Scaling Methods: Horizontal vs Vertical – eBoxman

Last time, we have discussed how to calculate BER and when to kill and scale your ads. Today, we will go deeper into scaling. We will talk about horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. The purpose is testing every little detail to find more profitable audiences.

You might remember that we scale when the Ad set ROAS is higher than BER. And when it has at least 2 sales. Now, we will show you how to do horizontal scaling and vertical scaling right away. Let’s begin!

How to do Horizontal Scaling

Basically, there are two types of horizontal scaling. One is finding similar interests. Another is finding more targeted audiences within the same interest such as the age range, gender, etc.

We will show you right here how to do both types with our example below. As you can see, we have one ad set which is doing really well with 2 sales. What we will do here is to duplicate it into another ad set and start to do horizontal scaling.

In the Detailed Targeting, you could see that we have chosen New parents (0-12months) with the Potential reach of 2million people.

In order to find similar interests, we will click the Suggestions tab and look for something that is similar to our initial interest. In this case, we would choose Parents with Toddlers (01-02 years). The Potential reach is 1.3 million people. And that’s good enough. We recommend you should try at least one million people.

Next, you just need to rename your Ad set and publish it.

So that’s the way we do horizontal scaling with finding similar interests. The next type we will show you is finding more audiences in that interest. Look at the ROAS of our ad set again. It’s pretty profitable. But what we want to do is find more specific audiences that have a higher ROAS. So in order to do that, we would click break down by delivery and choose platform.

Then it will show you 2 platforms here: Facebook and Instagram. You can see that most sales come from Facebook. And the ROAS is much better. So what are we going to do? We will duplicate the ad set and target Facebook only.

We could choose other factors like age range as below:

And theoretically, we can do the same as above. We duplicate the ad set and target the age range from 35-45 only. Or in this case, you could do both of them in the new ad focusing on both Facebook platform and the age range 35-45 as well. That could make a high profitable ad.

How to do Vertical Scaling

We have shown you how to do Horizontal scaling, now it’s time to talk about Vertical scaling, which is very easy to do but effective at the same time. With the same example, here’s how to do that. You just need to duplicate your ad set and double your budget.

Here, we have a daily budget of 5 dollars. We would duplicate it with the budget of 10 dollars a day. And then, if you still see that it works well at 10, duplicate and make it 20 dollars a day.

If you have 10 ad sets and 5 of them are making good profits, you would duplicate all 5 with a doubled budget. And the next day, you will see that you are making much more money. The thing here is that you just change one thing every time you duplicate and do horizontal or vertical scaling. Like when we change the platform, we keep other things unchanged. When we change the age range, we just do the age range only.

And that’s how we do that. It’s very simple. You might think there’s no way it’s that easy. But it is. Once you find a product from a good sourcing agent that you could market with emotions and scale. Whatever you do, horizontal or vertical scaling, it will be very simple.