How can I scale an ecommerce or DTC brand with Facebook Ads in 2024?

Inspire Agency’s Head of Performance, Marin Istvanic, has a winning formula that he and his team have used to scale multiple DTC brands to nine figures primarily through Facebook Ads. How? By committing to rigorous and constant testing that ensures only proven creatives go into high-performing auctions.

Marin shared his four-phase account structure at a recent Affiliate World event, and we’ve got the details you need to test this structure yourself.

1️⃣ Account Structure & Testing

Marin uses a simple ad account structure to find winning creatives:

  • One testing campaign
  • One audience campaign
  • One manual bids campaign
  • One to three Advantage+ Shopping campaigns

The testing campaign is always set to broad targeting, with buyers as the only exclusion. Marin tests in ABO and groups tests according to angles, concepts, and creators. Further, each ad set includes multiple creative variations to maximize the chances of finding a winning ad.

Winning concepts from each ad set are grouped together and moved up to a scaling campaign with post IDs:
Testing (ABO)

2️⃣ Scaling

Ads that demonstrate a healthy MER and ROAS over about three days are usually a good bet for scaling. In these cases, ads with two or three winning creatives that are lower than your target CPA can generate a significant number of sales.

You can confirm the winners’ performance with a higher budget in your testing campaign before moving them over to your scaling campaign.

Scaling with Audiences

Once you have identified winning ad angles or creators for your product, you can test those ads with different audiences in ABO to find the ideal match between the audience segment and the ad.
Audiences (ABO)

3️⃣ Scaling with Manual Bids in ABO

When Marin finds a good audience and ad match, he’ll move that campaign into the third phase, which is scaling with manual bids in ABO. This starts with by duplicating the campaign three times for cost cap bids at $5 below, $5 above, and right at the target CPA:
Manual Bids (ABO)

The goal of creating three manual bidding campaigns is to generate wins, but also more information — specifically, the sweet spot that exists between deliverability and good results.

4️⃣ Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

After rigorous rounds of testing to ensure a campaign’s performance, Marin moves into the final phase by importing winning ads into Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. These campaigns work best with a higher budget, but the potential risk is offset by verifying the ads and audiences beforehand using the account structure above.

Advantage+ is useful because it gives you the ability to segment activity according to new and existing customers. Marin targets new customers because Advantage+ does some remarketing on its own, and focusing on new customers reduces the likelihood that you’ll cannibalize your sales through retargeting. Using a one-day- or seven-day-click attribution setting can also help avoid over-attribution issues.

When you do proceed with Advantage+, start with a high budget and let it run for at least three days before evaluating results. Further, Marin recommends running this structure constantly so that you have new winning campaigns to import on a weekly basis, which is the best protection against creative fatigue.

As the final phase of this ad structure, you should only be creating a new Advantage+ Shopping campaign for a new product, a new funnel, or a new country.