Table Of Contents
- What are the top strategies to scale your Instagram ads?
- What is the best way to increase your Instagram campaign budget?
- How to best use the Campaign Budget Optimization feature?
- How to expand your Instagram ad’s reach?
- Why should you add more than one ad placements?
Have you been using Instagram ads and wondered how to properly scale them? Instagram ads are indeed powerful and effective in increasing traffic to your website and driving sales. However, as you start running more and more campaigns, it can become quite challenging to manage them and especially scale them.
Scaling your Instagram ads is not as simple as just increasing the budget but there are other factors at play as well. This blog will help you understand how you can strategically scale your ads while keeping in check other factors such as audience fatigue.
Let’s discuss the top four ways you can scale your Instagram ads.
1. Increase Your Ad Budget
Once you start getting adequate leads and your Instagram ads seem to work, it is a good idea to think of increasing the ad spend. However, there are a few best practices that you should follow in order to not get trapped and actually leverage by increasing the ad budget.
• Increase the ad budget but strategically
Doubling or tripling the ad budget seems to be the best option once you start seeing results but it is not always true. The best way forward is to not make any drastic changes in the ad budget and increase it gradually.
You have to understand that the Instagram algorithm plays a vital role in optimizing your ad sets and delivering optimum results depending on your budget. Now if you make any drastic changes in the budget, there is a chance that it would throw off the algorithm’s optimization and that would definitely compromise the campaign’s performance.
Make sure your ad set has completed its learning phase before thinking of increasing the ad budget. Increase your ad budget in increments for example you can increase it by 25% every few days or once a week. You can always edit the budget from Facebook Ads Manager.
The idea is to monitor the campaign closely and not let it go into the learning phase again. However, if you make any drastic or frequent changes, your campaigns will go into the learning phase which would decrease results for the time being.
• Make use of Campaign Budget Optimization
Needless to say, if you know which ad set of yours is performing well and showing results, you can go on to increase the ad spend to garner better results. However, many a time it’s hard to identify the best performing ad sets and it gets difficult to choose the one you want to increase the budget for.
This is when you can make use of Campaign Budget Optimization. What this does is that it optimizes the budget for the entire campaign. The algorithm itself avoids spending on the campaigns that aren’t bringing ROI and puts the money where it works best. This is the best way to scale without compromising the results of your running campaigns.
2. Expand Your Instagram Ads’ Reach
Scaling vertically is a good option indeed. However, it’s not the only option. You don’t always have to just increase the budget for your existing ads sets but you can also think of scaling vertically. Let’s discuss a few ways you can horizontally scale your Instagram ads.
• Add new ad sets
If you want to expand your Instagram ads and see how different audiences would react to your ad, you can create new ad sets. You don’t specifically have to amend the existing ad set.
Moreover, you don’t have to create the ad set from the scratch but you can easily duplicate all the settings from existing ad sets and edit them in the new one. You can always add the new ad sets to the existing campaign. This is how you can make sure to keep the existing ad set optimized while trying out different things and optimizing.
You can even create a new ad set from scratch with new settings and add it to the existing campaign so you’ve got the freedom to make changes as you see fit.
• Expand your ads' audience
No matter if your current ad set has a custom audience based on your customer list or even an interest-based audience, you can always expand it by adding new audience segments.
Be sure to do thorough research into your target audience’s demographics and make use of the buyer’s persona to pinpoint the right audience.
You can also make use of the Facebook Business Suite Audience Insights to refine your audience. Add the demographics and interests and it will give you a refined audience for your ad set.
One thing to keep in mind here is that you don’t want a lot of overlapping audiences. Some overlap will occur if you create multiple ad sets to test, especially you’re targeting a niche audience. However, increased overlap in the audience can cause a decline in the campaign’s performance.
The good thing is you can always use a tool called Facebook Audience Overlap Tool. You can find it in the ads manager by clicking the audiences you want to compare, then click the three dots, and then clicking ‘Show audience overlap and review the percentage’.
• Create lookalike audiences
You always have the option to try out new audience segments and target people with varying interests. However, if you want to expand your campaign by focusing on the people who look just like the audience you have saved, you have the option to build a lookalike audience.
Use the audience that is highly engaged with your campaigns for optimum results. For example, you can target people having similar traits to people who have visited your website. You can also build high-value lookalikes by using your data sources, for example, use Facebook Pixel to create a lookalike audience.
If you don’t have such data sources, you can also use data such as people who have clicked on your ad or messaged you on your handle and create a lookalike audience based on this data.
You have to option to create a maximum of six lookalike audiences. One of the best strategies of creating lookalike audiences is to create the first one with 1% size and then keep on adding with greater size of less similar audiences to scale your campaign.
You also have the option to put demographic and interest-based layers over your lookalike audiences to have greater control over who sees your ad.
• A/B test your audiences
If you want to experiment with your audiences and test different ones you can always A/B test your audience and find the best-performing ones. You don’t have to track the performance manually. Instead, you can go to ads manager, click the A/B test button and choose the ad sets that you want to compare. Then you go on to select the metric that you want to compare.
Publish this test and you can see the results. Facebook ads manager will identify the best performing audience for your campaign and you can use this information for your future campaigns as well.
3. Use More Than One Ad Placements
If you’ve been running a campaign with an optimized audience, there comes a time when you don’t want to expand your audience more. However, what this would do is that you’ll be showing your ad to a similar audience for an extended period.
Now if the ads are the same and the audience is the same, people seeing your ad would start experiencing ad fatigue. If that doesn’t happen, your costs might start rising. What do you do to tackle that? One way is to add newer placements like stories and reels. You may even reach a bigger audience by using varying venues.
A lot of marketers assume that increasing your ad budget is the only way to scale your Instagram ads. However, as aforementioned, it’s not always the right option. You have to be a bit more creative and try out different ways of expanding. Different techniques mentioned in this blog will surely help you scale in a systematic way without sabotaging your existing campaign results.
This is it for today’s blog. I hope you liked it and that you’ve learned a thing or two about expanding and systematically scaling your Instagram ad spend. Be sure to share your feedback with me and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about social advertising.
If you’re a business owner and you can’t find enough time to focus on your advertising campaigns, or if all this is too much to handle, contact Prism Digital, the best advertising agency in Dubai and our expert advertisers will help you create and manage advertising campaigns that bring in greater ROI. See you on the other side. Thank you.
About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth
Lovetto Nazareth is a digital marketing consultant and agency owner of Prism Digital. He has been in the advertising and digital marketing business for the last 2 decades and has managed thousands of campaigns and generated millions of dollars of new leads. He is an avid adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter. Follow him on social media on @Lovetto Nazareth