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What’s Your Process Before Scaling a Campaign?

Today, I’m going to be answering a question that was sent in by a listener, this question is from Alessandro.

Hi Kyle,

Let me thank you first for all the content you have been doing. I really appreciate it.

My question is:

What is the process you go through before scaling a campaign? What are the key touchpoints in terms of optimizing a campaign before it’s ready to scale?

I am struggling to find a mechanic method to optimize and scale. And this often results in me over-optimizing and scaling campaigns that don’t turn out to be profitable.

Thank you very much in advance!

Let me first say that this answer is going to be specific to Google Ads.

If you’re talking about YouTube ads, everything is completely different. I’m not going to be answering anything about YouTube ads in today’s episode.

But if that’s your interest, I don’t want to leave you hanging. I actually have a video on YouTube talking about YouTube Ads scaling strategies. Watch it here.

So, let me talk about scaling Google ads first off.

Not every Google Ads campaign can scale. If we’re talking about scale, that could mean different things to different people.

But you know, usually, it means you’re spending a relatively low amount, whatever that amount is to you, and you are starting to get good results. You want to start spending more to make more.

Some types of campaigns can never spend more than a relatively low amount. There just isn’t the right traffic available to actually scale a campaign. So, first off, let me talk about what would actually be required and what you could do to scale a campaign.

So, scaling means we’re getting more traffic more profitably. After I talk about this, I’ll talk about how to make sure your campaign is optimized and ready to scale.

But, first, let’s look at the ways to get more traffic. You can add more targeting, you can add more keywords, and you can expand your location targeting by adding more locations.

If you are limiting demographics and are only targeting certain age groups, you can get more traffic by targeting more age groups. These are just the basic ways to get more traffic through targeting.

You can also get more traffic by increasing your bids if you’re bidding a certain amount and your ads aren’t at the top of the page 100% of the time.

Then, it means that you could potentially bid more and your ad would show up more. They’d be at the top of the page more and you’d get more clicks.

Now, of course, for this strategy to work, your ads have to be really profitable. The difference between the second position and the first position could mean quite a big difference in what you need to pay for that positioning.

So, while increasing the bids is a way to scale, it’s not necessarily a way that’s always going to work because it will eat into your profit margin.

The other way to scale is to make better ads and better messaging that will get more people to click. You will basically increase your click-through rate. If, right now, for every hundred people who see your ad, five people are clicking on it. If you make it better, that’s going to attract more people and you get 10 people to click on it instead of five, now you’ve doubled your traffic without changing your bids and without adding targeting or anything. You’ve simply made a better ad that attracts more people.

So all of these are ways that you can scale and, of course, the opportunity is going to depend on what you’re selling, where you’re trying to sell it, and what types of keywords are available.

I don’t care how scaled the campaign is at some point, you will run out of any possible keywords to target, you will run out of any possible location to target, and you’ll basically be targeting everyone that you possibly can.

So let’s talk about how to basically optimize the campaign and make sure that it’s ready to scale. I do agree with Alessandro that you shouldn’t really worry about scaling a campaign until you’re getting results that are worthy of scaling.

Some people do want to scale at breakeven or even losing money with the hopes that later on down the line, they will be able to optimize and get better results.

That can work. I prefer to take the other approach by making sure that the ads are optimized early on and then scaling what’s working instead of just scaling back what isn’t working after you’ve already lost a bunch of money.

So, to ensure that your campaign is ready for scale, you need to cut out everything that isn’t working. You need to be in there looking at locations, demographics, and keywords.

You need to be testing your ads, you need to be looking at what is bringing in your results, and what is bringing in your sales, your leads, your conversions – whatever type of campaign you’re running.

You need to make sure before you start to scale, to get rid of anything that’s not bringing in positive results.

Then, you are left with a bunch of stuff that is working. Now, you can worry about scaling that and as you’re scaling, you may be making better ads and improving the messaging on your website with a better offer.

Maybe later on down the road, you can add in some of the stuff that you took out initially, because now that you’ve improved other aspects of your business, other types of targeting will actually work.

But, initially, when you’re scaling, you just want to focus on what’s working. Make sure whatever isn’t working is completely out of there.

Hopefully, that helps answer your question, Alessandro!