How to scale dynamic product ads during prospecting

DPA is not a well-known tool to use when scaling your budget/ROAS in the prospecting phase.

But it can actually go on to become one of your best campaigns.

The great thing about DPA is that it has an incredibly long lifespan compared to normal ads, where you can quickly find that your videos/pictures no longer work.

With DPA, Facebook will constantly try (based on data) to find products that the individual will convert from.

With this in mind, it gives us ample opportunity to scale the budget in prospecting.

It is, however, incredibly important to emphasize that DPA in prospecting only makes sense when you have a larger catalog. If you only have 10 products, it doesn’t make sense to try and scale a DPA in prospecting.

It only makes sense if you have a wide product range (e.g. 50+), as this allows Facebook to show many different products to more people.

A limited catalog will limit your chances of success with DPA in prospecting.

Try to look at some of the biggest advertisers such as Wish, ASOS, Amazon, etc.

They almost exclusively use DPA, and for good reason: It works when you have a large catalog.

Before we can scale our budget, it is important that we have a foundation that ensures that we can actually do it.

Otherwise we risk spending too much money without getting a positive return.

The way we do it is to define and test audiences, texts, overlays for DPA, and product sets.

We go through these stages:

Testing of target groups
Ad testing
Prospecting on higher budget
Scaling

It is important to emphasize that we are investing in the performance of our future campaigns and will therefore get a greater return by using only tested audiences and tested ads.

In general, you should also turn a profit on your test campaigns and therefore shouldn’t waste budget without getting a positive return.

Test audiences

If you already have a lot of audiences working for you, you can easily skip this stage. Feel free to go back to your account and isolate those audiences (lookalike audiences or interest-based) and reuse them for the next stage, "Ad testing."

If you do not have any clear audiences that you can reuse, then this is where you get some. We start out by selecting 10 audiences that we need to test to find the ones that convert best.

Consider starting out with the following:

4 different lookalike target groups, preferably on previous buyers as a start. It can be in the sizes 2% 4%, 6%, and 8%.
4 different interests. Try to make them as wide as possible, you sell e.g. clothes, try the interest “Fashion.”
2 target groups where one is men and the other is women. Here you should not include lookalike audiences or interests. We keep them entirely wide.

Once you've found your audiences, we'll set them up in a test campaign.

Here is one example of a structure you can use:

Campaign level

Optimization: Sales from Catalog and Buy

Budget: Budget is set at campaign level (CBO) and must be DKK 1,000 daily.

Ad set

Here we end up with 10 ad sets which are the 10 target groups you have formed previously.

Each ad set has its own audience.

Set a minimum spend on each ad set of 90 daily. This is what you do at the top when editing an ad set. This ensures that the campaign uses the budget evenly across our audiences.

You can place up to two ads in each ad set/audience (reuse the same ones).

It’s no rocket science. Just try to keep them as simple as possible. Consider trying two different texts.

We pause the campaign after five days and evaluate results here. The target groups who have received purchases within our desired price per. conversion, we move on to the next stage. The others we do not drive on with.

Test ads

Now we need to test which ads convert best from our best audiences from before.

Here we will try to get more angles, overlays, and product sets in play. We recommend that you start with five different ads and continuously test more.

The five could be the following:

1x Completely normal and standard ad
2x With different overlays
2x With combinations of different texts and overlays

It is important that you do not compromise on creativity.

Standard DPA ads tend to be bland and not stand out from the news feed.

Use this to your advantage. Try to generate DPA ads that cause the user to stop and pay attention.

Here, different images and designs are a powerful weapon and often the key to success.

If you have many different categories, it can also be beneficial to test them by creating a product set inside your catalog with your different categories, and then testing which categories convert best.

Campaign level

Optimization: Sales from Catalog and Buy

Budget: Budget is set at campaign level (CBO) and must be DKK 1,000 daily.

Ad set

Insert min. three ad sets, each with its own audience tested in our previous campaign. If you do not have mine. three, then test multiple audiences. Again, we set a minimum budget for each ad set.

Insert five ads in each ad set.

It's important that these are the same ads you use in the different ad sets. Each audience can respond differently depending on which ad they receive, and we try to find the best combination between audience and ad.

We turn off an ad when it has hit 2500 exposures and then evaluate KPIs. We promote those that perform to the last stage.

Let this campaign run continuously and keep creating new ads that you can test. It constantly lets you have new good ads ready.

Prospecting on a bigger budget

Once you have completed your tests of audiences and ads, you should end up with a lot of good audiences and ads that have performed within your desired KPIs.

We rarely return to our test campaigns, so you can just turn them off.

We now need to use your tested audiences and ads on a higher budget, and it is in this campaign that we will try to scale the budget and keep our ads active for as long as possible.

We follow the setup of our campaign below.

Campaign level

Optimization: Sales from Catalog and Buy

Budget: Budget is set at campaign level (CBO) and must be DKK 1,200 daily.

At DKK 1,200 a day in budget on your DPA ads, you are already far in your attempt to scale further.

There are several benefits to starting your budget high.

Facebook gets more data, and it helps a lot with the actual optimization of the campaign—but most importantly, it is easier to scale further.

If we start at DKK 100 per day, we get little to no data, and we’ll find it very difficult to scale that budget to DKK 1,000 per day. On the other hand, when we start with DKK 1,200 a day, it is easy to scale to double that, which is a relatively big budget.

Ad set

Here we use the ad sets/target groups we have tested and performed within our desired KPIs. Consider a minimum of three and a maximum of five ad sets per campaign.

Set a minimum spend of 50 daily on each ad set. We only want Facebook to spend a small part of the budget per ad set to ensure that all ad sets stand a chance.

Insert min. one and a maximum of three ads.

If you have more winners from your test, that's fine. You can save them for days when performance is no longer within your desired KPIs. Here you simply pause the ad that is not performing and insert your new ad.

Once you've completed your setup, we recommended setting a start date on your ad sets the day after early in the morning. By setting the start early in the morning, we ensure that we can get as much data into the campaign as possible.

This helps Facebook further optimize and creates better results for us.

Monitor your campaign for the next 48 hours. If you do not see the desired performance, go back and test new ads or use some other ads you have already tested. If you are seeing positive results, you are now ready to scale your budget further.

Scaling

Once we've seen a good performance on our new campaign with our tested audiences and ads, we're ready to turn the dial of the budget up even further.

Unfortunately, though, Facebook doesn’t work in such a way that you just turn up your budget and hope for the best.

The way we do it best is by slowly turning up the budget.

We do this because with big budget changes, Facebook resets the learning phase, and then our data will be lost.

As a rule of thumb, increase your budget by a maximum of 20% per day. Then you are sure that the learning phase will not be reset.

If you want more tips on how to optimize Dynamic Product ads and Catalog Ads, click here.