| Hey, I found a sweet place for a couple of months so let's make heyyyyyy while the sun is shining and dive into some high-level Facebook Ads wrangling. Unless you forgot who I was during my unplanned absence, you might remember we were answering one of the most frequent questions going - how to scale Facebook Ads - and we'll use today's email to review everything so far, to remind everyone (myself included!!) where we're at. the challenge is challenging The first big hurdle is making a profitable ad (or creating an ad at all with the current state of the interface!). If you are at that stage, which probably describes most people, you might be better served perusing the extensive set of free resources I have for subscribers at Facebook Ads For Authors which will help you get over that hump, and several neighboring ones, like a path through a field of camels. It feels great when you make your first profitable ads, but disappointment invariably follows when you try to scale those ads up. Simply increasing the budget can work... sometimes... and might even lead you to double-down - making the inevitable crash even more spectacular. This leads many to think that Facebook Ads are a crapshoot, or some kind of pyramid scheme - with the only guys at the top being those selling $1,000 courses. I totally understand that sentiment. Over a series of emails, I've been showing you how to scale up your ads in a realistic and sustainable way. I forgot to charge $1,000 though, so please forgive that oversight. Do not, however, underestimate the value of this advice as a result. These are the techniques I use to scale Facebook Ads budgets over successive campaigns right the way up to a five-figure spend during launch week alone. That's pretty big and generally the preserve of bestselling authors with established audiences and series. But the techniques are applicable for those looking to level up from basic profitability too. Indeed *cue music* this is how you do it. Well, there are many ways to the top of the mountain. I just think this is the best one. So let's recap each of the five emails so far - and I'll answer some of the questions I received along the way, so that we are all on the same page for the final steps. Don't forget: all these emails can be found on the Facebook Ads resource page linked to above (towards the end of that page). the process is the process In the first email - How To Scale Facebook Ads - I underlined the challenge, explaining why simply turning up the budget goes so badly wrong, or why results often feel random. If you think scaling ads is easy, definitely go back and read this email. Scaling your spend is easy; anyone can do that. Scaling your results and doing so consistently, in a sustainable way, is hard. Maybe the most controversial part of this first email - and my entire approach to scaling ads - is this: I actually don't scale my ads during a campaign. Not really. Because I start big. This isn't some sophistic trick. I don't scale during campaigns. The scaling is already done over successive previous campaigns. This really isn't some kind of switcheroo. I'm trying to underline a very important point: scaling is a process, not a secret button. It's one that necessarily takes place over an extended period. I'm not above quoting myself, so here we go: 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. I guess there was something else really important in this introductory email because I also slayed the myth of the 25% rule - which is a piece of (probably well-meaning) internet nonsense that says you should only increase your Facebook budgets by a certain amount, at a specific time of day, when the wind is blowing from the east and you're hopping on one leg. That's probably a little unfair but one of my issues with this claim is that it's desperately trying to avoid something - ads re-entering the Learning Phase - that good ads should not be afraid of. (Because good ads will exit it pretty quickly and be otherwise relatively unaffected.) I had a bit more time for the much-used terms of horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. As a reminder: Vertical scaling is when you simply increase your budget on an existing campaign. Horizontal scaling is increasing your spend by adding more campaigns. Yeah, I guess that's somewhat useful. But I look at scaling a little differently. When I'm feeling fancy (i.e. Monday-Saturday), I think of scaling as a four-step process - one which takes place over time. 4d chest-beating Before I lay out the four-step process, let me stress that it's not compulsory to run through all these steps, and certainly not to do everything the way I do it. I got lots of emails from people wondering if they had to discount books so aggressively, or to only push new releases, or to always run series promotions, or to always have so many books out, etc. Obviously, all those things strengthen your offer and make it easier for you to turn a profit. Cheaper books are easier to sell. Series deals are more attractive than standalone deals. New releases are shiny and new. Bigger discounts are more attractive than smaller ones. But you can make it work without some or all of these things - you'll just encounter a little more friction. I always try and make my offers and campaigns as frictionless as possible... but that's not always possible. Do what you can. Anyway, here's my fancy four-step scaling process. 1. Scale the offer. 2. Scale the interests. 3. Scale the audiences. 4. Scale the budget. You don't necessarily have to do things in this order, it just a little more logical to roughly approach things this way. You can tailor the process to your circumstances and skip anything that's not useful or relevant. Scaling the budget is something that will happen a little as you go along - in case that was confusing - but the real scaling will come when you have mastered the first three steps. scaling your offer While it isn't absolutely necessary to scale your offer, it certainly makes the next steps much easier. The coolest part? You can actually increase your profitability - significantly - if you can scale your offer in attractive ways to readers, even before you take the other steps. Scaling your offer is about really drilling down on the proposition you are putting in front of readers - aka the "offer" in marketing lingo. This isn't about honing your presentation, smartening up your blurb, ensuring your cover appeals to your target reader, and so on; it assumes you have done that already. But it can mean discounting your book, or making it free, or dropping the price on an earlier book in the series, or more than one book in the series, and expanding geographically as well. I detailed the example of discounting earlier books in a series to support the launch of a Book 3, but that's not prescriptive at all. However, discounting earlier books to support the launch of a later one is most definitely my go-to for series launches because it allows me to multiply my campaigns without even touching my budgets because I can now run: - ads for the new release
- ads to the series page
- carousel ads pushing each book individually
- ads for the deal on Book 1
Some of these things help your new release directly, some indirectly. All will add to your bottom line. Before we move on from the first step, let me just answer one common question I got: you don't necessarily have to have a new release to play this game. Obviously, new releases are the most important thing in your marketing calendar and will generally be the focus of your efforts and ad dollars. But you can totally apply these techniques to backlist promotions. I've helped put older books to the very top of the charts with backlist promos, but there's no doubt that having a new release as your tentpole makes everything easier. scaling your interests In short, scaling your interests involves greatly expanding the number of effective interests you are targeting with your ads - allowing you to increase your budget quite a lot without any performance hit. (Indeed, performance can even improve because you are giving the algorithms a much larger audience to play with.) People these days tend to complain that Facebook is taking away a lot of their useful interests - totally with justification. But I think most authors can unearth a surprising number of effective interests going through the process I outlined in this email (again, you'll find all these on the page linked to up top, and you can dive in where needed). I gave the example of an author targeting Stephen King. After exhausting related authors and genres, they might think they have hit a wall. But if you try something like targeting the Stranger Things TV show (remembering to filter it by Kindle ownership), you might find a large and useful audience for your books. Now, these ancillary audiences can be hit-and-miss (and lean towards the miss part of that equation in many cases), so test with small budgets first. This goes against the trendy advice to forget about interest targeting and abandon yourself to the AI-powered algorithms which are all the rage these days. Because I think that is terrible advice. (I have a 4-part series of emails on that topic, on the above resource page, if you really want to get into it.) But feel free to test and compare - as always. scaling your audiences After scaling your offer (something that can be done quite quickly) and scaling your interests (will take either a little or a lot of testing, depending on where you're at with ads), the next step is to scale your audiences (almost certainly will take you a long time to do in a meaningful way... so get started now). In this email, I broke down the audience types (interest audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences) and explained how you should be using them, and when. Because people like the new flashy, and dive into things like customs and lookalikes way before they should. I explained how to start building your first custom audience - your Page audience - and why you should start doing that right away. I even gave you the exact steps to get going on this because I'm a solid dude. Then I snapped that email in half like a shared doggy treat, and continued the following week with the rather more complicated process of feeding your mailing list to Facebook and building audiences from it. We also talked about website custom audiences and the Pixel but I basically advised skipping that for now, and instead talked about those much-more-important-in-my-opinion list-based audiences, and how to deploy them. And also how to nurture your page and list audiences so they grow consistently over time into a giant marshmallow-baby which stomps all over your genre. And then I basically disappeared for a couple of months while I packed up my life, left Portugal, and moved to France. Hey, as excuses go... scaling your budget This is what comes next, so I hope you are up to speed now. Obviously, there is no quick trick here to scale your ads - it's a complicated and lengthy process. But it really does work. If the quickfire summary above left you confused, I strongly recommend going back and reading the five previous emails in this series - it's important stuff. Make sure you have the above done before next week because we are moving onto the final stage. Exciting! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Ofege - a bunch of high-school kids from Nigeria in 1970s - with It's Not Easy. | 
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