last on that list, and for very good reason. If you attempt to increase your budget dramatically without going through the first three steps carefully, you're making an extremely risky bet that will likely end in tears. This isn't because your ad re-enters the Learning Stage – that's a mere blip in the context of an overall campaign, and when an ad is running hot you probably won't even notice it. The real reason results don't scale with spend is because you are running through audiences faster, the system has a harder job finding you cheaper clicks when your budget is demanding lots more of them, and a higher spend will ruthlessly expose and flaws in your ad, your text, your offer that you might have skated by on at a lower level. And there are solutions to all those things, if you are willing to put in the work and be a little patient. Needless to say, the rewards at the end can be considerable if you do invest the time. While I'm sure you are eager to hear more about all this right now, each of those stages is important enough – and different enough – to be covered in-depth so we'll leave the rest for next time (and I'll get back to work on that video I promised you). Stay safe and don't eat too much ham, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is a wistful MGMT with Nothing to Declare. | 
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