Breaking Through Facebook Spend Barriers for Q4 Success

It's as simple as that .

If you missed last week's episode , I highly recommend tuning in to it , because I go into detail about what you can do to prepare for Q4 and put yourself in a position where you're going to do really well with your subscription box business , because there's a few key things that you have to be aware of and you have to do .

Otherwise you can find yourself priced out of marketing because it gets quite expensive , or just drowned out in the noise because so many other companies are trying to grab a tension . So definitely check that out if you missed it . On today's episode I'm answering the question about Q4 that was sent to me during the week .

Let me read it out because I think this will help a lot of people listening , because I know this is a pretty common issue . I listened to your last podcast and I'm excited about growing my business . I'm trying to get as much growth as possible in Q4 . The issue I have is I can only seem to spend $100 per day on Facebook ads .

If I spend more , I don't get more subscribers . My customer acquisition cost just gets very expensive . Why is this and how can I fix it ? Very good question . This is an issue a lot of people experience when they're trying to scale up their Facebook ads .

Now , the first thing I'd say will be go back and listen to a podcast I recorded in June which was titled the Correct Way to Scale your Facebook Ads , because that will definitely help you . But let's elaborate on this a bit . Right , because usually if you can't increase your budget , it's down to three reasons . Some of three reasons , right ?

The first reason your website has to convert at least 2% if you want to spend a considerable amount of money on Facebook ads . Let me explain why this is the case .

Right , if you're running Facebook ads on a lower budget and you're saying some kind of success , facebook is usually going out and it's finding the low hanging fruit who are likely to actually sign up . These are people that have given Facebook signals , right , that they're potentially interested in your blocks .

Facebook collects all of this consumer data from people who are signed up to their platform . They know the websites you're going to . They know the type of products you're buying . They know the type of products you're adding to your cart . They track all this information right , putting your ads out in front of the people who have sent some sort of signal .

These people may have been on a competitor's website and they added the product to the cart and they never bought . Okay , for whatever reason . There's many different signals that can be picked up for Facebook to identify that they're low hanging fruit , and usually Facebook wants to give advertisers some quick wins .

Okay , it's in their interest to give you a quick win , because if you start advertising at a lower budget and you get people signed up , you're more inclined to actually spend more money on the platform and stick with it . And that's what Facebook want . They want advertisers spend money on the platform .

It's in no interest to them for people to start running ads and not to get any results , because over a prolonged period of time , if you're not getting results , you're going to cut your budget or you're just not going to advertise at all . That's pretty much it . So they want you spending more money on the platform .

So when you advertise with a lower budget , facebook is going out and it's finding all of that low hanging fruit who are likely to sign up . These are the people that I would call in-market consumers . This means they're in your market and they're likely to sign up . They're there and they're ready to be sold to Now , within market consumers at a lower spend .

It is very possible to remain profitable with a website that has a conversion rate under 2% . These are your ideal customer and it doesn't take much selling to get them to sign up to your box , and it's really cheap to reach them . Now the issue is right when you look to scale up , to get anywhere , you're going to have to break out of in-market consumers .

You're going out of market . The more money you spend , the more likely you're going to go out of market to reach more people . And as you go out of market , the people that you're reaching are less inclined to sign up to your box . They're not as hot as the in-market consumers .

So if your website does not convert at 2% , then it's going to be really , really difficult to scale up . It's going to be really expensive to acquire customers and it's going to be hard to get the finances in your company to actually make sense . So I'm not saying your conversion rate is under 2% . I literally don't have a clue .

I'm just trowing out something here that could very well be the reason why you can't spend more than 100 per day . You may be just reaching that low hanging fruit and then , as you try to increase the budget , you're going out of market and your website just doesn't convert at a right high enough for the increased budget to really make a difference .

It's very possible . My advice around it will be to install Google Analytics , if you don't have it installed already , and take a look at your conversion rate and see what you're actually converting at . And if it's lower than 2% , look to improve it . Look at your copy , try to make your copy better . Try to make your offer better .

Look at the pages where people are leaving the website and try to improve them and just tweak it to try and get that conversion rate over 2% and then , once it's over 2% , test increasing the budget again and see how it goes . You have plenty of time to do this . It's not Q4 for a bit , so do it now and get ahead of it and look to get over 2% .

If that's the actual issue Now , there are some other reasons which I'm going to touch on right now . The next reason your audience may be too small to scale . This is probably unlikely , unless it's a really , really small audience , because you're only spending 100 per day and you're looking to increase that , but it is possible .

If your audience is too small , well then they're adding up people online at any given time to sustain the type of budget that you're actually looking to spend .

When this happens , your frequency is going to be really high and it's literally just going to be the same people seeing your ads over and over again , and then if you look to increase the budget , it's not going to work pretty much because , yeah , the audience isn't big enough to sustain it and it's just going to make it really , really expensive .

So say , you're looking to spend like $1000 per day on Facebook ads . Well , in that case , you need to have an audience of at least a million people and probably bigger . Like audiences of $250,000 and $300,000 probably aren't going to be big enough .

Now , when you're only getting up and running right and you're only spending like $25 a day or even $100 a day , or even $150 , $200 a day , you may be able to target a smaller audience and it will probably actually work really well for you because that's a really defined audience of your ideal customer .

Now , if you are running into some issues around scaling due to audience size , there's an easy way to fix this . You need to go out and find more audiences that might be more lookalike audiences .

You could make lookalikes of website visitors , make lookalikes of your email list , make lookalikes of everybody who purchased from you through a CSV file or by firing your pixel . Do both of those things . You can go out and make more interest based audiences . You can go with open targeting .

There's so many different combinations that you can actually do to solve this issue . If it's not down to audience size , I'd still actually test other audiences and look to expand them , because that's going to help you .

Either way , that's going to help you create a campaign that's actually able to sustain a bigger spend , because the more audiences that you have that actually convert , the more ad sets and campaigns you can send out , tagging them , which will increase your budget . Definitely do that .

Now , the other reason why you're not able to increase your spend may just be down to the fact that you're doing it wrong and you're not actually increasing the budget properly . If you have a audience which is big enough and your website converts at over 2% , well then it's likely you haven't been able to scale because you're just doing it wrong .

Let me explain this in more detail . Like I said , I definitely recommend going back and listening to that podcast in June because it really digs down on this .

If you're spending 100 per day and you're just going in and you're changing that to 300 , 400 on a winning campaign , more than likely you're going to break the algorithm and you're going to throw it out of whack and your CPA is going to be really , really expensive and it's just not going to work for you .

So there's a few different ways you can scale . Number one you increase your budget by no more than 20% every 24 hours . So you go in and you just increase it by 20% . This is called vertical scaling . Now , the problem with this is you are essentially playing poker with Facebook and more than likely you're going to break the algorithm . At some point .

You're going to throw it out of whack . It's just , unfortunately , the way it is when it comes to advertising on Facebook , and the same with TikTok as well . A lot of this stuff that I've covered also applies to TikTok advertising .

It can work right , but , yeah , eventually it's probably going to break the ad campaign and your CPA will get really , really expensive and on top of that , it takes a really long time to scale up to a high amount .

When you go with this approach , especially if you start from a very low base , you may be spending like 50 a day and your plan is to spend 800 per day . When you scale like this , it's going to take a very long time to get to that amount per day .

So the way I like to do it is through something called horizontal scaling , and this means just adding things on to a winning campaign , right . So if you have a campaign that's performing really well on 100 per day , right . What you can do is you can duplicate the campaign and you can just leave both of them runging at the exact same time .

Now you may be thinking that goes against everything . Facebook reps say that's audience overlap . Those campaigns are going to be competing with each other . Performance will be terrible , blah , blah , blah . The truth of the matter is right .

Unless you're spending a massive amount of money per day , like five or ten grand , or you have a really small audience , audience overlap isn't really a problem . It's not really going to affect your overall performance . It's actually going to help you scale pretty safely , because when you duplicate , if the new one breaks , you still have the original one runging .

Now another way you can do this , which follows the same , where a strategy of scaling horizontally and this applies to a ABO campaign is just add more ad sets to a winning campaign . So imagine you had a campaign running .

You're spending 100 per day and you have three ad sets and each ad set is targeted in a lookalike audience , like it's targeted in a 1% , the next ad sets targeted in a 2% and the next ad sets targeted in a 3% . Well , you could duplicate one of those ad sets and add a 4% in .

You could duplicate it again and you could add some interest based targeting in . You could duplicate it again , you could add some other interest based targeting or some other form of lookalike in and you could scale it out that way . And the final way is just go in with a high budget from the start . Don't even try to increase the budget .

Launch a brand new campaign , go in with the desired amount you want to spend daily and hold your nerve for a few days and hopefully the acquisition cost will drop down . This does work .

We do it pretty regularly in Busterbox and we'll hold our nerve for two to three days and it usually drops down and then we're spending the amount that we want to spend daily and we're not messing around trying to increase budgets on smaller campaigns . So any of them strategies can work .

Hope you found that helpful and I hope anybody who is looking to really make the most of Q4 and acquire a lot of customers found this helpful as well , because , like I previously mentioned , I know a lot of people struggle with this and we struggled with this as well . When we were first getting started on Facebook or then years ago .

I really found it difficult to build out a campaign which was spending a decent amount of money and driving a decent amount of volume . But you just learn over time .

I've been doing this now for literally years and , yeah , we have spent a lot of money on Facebook ads and I have helped a lot of other businesses scale up through Facebook ads and , yeah , when you get it right , it's really , really satisfying because you're literally seeing your subscribers shoot up like a rocket .

Paid traffic is by far the quickest way to grow one of these businesses , but to do paid traffic properly , you have to understand what you're doing . Pretty much . If you don't know what you're doing and you don't have some of the key components in place , it won't work for you .

But when you understand paid traffic and you have a website that converts and I offer that converts and you're getting a customer acquisition cost that makes sense and your business is profitable while you're requiring these customers , it's like magic . To be honest with you , you can literally blow up your business and change everything overnight .

Trust me , I know this because I've done it in our business and , yeah , I've helped a lot of other subscription boxes do it as well . Hope you found this helpful .

If you have any more questions around q4 or anything in general , email me at lehmatsubscriptionboxanswerscom or head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom , join the free facebook group and post it there and I'll answer it in a future episode . And can you do me a big favor ?

If you got any value from this episode or from any of these episodes and they've actually helped you improve your business , could you give me a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts ? It just really helps get this show out in front of more people . Thanks very much . We'll be back next week at the exact same time .

Have a good day .