
So, you’ve followed the steps of The Hirsh Process, and you’re seeing huge success with your ads. Great! What’s next? You’re ready to scale.
A lot of our clients come to us saying, “Okay, this worked really well – but how can we do better?” That’s the question I’m answering today.
On this episode of the podcast I’m explaining two ways of scaling your ads. Vertical scaling is what you’re already familiar with. It’s the more, more, more method: adding to something that’s already working. Horizontal scaling requires a little more creativity, but it allows you to scale FASTER without adding “more” (or messing with your optimization). This is changing our client accounts like crazy! Let me show you how.
Key Points:
[1:45] How most people scale ads (and our best TIPS for optimization)
[4:06] Our “ninja trick” to scale ad sets that are going crazy out the gate
[4:59] How to scale ads FASTER without adding more budget
[5:51] An example of horizontal ads for our agency
[8:16] The KEY to scaling ads during a live campaign (i.e. how to start with enough momentum)
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Episode Transcript:
Today’s episode is going to be all about how to scale your ads. This is a huge problem that a lot of people come to us with, because a lot of the clients we work with, they have successful ads, but every time they try and add money to make more money, things go wonky in their funnel or their ads, and they have a hard time scaling. So, we recently implemented in our team, where we do a weekly training for my existing ads managers. One of the trainings we recently did was how to scale your ads vertically and horizontally. I’m going to explain that, but I thought I would share it, because it’s something that we just internally taught and refreshed our team on, scaling, because it’s something we’re always working on for our clients.
What do I mean by how to scale your ads vertically and horizontally? Basically there’s two ways to scale your ads. Vertically scaling your ads is how most people do it. That would mean adding budget, adding more audiences… You have something that’s working, adding budget to that existing ad set or adding more audiences to that ad that’s working, that creative version that’s working … creating new audiences to the version, and just think of it as your … there’s a chart you’re looking at of ads you’re running, and by scaling it vertically, you’re adding more options down the chart or making those options bigger by spending more money. This definitely works, and is the most common way that people scale ads.
Now there’s a couple tricks that you can add in here, and how to scale your ads, and that is … So number one, we stay around maybe 15-20 percent cost increase on the ad, and that’s the max. So you can’t say, “Oh my ad’s spending $5 a day, and it’s doing great – let me make it $50 a day,” because that will make it totally wonky and mess up the entire optimization. So you can scale your budget 15-20 percent each day. But when you do that, you have to basically check, “Okay I scaled it; now let me give it a minute, let me give it a day to make sure it’s still converting. And then if it is, I can scale it more.” But sometimes you have to let it sit for a couple of days before it re-optimizes essentially.
It’s important when you’re looking at scaling your ads that you look in the “attribution window.” So there’s a right hand … in the right hand corner of your ads manager, I’m like, pointing as I do this … In the right hand corner of your ads manager is where you can see the date range. So when you’re scaling ads … and what we do daily is we check: how did the ad convert in the last day, how did it convert in the last three days, and how did it convert in the last seven days. This allows you to see trends of like, “Okay, in the last seven days it converted at $4, but in the last three and one days, it’s gone up to $5, $6, $7. So either this ad is saturating, or I’ve scaled it too fast and I need to let it sit to see if it will come back down.” It’s important you look at the ads this way, all your ad sets this way. You can scale by adding, like I said, more options, more creative options, more versions, more audiences, adding budget to what you have … and that’s how you scale vertically.
The other thing you can do is you can actually, to go really fast, you can take an ad set … Let’s say you’re running ads to a lookalike of your email list, this one version, and it’s just crushing it. You can’t scale it fast enough. You can actually duplicate that exact audience and run traffic to that, like … just try and do … so, “Okay I have a $20.00 a day set,” duplicate it $20.00 a day, and that allows you to scale faster – but not within that one ad set so that you can reach people more. Because especially if it’s a big million-size plus audience … If you had a lookalike audience, there’s a lot of potential reach there, so you’ll still reach new people with that ad, and it won’t necessarily overlap. That’s a kind of a “ninja trick” that you can do if you have to really scale fast. When we work with big budgets, sometimes we do that. We’re like, “Man, we can’t get enough traffic in here fast enough,” so we scale the ad sets.
So then how do you scale horizontally? This is like one that we have been incorporating more and more into our clients’ strategies, because it’s more creative, and it allows you to scale faster without just, “Okay, let’s add more, more, more.” Which, you can add more, more, more, but this is just a different angle. So horizontally, picture that you’re looking at a chart. Vertically you’ve added a bunch more options and audiences to what you already know is working, and you’ve added things down that list. Now, horizontally is where you look at actually the messaging. So we actually create a table that’s like, the five or six pain points that your customer or lead would potentially be experiencing, and you basically write those out. And then you create different ad versions that speak to those different angles.
So let’s say you had one that was focusing on … let’s think about my … Let’s go to our client, our ideal client. So if i was to do this myself, I would say, “Okay, my ideal client, they have maybe previously worked with an ad agency or somebody and it failed.” That’s one of their biggest pain points. Another one is they’re so busy they can’t stay on top of the top Facebook marketing tips and tricks, and they are overwhelmed. So overwhelm, distrust … Those are two different kind of angles that I could go at, right? I could probably also say they want to be able to make $1, $2 for every $1 that they spend or know that that they’re going to see positive ROI for their ads. They’re worried, there’s fear that they’re not sure it’s going to work for them. So that would be three different angles that I would map out in a grid, and I could have different ads written with each angle.
Then I can take those ads and send it to the audiences that I know convert. If I had a lookalike of my list or a lookalike of my video views and then I made these different angles, this would allow me to creatively, in a creative way, reach more people faster, because I’m going to hit different people with the different angles. So I basically would send those three different creative versions to this audience that I already know is converting because I have this one ad running, and that’s how you scale your ads horizontally.
Vertically is adding more audiences, scaling budget, and basically going down. And then horizontally is looking at and mapping out: what are the different pain points and angles that I can come at with my ad copy so I can reach new people in those … in the ways that one person might respond to “this ad” in the audience versus another might respond to “this one.” This also allows you to test, because if you test four or five different angles, and then you see two of those are doing really well, you can do more around that kind of pain point, like videos or whatever it is. This allows you to scale faster. This also is a trick, the horizontal thing is a trick, if your ads aren’t converting and you know it’s the messaging, and you’re like, “They’re not getting clicks, people aren’t resonating with this copy. Let’s map out the really deep, on a deep level, six pain points that people are experiencing, my ideal customer’s experiencing, and let’s test the different angles and the different messaging that we have here.” That’s another option and way that you can troubleshoot your ads as well as scale them.
Now scaling ads is like, with evergreen campaigns, you can scale slow and it’s okay. But with live webinar campaigns and things where you have very small promotional windows to promote things, it’s super essential, like it is an art to be able to scale fast enough. And so going … the key here is going out the gate with enough creative versions, with enough audiences, and enough options to be able to start from day one with enough momentum basically. When you have a seven day window to promote a live webinar, if you go slow on day one, literally it will take you three days to catch up, and it will be like … You have to go out the gate with the planning of enough creative versions, enough audience versions, enough options, and high enough budget from day one. Your testing should have been done “pre” that promotional window.
So hopefully that was helpful in how to scale your ads and gives you kind of a different perspective. I know for our team, thinking about it from the creative perspective … because a lot of people think about scaling, it’s just like adding budget. But what if you also added different ways that you could connect with people through your ad copy and your ad creative? And if you, of course, would like us to help you with this and like the Hirsh Team to be on your ads and on your marketing, go to HelpMyStrategy.com and book in a call with our team.
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Episode Transcript:
[In] today’s episode, I’m going to share with you guys an ad that produced 10,000 (yes, you heard that right!) ROI in one of our client launches recently. And this is such an easy ad to implement, such a cheap ad to run, and such an effective ad to have running in your funnel.
So, it’s a very small audience. And I will share with you the ad in a minute. But, it was $1,100 ad spend to run this ad during the course of this live launch. It was a video, and it was going straight to a sales page, to then buy. And out of that ad, we had 612 purchases at a $2,000 cost product – so over $1 million made off of $1,100 ad spend. Like, literally jaw dropping, amazing, amazing results.
Now. Here is what this ad is. (And I’ve talked about it when I went through The Hirsh Process before, because it’s in Step 4 of The Hirsh Process, which is your sales ads.) … And that is an abandoned cart ad. That means an ad that you are directly targeting to somebody who has landed on your Order Form Page of whatever you’re offering, but has not landed on the Thank You/Confirmation Page after buying. So they have not bought essentially.
And the reason we set it up that way versus like, an email list is you’d have to constantly update an email … Well, you can’t even do an email list of people, unless they’ve come in from your webinar or something. But this way, if you set it up on the Pixel … I guess you could do an email list of purchasers … But the easiest way to set it up is [there’s] an audience in Facebook of people who have landed on the cart, but not landed on the Purchase Confirmation Page. And that way you can either ongoing run this, if your product is always available, or have this ad running during your launch.
Now here’s the keys with this ad. So, the mistake people make is they just put up an ad… First of all, the mistake people make is they don’t do this. They don’t run this ad. The second mistake people make is they will have a very generic ad ran to these people. But the key here, and why this ad did so well, was it was a video ad. It was shot straight with an iPhone camera, very organic, connecting-looking, not like this overly-produced ad that doesn’t make somebody want to say, “Hey, I love her. I want to be her friend.” And it was directly talking to this person.
So we know, because this audience that we’re targeting, we know that they were so close, on the fence of buying our product that they made it to the Order Form. They’re very close, right? They’re about to pull the trigger, so what we want to do is speak to that in the actual ad – and ideally with a video. So the actual ad copy we had was super basic, maybe two lines.
And then the actual video was also super basic, but it spoke to exact paypoints of … Like for example, this was a course, so: “Hey, I know you’re right on the edge! You want to join [such-and-such] course, but you haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Trust me, I’ve been there.” Maybe small, short story about how you were there or how a client of yours was there before, and wanted to pull the plug and didn’t. And then, “BUT if you take this chance,” we have either a guarantee or whatever the guarantees are, “But if you take this chance, you’ll be able to change your life around, grow your business,” whatever your promise is.
Also, then remind people, “And don’t forget,” and then whatever the urgency is: doors close on this date, or doors close in a few days, or registration’s closing, or the product’s going to sell out, whatever it is, so they take action. Because the goal with this ad is to connect with them, to build the final step of trust that you might want to build with them, because they are on the fence. They’re almost a sale. And then, to show them urgency so that they pull the trigger and essentially buy.
And I’ve used, in the past like, if you have stories around either yourself or… I’ve also had a client use a story where she had a student… We had a testimonial of a student who, in the testimonial said, “I pulled out my credit card three times, and I would type it in, and I just wouldn’t press “submit” on the Order Form. Then I finally did, and now I’ve quit my job, and I have this business of my dreams!” We cut the video so it was like, her talking … to sell, saying, “You’re right on the fence. You’re almost there.”
And then we had a little clip of that student, “Maybe you’re like Jesse” … I’m making up names, because I don’t want to say any names … “who,” this is the story, and then we showed that video, because it could be exactly what that person is experienc[ing].
So first of all, regardless of like, if you have a product, service… This can apply to so many things. Like for this, we do abandoned cart ads; but let’s say your goal is for somebody to go and fill out an application, because you do high ticket sales – do abandon the application ads. Wherever someone steps in your funnel, tie an ad to it. And it’s so cheap to run this, because you’ve already paid to get the person that far, right? Like … maybe not even paid, but you’ve already gotten the person that far, so the audience is super small. You don’t have this crazy big audience who you need to target. And that’s why we were able to spend $1,100 to make $1 million off of that ad.
Now obviously like, they may have come in from other places to ultimately end up on the cart page, so you have to take that into consideration, but that could have been 612 sales that we wouldn’t have had if we weren’t running that ad to stay top of mind. The other thing is, it was a live launch, so no matter where they were in the process of the launch, like… if they had watched the webinar or not, or if they had been to the sales page or not, or the order form page or not … they were seeing ads that were tailored to them.
That literally gives me goosebumps, because it’s so powerful! Like if you really think about that …. Based on actions people are taking, we showed them ads that [were] tailored exactly to what they needed to hear to take the next step. Like, how freaking powerful that is… And the huge thing is, here it’s like, you don’t have to spend a lot of money for these things to be successful, because the audience is so small that you could reach them with a small, small budget. And if you do it right and your messaging is right, you can really, really nail this and make a lot of money.
So the key is, one, having this set-up, whether it’s a product, a service, or whatever it is … I mean, you’ll see Amazon do this all day long … Have it set up, but then for a lot of people, where there’s emotion involved, make it very intentional with what you do – whether you use a testimonial, whether you film a very connective video, you want to knock down any objections that the person is having to buying. And then put in your promise – remind them of your promise, and then the urgency. Those are the key things, and if you can do … Don’t overproduce a video. Video is the best way to do this, and I like it just straight on the phone, because you don’t want it to be overproduced, because then they feel like, “Oh, this is an ad.” They won’t feel like it’s an ad if it’s a video from on the phone.
That is our highest ROI ad we have ever had, that we ran to date in the agency. 10,000 percent ROI is insane, $1 million made off of this one ad with $1,100 ad spend. So if you’re not going to run over and create those abandoned cart and abandoned sales page ads right now, I don’t know what else you would be doing!
And if you guys want strategy like this, analyzed on your funnel, and ads created for your funnel that [are] very intentional, with our strategies of how we do retargeting and how we specifically tailor the messaging in our retargeting ads to be insanely successful, go to HelpMyStrategy.com and book in a call with the Hirsh Team.