How To Optimise Facebook Ad Campaigns With a Low Budget Strategy

In this article you’re going to discover How To Optimise Facebook Ad Campaigns With a Low Budget Strategy.

Specifically, I’m going to break down all the key metrics and list all the things you’re gonna need to know to arm yourself to create the best strategies that are right for your campaigns on a small budget.

Using a low budget, to begin with is actually one of the best ways to start.

You don’t want to burn through your ad spend, throwing in hundreds or thousands of dollars quickly in a single week or month.

Using small budgets allows room for testing and figuring out your funnel.

Now I say funnel and not just product or service because it’s the funnel structure and the copy that influences the perception of what your prospects, of what your product or service for them…

This is what’s most important when running ads.

Focusing on the product or service isn’t what your goal should be.

Because ultimately compelling people to take an action with your message should be your goal.

What is a small budget ON FACEBOOK?

A small budget in my opinion is anything Less than $500 p/m or even spending $5 a day.

Now Most people will say you need to use at least 50 dollars a day or more to get good results and you shouldn’t be using any less.

And even though this is true for many cases, using less than $5 a day is enough to get started and can help move the needle forward in your advertising.

So if you’re using 20 dollars or even 5 dollars this is enough for you to run your ads.

Now before jumping into the strategy another important question is…

How Many Ad Sets and What Targeting Should You Use?

The amount of ad sets and the targeting you should use depends on the budget, if it's $5 a day I would use just one ad set.

If you're opening your target too broad, just leave it at that one ad set and let it running until you need to do any optimisations.

If you have multiple interests, then here, I would do two things…

If you’re willing to take your time, then expect slow results as you can test each interest separately.

Until you change the ad set interest when you’ve discovered the previous interest didn’t work.

Again this will take a very long time but will allow you to know which interest works.

You can also bundle in multiple interests in that one ad set and run it that way or if your budget is at least between 10 to 20 dollars, you can use 2 to 4 ad sets.

Now a key thing to mention here even though this takes longer there’s a big benefit.

Allowing Facebook to take its time and optimise your ads, letting the AI figure out who your customer is allows your ads to optmisie for the best results.

Adset budget optimisation(ABO) vs Campaign budget optimisation(CBO)?

If you’re using a small budget and testing your ads, I personally recommend you stay away from CBO.

CBO is better for when you know you have a winning ad or if you have a big budget allowing Facebook to do all the work and control your ad budget across your campaign.

But with low budgets and testing, you want to have control of your costs so start with ABO.

CBO is more for when you find winning ads and you have bigger budgets to let Facebook do the work.

What Objective should you use?

The objective you should use depends on how your funnel is set up, usually, with a low budget, I only run two types of objectives…

Which are Lead or sales conversions.

If you have a funnel setup to collect leads and then you have your offer for your leads on the back end, and a follow-up sequence, then a leads strategy will be ideal here.

Leads are cheaper than purchases, it allows room to get more feedback and data from Facebook to know what works best.

however, if you don’t have a back end and follow-up sequence, even though I would highly suggest you do this and get this setup immediately.

You can still send people directly to a sales page.

Which leads to…

Testing your message to convert a sales page

Here you can set your ads to cold traffic and send people directly to your sales page.

The benefit of this is that if you can convert someone to pull out a credit card and make a purchase, you’ll know you have a winning product/service.

And another benefit of this is that you’re telling Facebook who a customer is, which it then optimises for your best audience.

But at the same time, here’s a big TIP...

You must let the ad run to see if the sales are consistent.

Because Facebook will likely find the best people that are highly likely to convert.

However, when Facebook has already gone through those highly converting people.

Your conversions will slow down and cost more or even stop in some cases.

So before scaling this, make sure to let it run…and know if it's consistent

This leads to the most important aspect of running your ads…

Know your Numbers

When running conversions straight to a sales page or to an opt-in for leads, you have to make sure you know your numbers.

Knowing your numbers will help you make the right decisions to keep an ad running or to stop it and when to test different creatives and headlines.

So when running a conversion to a sales page the ultimate number you need is your average order value (AOV) or cost per acquisition (CPA).

Because let’s say you have a product at 37 dollars then you’re going to have to let yourself spend up to 37 dollars to find out if what you have works…

If you stop your ad at 27 dollars you won’t know if you were about to get a sale at the break even point.

Because your goal as an advertiser is NOT to make a profit on the front end it’s just to break even on your AD spend and make your profit from your follow up, order bump or one-click upsells.

So let the ad run until it gets to your AOV or CPA.

In some cases, you could even leave a small room to go above your break-even spend if you know your follow-up is strong.

Here's a tip…

Find the lowest product or service that helps to break even asap.

I have products that sell for 7 dollars at the front end and make a profit from one-click upsell and order bumps, including making more offers in emails.

And it’s the same with leads, in my opinion, don’t focus on trying to get low cost per lead, look at the end goal which should be a purchase, does that purchase break even?

For me, I’ve had 20p or cent per lead if you are in the US, and my CPA was down by around a few dollars vs leads that cost 1 dollar and more.

But it was breaking even at the front end, so keep it all simple and focus on the end goal!

You don’t need to be a math wizard here… just keep it simple with knowing those numbers.

Then next is something I get asked a lot about is...

The Learning Phase

If you’re using a low budget, The learning phase may be difficult to get out of… especially true if your objective is to increase purchases.

But here’s the thing…

For me, I have many ads that are in the learning phase and it hasn’t affected them at all.

In fact, when I retarget video views I rarely come out of the learning phase as I keep changing the creative.
And I’ve never really had any issues.

I know there are a lot of people who talk about having to get out of the learning phase or you won't get the best with your ads and it'll fluctuate all over the place.

Well for me it’s been fine and I invite you to give it a try and ignore the learning phase and continue with what you're doing.

Scale The Winning Ads

If you are at the stage of scaling your ads then congratulations, because this is the easiest part of running ads.
And the hard work is everything you’ve done to get this far.

Now the truth is…

All you're doing here is simply turning off all bad ads and duplicating your winners.

And when you duplicate your winner you have two different options to do.

Which are, changing the ad budget or changing the interest targeting.

Leave your original ad if it's working, don’t mess things up by increasing the budget or changing anything.
Instead, you can lower the risk by duplicating it.

You can increase the budget and if the increase works well you can keep doing this.

Or simply duplicate your ad, and change the interest targeting.

Now when duplicating I usually do it at the campaign level.

If you're still feeling unsure of how to get results, you maybe interested in learning how to turn your clicks into conversions.