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ABO Approach for Successful Meta Ads Campaigns

John shares the Meta Ads strategy he applied to a specific client account, which resulted in reduced costs by 10% and an increase in new customer acquisition by an impressive 118%. Read this blog and learn about the ABO approach and how you can apply it to scale your Meta Ads.

Table Of Contents

Replacing Level I With ABO

Analyzing Meta Ads Strategy Metrics

Growth In Amazon And Shopify Sales And Subscribers

Replacing Level I With ABO

abo vs L1

At Solutions 8, we have started a new way of scaling and it is our pleasure to share it with you! Let’s begin with a new approach we have been testing out that replaces Level I with ABO.

We begin by breaking down the multi-level model inside Meta Ads that John calls Levels I, II, and III. These three different campaigns are described below: 

  • Level I comprises all website traffic plus all Meta and Instagram page engagers, minus all existing customers—to the point that we can rely on Meta Pixel. (John recommends using a tool such as Edgemesh or Blotout for better accuracy.) This is going to bring one-time-click users to the site, at which point Level III comes into play.
  • Level III is your typical cold traffic remarketing. 
  • The middle level is something that can also help Meta Ads generate more demand and actually capture more demand at the same time. Level II excludes all website traffic as well as those who have purchased already, instead targeting the people who are engaging in Level I ads and engaging in the Meta pages. In other words, they haven’t been to the website, but they are liking, commenting, sharing, and watching on social media. You need to keep them engaged, and that engagement campaign will earn the click that then gets your Level III to convert. 

ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimization) is a budgeting strategy in Meta Ads that determines how your ad spend is distributed. ABO allows advertisers to set individual budgets for each ad set within a campaign. This method provides more granular control over budget allocation, making it easier to prioritize certain ad sets over others based on performance.

With ABO, you can test multiple ad sets independently, which can help identify which audiences and creatives perform best. Furthermore, it provides the flexibility to pause or adjust individual ad sets without affecting the overall campaign budget.

Replacing Level I with ABO proves to be beneficial in several ways. It is extremely efficient in cloning the ad sets within ABO. The first step for this specific client was to take $22,000 out of the Level I structure and put it into ABO. By cloning the ad sets on ABO, we discovered it worked better than a remarketing campaign. The testing period for this strategy was short and sweet and got great results. 

Instead of just one ad set, we cloned it when we saw favorable results on the in-app metrics. Then we cloned it again—still the same thing, a decent click-through rate. We cloned it another two times, and even though we hit points of diminishing returns, it was overall positive from a new customer perspective.

Each time we cloned the ad sets, they hit goal.  

Spending $225 a day on ABO meant we added a total of $6,700 per month to the campaign. We tried it again. Lousy results! 

The conclusion is that if an ad performs well, the cloned ad sets will perform well. And, if the original ad does not have good results, the cloned ad sets won’t perform any better.

The team at Solutions 8 then determined to carry this strategy out on a mass scale, simultaneously scaling very quickly. We settled on the following new method of creative testing and scale.

creative testing

We took a single ad set, called ‘Pam’, and cloned it five times at $100 a day each. That gave us $500 a day of creative testing on ‘Pam’, allowing us to see the results after a week. The results for Pam were abysmal.

Would we have better luck with the ad set named ‘Suzanne’? The ad was cloned five times. Two out of five are working so far, at a CPA of just under $100 a day. We’ll wait a little longer to see how that pans out.

Let’s try it again by cloning the ad set ‘Lori’ five times. Once more, two of the five are doing just as well as Suzanne, and getting better results than Pam. 

‘Claudia’ has five ads and we have no good results in any of them.

The last one, ‘Diane’, has three out of five ads performing well, one of which has already received two purchases at $50 cost per [new] customer. 

By making five versions of the same ad, we have observed they perform similarly to each other. Alternatively, we can take the average of each five and compare them with the average of the other five, allowing us to pause the underperforming ad set. 

That extra $500 then goes from the paused ad group to a well-performing group, cloning more of the good stuff. Why have five well-performing ads when we can have ten?

We take the loser’s ad spend and give it to the winner by cloning it to get incremental spend

Analyzing Meta Ads Strategy Metrics

analyzing meta ads strategy metrics

Since we started implementing this new approach, we’ve managed to pull out 50% of our costs inside LI. This gives us an economy of scale while L0 (L-zero) is scaling up at 34%. Additionally, new customer acquisition cost (nCAC) is going down.

When compared with our new version of five cloned ad sets of $2,400, we can see the nCAC is starting off at 273%, which is better than a remarketing campaign.

And, as long as that figure doesn’t rise, we are going to continue cloning this specific ad set.

We are privy to mass testing at $500 a day on ads that are much colder than LI. Anything that’s underperforming will simply be erased, leaving us to focus on the ones that we can easily scale.

So, we’ve spent 10% less and saved $7,000. Our costs per lead went down while our sales went up from 168 to 200, our customers went from 169 to 200, and nCAC dropped by 11.4%.

18% more new customers for 10% less cost!

Please note: 

  • When we put the well-performing ad group ‘Diane’ back into LI, it failed.  
  • When we placed it into L0 for creative testing, it got worse.

But wait, there’s more! Instead of cloning ‘Diane’ at $250 repeatedly, we thought we’d take five ad sets at $500—admittedly spending twice as much—taking advantage of Meta Ads economy of scale in reverse. If there is just one sale in these five ‘Diane’ ad sets, we are already one third of the nCAC of the other campaigns.

It’s easy to spend $100 for three days with zero results. Our new approach allows us to buy a week-long time frame to test it out. We are basically finding the average of multiple instances comparing them against each other.

With a couple of sales under your belt, you are already better off than before. The economy of scale gets you more sales at a lower spend. Since that is easier, why don’t we keep doing that sideways which is the old school strategy. Now we have five pieces of cold traffic data points at seven days each. These can be compared against four other ones.

Growth In Amazon And Shopify Sales And Subscribers

amazon, shopify, subscribers

Successful results in Amazon are also showing up. After a month of our new approach, we saw a huge shift from spend to cold traffic regardless of the record days—20% higher than we’ve ever seen. Continuity has been on a steady rise.

We gained 96% more subscribers over the past month which is worth significantly more than any in-app CPA. Our intention to clone it five times was to avoid having AI change five different versions of it.

The perfect duplication of well-performing ads took us back to scaling sideways. We want to know how Amazon, Shopify, and Subscriber numbers moved based on the changes we made. Adding $20,000 to the mix proved that they continually got better. 

The team at Solutions 8 would love to hear if you have the same experience with cloning ad sets in ABO after implementing this strategy into your campaigns.

Author

Jani is a copywriter at Solutions 8 with a passion for short stories, dancing under the stars, and 80s pop music. Her soul’s purpose is to turn herself into a masterpiece. Her future is filled with green fields, flowers, sunshine, and poetry.

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