Over the past several months, I’ve been spending roughly 60K/month on Facebook ads for one client (about $2,000 per day, $720,000 per year).

This may sound like a lot or a little depending on the size of your business, but I’ve found one thing’s for sure… it’s a whole lot different than spending your typical $100 per day.

After (literally) hundreds of trials and errors, I’ve come up with a useful list of Do’s and Don’ts when working with high advertising budgets.

Let’s start with the “Do’s”

My first big tip is to use a lot of audiences, not a lot of ads. When you use a lot of ads (say, more than 15) per ad set, Facebook has a harder time spreading your budget across all ads, and will often spend most of your budget on 5 of the ads, even if they are not the highest performers. And let’s be honest, 5/15 will be great, so start with those ones first and forget the rest.

Tip #2 is to duplicate what’s working! If you’ve ever spoke with a Facebook advertising rep, they’ll tell you not to duplicate an audience because it will sabotage what’s working. I’ve found this to be the opposite. When you duplicate what’s working, you are simply increasing the frequency for a retargeted audience, or doubling down on a Lookalike. Either way, if you have great results on one audience, there’s a good chance you’ll get great results on an identical one.

My third tip is to create an internal sales funnel. This is an important one because when you’re spending thousands of dollars per day, your audience can get sick of your ads quickly, forcing you to make new ones. This can make your campaigns pretty messy. So instead of creating new ads every day, make a Top Of Funnel campaign with the Video Views objective (no CTA), retarget the video views with a View Content campaign, and retarget your website visitors with a Purchase campaign. This will save you time in the long run because each prospect will filter through the funnel and eventually make a purchase, or stop seeing your ads. A win-win in both cases.

The last tip (and this is a big one), is to use short term audiences. By this I mean, only retarget people that have been on your website in the past 2–4 days. There is one main reason for this…. People have short memories! 90% of people who visit your website will purchase from you that same day, or the day after. There are always a few stragglers left behind, but if you focus your ad spend on the 2–4 days after people visit your website, your purchase campaigns will be significantly more profitable (See image on the left).

I hope that all made sense! Now onto the “Dont’s”

There’s not a lot of things I would say “definitely don’t do”, because every store is unique, and customers will interact with your business in different ways. However, there are 2 big mistakes I see a lot of online stores make, that you could avoid.

The first one: don’t buy followers. Fake followers throw off your ability to target people who engage with you on Facebook & Instagram. FB & IG engagement can be one of the most profitable audiences, but with fake followers, you’ll end up spending your money advertising to fake accounts.

Second, don’t give massive discounts. Discounting at the holidays is no big deal, everybody loves Black Friday or Boxing Day deals, but when you give discounts to your customers on a regular basis, it deters them from ever paying full price for your products. Instead, they’ll just wait for the discount.

If you read this far, way to go! It’s a pretty long post, but hopefully worth the read! Try out some of these tips the next time you have a high budget to work with, and send me a PM if you have any questions!