Dispatch № 8 - Horizontal Scaling
The SIMPLE secrets to horizontally scaling any ad account.
Hello and welcome to another free dispatch with me, Jake the Ad Nerd 🤓 (< not me)
What a crazy month September was for ads!
With that and your time in mind… let’s jam through today’s dispatch.
As always, rather than feed you the idea that FB is rocket-science, I’m going to simplify Horizontal Scaling with a friend of mine and let you know how/why it’s a viable strategy for your accounts.
Simple, straight-forward, and to the point.
For some of you, you’re steady-rocking it already 🤘. Let this be a quick refresher.
For others, this is your first time hearing about it and that’s what I’m here for!
I'm recommending a block of 15 minutes to consume everything here.
If you're new, I always provide two disclaimers before we get into everything:
1. There is no one unicorn source (including this one) that will teach you everything you need to know about advertising. If that’s why you’ve decided to be in this community, you’ll soon be disappointed.
2. What works for one advertiser, might not work for you. These are merely observations on what myself and others see is working across platforms, accounts, and verticals. And, our interpretation of ideas. You need to test responsibly, at your own discretion, and ideate individually.
⁉️ What Are We Nerding Out On?
The good ol’ Horizontal Scale method within Facebook Ads!
“Simply put horizontal scaling is the opposite of vertical scaling where you only increase the budget.”
That’s straight from my friend Andrew Foxwell. Who’s always provided me, and the industry with the simplest way to explain it.
“Horizontal scaling is the idea that you consider the diverse set of potential customers you could appeal to. Instead of merely thinking about a lookalike of purchasers, for example, you can think about not only other higher value lookalikes, such as add to cart, initiate checkout, 2x page views last 14 days or email opens, but also more “low value” lookalikes like view content or interest segments lumped together in different Ad sets.
With Horizontal Scaling, your goal is to diversify the type of people brought into the funnel along with varying sizes of those audiences.”
Thanks, Andrew!
Did you see this by the way? You need to hop on it!
Before we move on to the Good Stuff, Andrew just dropped a Q4 Tactical Roadmap course that is pretty darn good.
You guys know me by now, I’m not here to sell anything!
That’s why this bad boy (aka newsletter), is and always will be, $FREE.99.
BUT, that means that every now and then, I’ll help some friends out 😬.
Deal? Alright, I appreciate it!
You can grab that course and use code JAKE30 to get $30 off. Or don’t. Your call!
I will transparently let you know, that Andrew is donating 10% of every sale to local non-profits in his area and I’m donating 100% of anything I would get from that course to charity as well. Again, not about the money for me.
It’s all about making sure that YOU’RE set up for success, we’re sharing forward-thinking ideas, leaning on one another when needed, and continuing to grow together.
🍯 The Good Stuff
Now for the good stuff.
Let’s get back to the roots of this newsletter and bring in some friends.
Today I’m calling on a truly humble human being to bring some ideas to the table.
“Woah, Jake! How many friends do you have?!”
I know a few people… (not really).
In all seriousness, it’s a pleasure of mine to intro you to Mr. Danavir Sarria!
Danavir is an eCommerce consultant who’s worked with several awesome brands, including: Kettle & Fire, Drink02, and Cup & Leaf. He’s also the founder of SupplyDrop, where his team develops high performance creative for DTC brands.
On top of that, he also runs a really cool newsletter where he analyzes the world’s fastest-growing brands and documents the secrets behind their success.
Swing on back to this bit once you read through what he’s put together for you and make sure you show him some love. I think you’re going to enjoy it!
THE SHOW DANAVIR SOME LOVE SECTION
THAT YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO -
Website: danavirsarria.com
Twitter: @danavirsarria
Right, Danavir… can you do the readers a favor and expand more on the Horizontal Scaling method?
Some are most likely asking me, halfway down the newsletter, what the hell is Horizontal Scaling…
“I’ll start by saying, creative is the variable of success.
Yet, there’s a huge difference between creativity and creative.
(Danavir is coming out of the gate on 🔥)
In the former, you’re trying to come up with cool new ways to present the same information like GIFS and awesome jump cuts. In the latter, you’re trying to come up with new information that compels people to click and buy.
The second option is what you want to focus on if you’re trying to scale ad accounts horizontally because new information leads to new audiences for Facebook’s AI to target.
I call the process of finding ads with “new information” the Day Zero Flywheel.
It’s called Day Zero because the ultimate goal is to come up with tons of new ad creative that make the sale on the 1st impression (aka Day Zero) rather than through retargeting.
The first step of the flywheel? The OAA Framework.
Here is where you come up with a ton of “raw” ad creative ideas.
The “O” stands for offers, “A” stands for angles, and the second “A” stands for audiences. Think of it like a brain dump. Every idea created using this framework leads to new information, which is key to horizontal scaling.
Offers - What new offers can you promote?
New products
Pricing
Payment terms
Bonuses like BOGO
Risk reversals
Angles - What new angles can you focus on?
USP
Major product features
Emotional triggers like exclusivity
Audience - What new audiences can you target?
Communities
Hobbies
Professions
Geography
Gender
Ethnicity
There will always be new answers to these questions, so it’s pretty much infinite.
However, ideas alone don’t pay the bills.
(Jake giggles - so true! 🤑)
You need to turn them into actual video ads. But which ones should you invest in and which ones should you pass on?
Here is where the image to video pipeline comes in (aka steps 2 & 3).
Because horizontal scaling depends on testing tons of ad creative to find winners and static image ads are pretty easy and cheap to produce, they go together like PB&J. All you have to do is test all of your biggest ideas as images first, then go all-in on a few select video ads.
So, if you’re testing 10 different elements, that’s 10 different image ads.
Once you find your winners, you can then invest in turning those same creative concepts into high production video ads or even anchor videos.
The reason this works is the same reason why any ad works.
What customers want is messaging that connects with them, not just cool visuals.
This doesn’t mean you never do video ads without image testing. The image to video pipeline is just a more efficient way of spending your creative budget, especially when you’re really scaling hard. But you can go straight to video ads if you want, especially for core messaging pillars such as your USP and primary acquisition offers.
The final step is optimizing your video ads with the AIDA framework.
(^ that’s an old-ass link to a resource on AIDA but it will help shed some light on the framework if this is your first time hearing about it).
Whether you’re trying to beat your winners or trying to fix your losers, you can figure out what to focus on by looking through your ad’s performance over its first 3 seconds, average watch time, and outbound CTR.
Wherever you see a major dip, that’s where you fix your video ads. You can do this through more visual/presentation fixes such as adding better pattern interrupts, adding proof elements, or even adding in an exciting spokesperson.
Need more video ads to test after all of this?
Go back to step 1, the OAA framework, to find new concepts to turn into videos. Except this time, you have new learnings to inform your brainstorms.
All of a sudden you now have a real flywheel that feeds off of each other. Ideas lead to cheap tests, which leads to video ads that scale, which leads back to more ideas.
This is the true secret to horizontally scaling any ad account.
By systematically coming with new ads that convert and having a product with true product-market fit, it’s hard to mess up. You’re feeding exactly what Facebook wants like clockwork. At the same time, it lets you avoid wasting time and resources on creative that isn’t designed for horizontal scaling.”
Pretty straight forward, right?
Insert broken record phrase: That’s what we’re here for!
Super thankful for Danavir for dropping some knowledge today. Thanks again, D!
Now, are podcasts your thing?
Weird segway, I know… haha
But, if you want to go even further, there’s a great podcast from Andrew (yeah, that guy from earlier - no I don’t have a crush) about Horizontal Scaling.
Listen here: https://www.ecommerceinfluence.com/scaling-up-your-facebook-ads/
If I find a few more resources of equal value in the near future, I’ll be sure to share those as well.
For now, you’ve got me, this newsletter, some great friends of mine, and a podcast.
Enjoy!
🏁 In Closing
There's a general rule within FB Ads that will never go away.
If it works on a small scale, it should work on a large scale.
The biggest problem that most of you are facing when you try to scale campaigns is that you’re simply increasing spend.
How do I know? I audit accounts on the regular! (we’re still saying that right? I’m old).
Never stop learning and polishing your craft.
Many of the brands on these audits are simply increasing the ad spend, without increasing their return. An odd mix of Vertical Scaling.
Which works. But it only gets you so far.
You’re literally (literally) paying higher prices for the same amount of traffic and customers. Can you say, “Diminishing Returns”?
The solution is to increase the brand’s scale without increasing costs. You can do this using the Horizontal Scaling method and leaning heavily into Danavir’s method.
That Horizontal Scaling method (on steroids) will allow you to distribute spend across multiple dimensions. Yep. You’ll get to keep the same ROAS at a larger scale!
Maybe this could be the solution to your panic recently?
Be honest, how many of us reverted back to a safe space recently?
My goal with this newsletter is to nudge you out of that safe space.
You need to TEST Horizontal Scaling. If you’re simply increasing spend, you’ll always revert back to that safe space (your safe budget) and things will keep falling apart.
Instead of scaling up with one, scale across with mas.
Will you still achieve the same result of spending more?
You betcha! That’s the beauty of Horizontal Scaling. Increased spending and a distributed load. What does that equal…?
Account balance at scale. ahhhhhhh
I think that’s a great note to end on. A Mad Men gif…
If you have questions regarding this method, feel free to reach out to me.
I’m on Twitter and you can also shoot me an email outside of our agency at: jaketheadnerd@gmail.com
I might not respond right away, because let’s face it, it’s about to get bananas this quarter. But I’m here as a resource for you when I can!
With that, please note that I refuse to respond to messages saying…
“Hey Jake, what’s working? Give me ALL THEEE IDEAS!”
You can do better than that. We can do better than that.
Remember, this isn’t the place, nor am I the person, to hand-feed strategies.
We touched on this in great detail in recent dispatches. If you’re new, you can go back and read everything for free. Some pretty stellar dispatches have come out so far.
Wait…
I just realized we’re only on Dispatch 8!
Ohhhh, we’re just getting started!
Haha, but yeah, I’m here to help - We’re in it together nerds! 🤓
With gratitude.
Your next dispatch will be delivered on 11/1. We’ll be breaking down BFCM strategies and I’m bringing back more guests. That’s right, get excited!
As always, I’ll be in touch if anything comes up in the ad world or if FB drops some new updates. These updates are intense right? Okay, so it’s not just me…
Until next time. Happy scaling!
Cheers,
Jake the Ad Nerd 🤙
Did we bring some value on this one? We did? That’s what I’m talking about!
Do me a favor, tap that beautiful and clearly marked ‘Share’ button, to let your network know what we’re cooking up over here. Let’s keep growing this thang!