| Hey, I'm back at my desk and healing nicely - thank you. Still need to find a house but you can only eat one elephant at a time, as the old Swahili saying (almost) goes. It's time for another episode of How To Scale Facebook Ads. If you missed the first couple, you can catch up at my dedicated page for subscribers - Facebook Ads for Authors (near the bottom). And I recommend doing that because we covered some important stuff like why scaling Facebook Ads can be so challenging - i.e. how simply turning up the budget even on a successful ad can be a disaster. I also outlined my four-step process for scaling up hugely over time, where you scale the offer, the interests, the audiences, and then finally the budget, which we are covering in separate emails. Right now, we're at Stage Two - scaling your interests - a process by which we greatly multiply the effective audience seeing our ads without taking any real hit in performance. scaling your interests Because this mini-series of emails is intended for more experienced Facebook advertisers, I won't go over the basics here. But if you want to bone up on Facebook's targeting interface I recommend this email from a while back: Reaching the Right Readers. That email might be from 2023 but don't worry. Bar some cosmetic differences in the screenshots, it's still relevant and useful. Back to the present. In the intro email before Christmas, I spoke about vertical scaling and horizontal scaling - terms common in the Facebook Ads world but perhaps less familiar to authors. - Vertical scaling is when you simply increase the budget on an existing campaign. I guess the kids would call this rawdogging it.
- Horizontal scaling is increasing your spend by adding more campaigns, in parallel. The kids have nothing to say on this; I enjoy these rare moments when I'm one step ahead.
And the example I gave last time was a $20 daily campaign targeting fans of Dean Koontz. If I simply increase my budget to $40, that's rawdogging it. I mean vertical scaling. But if I keep that $20-a-day campaign targeting Koontz and add a separate, parallel campaign targeting Stephen King, well, now I'm horizontal scaling. And what we want to do today, essentially, is find ten more Stephen Kings - which will allow us to increase our spend significantly without taking a performance hit. After testing, we won't be targeting our authors separately - we'll pressgang all our winning interests into one monster campaign with a higher budget to reflect the greater audience size. There will likely be considerable overlap between ten similar authors so you might not quite be able to 10x your spend. But we should still have significant room to expand our daily budget on that campaign before it starts to impact performance, drive up click costs, and render our campaigns unprofitable. Once we find the sweet spot, we should be able to run our campaigns at a much higher level, hitting way more eyeballs, driving our books higher in the charts - all without going into the red. Of course, this job would be a lot easier if Facebook hadn't taken a giant hatchet to the interest database. the culling of interests In case you haven't run Facebook Ads in a while, you might return to see various warning signs in your account signifying that a whole swathe of interests have been removed. Good interests. Profitable interests. Ones which had your people in them. Readers who clicked and liked and shared and bought books! Yes, that happened. No, we are not totally over it. But, yeah, the ads still work - if you can navigate the latest BS. As has been the case since Facebook Ads became a thing. The short version is that lots of interests went away. Some related to what are considered protected groups, part was just general cleaning up of the database (by a drunk robot), and a few were simply smooshed together - which made sense in some cases, and not in others. Lots were inexplicable. All were things we just had to deal with because it's not like we get consulted on such things. If you are in a niche like M/M fiction, or perhaps Christian Inspirational, then you might be in a tough spot because Facebook seemed pretty thorough about not just removed the ability to target those groups directly, but also authors in that niche and many adjacent interests too. Some unicorns survived, but you will have to do a lot of manual work to find their hidey holes - hunting in the interface. And I can't promise you will be successful. Outside of sensitive/protected niches, you should fare better. Where some of your interests might have been removed, others have been combined and expanded. While this won't be true for everyone, most should find workable alternatives to their old favorites. I would especially encourage older advertisers to reexamine their views on big authors and audiences if they are reticent. I was also brought up in the world of hyper-targeting - when Facebook only really worked with smaller audiences - but those days are long gone. Big is beautiful in 2025. Take a chunky boi for a spin; you might have the time of your life. have wilburys, will travel If you need a refresh on how to find comp authors, there's a handy article on the Facebook Ads for Authors page linked up top. But comp authors are just one possibility on Facebook. When searching for new interests to target, I generally look at comp authors first - and I take a bigger and broader view on Facebook than on Amazon Ads or BookBub Ads where huge audiences can be problematic. Next, I look at genre interests - the list of targetable genres is hit-and-miss, with some surprising niches available... and big gaps. Again, laborious trial-and-error in that Windows 3.1-era interface is the only way here. I try out what I call adjacent audiences after exhausting all genre and author possibilities - things which aren't quite bookish like TV shows and movies but may contain little pockets of readers I could perhaps fish out of the pile. I ditch the losers, cleave the winners tightly to my breast, and then dump them all in a supergroup to be targeted together. like a bit of strange? Let's return to our example of a suspense writer targeting Dean Koontz, and then Stephen King. After exhausting the pool of similar authors and genres targetable on Facebook, our imaginary writer might look to the world of TV and movies. Stranger Things, for example, is a targetable interest on Facebook - which is always your first port-of-call to see if anything is viable. It has a beefy audience of 10m in the USA alone - which sounds big, but we'll thin the herd in a minute to get rid of all the non-book-reading dopes. Note: these audience numbers are super unreliable for a million reasons but we'll get into that next time - for now, it suits our purposes as a rough guide. Regardless, don't get too excited or intimidated by these numbers. On other ad platforms, big audiences can be very difficult to target effectively - as I said already, but especially so when speaking about adjacent or sideways targets like TV shows or movies. Bigger is better on Facebook these days - to a point. I don't believe in what is often called "broad targeting" - i.e. just targeting everyone in the USA and letting our friendly neighborhood AI handle the rest. (See the Facebook Resources page above for lots more detail on that point, if required.) But I very much do believe in targeting carefully selected large audiences - letting the algorithms go wild within strictly defined parameters. Those qualifications are critical to success. For example, it would be foolish to target the Stranger Things audience without first narrowing by Kindle interests - assuming you are pushing people towards Amazon to buy your Kindle ebook it kind of helps to target people who like ebooks, shop at Amazon, and can open a Kindle book. Sure, you might miss some people who have somehow averted Zuck's all seeing eye, but you also won't show your ad to a load of dorks who like Stranger Things but don't read books. You'll also skip the admittedly less dorkish people who read books in other formats or shop elsewhere but who are equally useless for a Kindle-focused ad sending people to your listing in the US Kindle Store. And that still leaves a lot of people! Around 4m readers in the USA alone, as far as Facebook can tell, who like Stranger Things and own a Kindle. That's a decently meaty audience to aim at, and I'd certainly give it a whirl if I wrote those kinds of books. scaling budget with audience If it's a bust, you move to the next target... without taking it personally because some of these interests seem to have been thrown together haphazardly, based on harvested data of questionable provenance. While others really are on the money, it should be stressed - especially when kissing more frogs than normal in this pool of adjacent audiences. This is just one example of one show in one niche. There are lots of big shows and movies (and other adjacent interests) you can potentially test - and you will know your niche and your readers best. Between comp authors, genre interests, and adjacent interests like TV and movies, you should be able to generate a significant list for testing. It's not practical to test everything everywhere all at once, but this is a process that can take place over time. Slowly work through your testing at times which suit you. Build up your database of potential targets. Winnow the list down based on audience response to your test ads. And then start building your supergroup from the clear winners. Once you have several reliable members in your supergroup, try hitting them all together for your next campaign - at a higher budget to reflect the larger audience size. Don't make any crazy bets – be cautious at first. But see how it performs at a higher budget with a larger pool of interests. There are no guarantees with Facebook Ads, but the increased audience size (while still curating it carefully) should allow the system to have a much easier job at keeping your CPC down even when you are spending at a faster rate. All going well, you should have now scaled your Facebook Ads without taking any real performance hit. And we have plenty more scaling to do - with audiences, and then the budget itself. But the key point to remember today is this. With your winners, add them all into one giant supergroup. While we test separately to get clean data, post-testing, we target everyone together. This is a marked difference from a few years ago, when best practice was often to keep it separated - that's all changed now. In simple terms, the bigger the audience the better. It gives a larger pool for the algorithms to go fishing. Once that pool is filled with effective targets only, the system will have a much easier job keeping your click costs down. Even at significant scale. Dave P.S. Music this week is Karen Dalton with Something On Your Mind. | 
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