When testing a new traffic source, most media buyers fall into the same pattern. They throw in random budgets, overcomplicate campaign structures, and try to figure things out through trial and error. It’s expensive. It’s messy. And most of the time it does not scale. Instead of guessing, we’ll walk you through the recommended campaign structure, ideal budget setup, and the automatic optimization rules that actually work on Newsbreak. This way, you can skip the costly learning curve and start optimizing like the top spenders from day one. Campaign Structure Before you start optimizing, you need a clean structure that gives the algorithm room to learn and you enough control to scale. Most campaigns underperform not because of bad creatives, but because they’re built on messy foundations. Here’s a simple structure that keeps things efficient and easy to manage: Campaigns 1 Campaign per funnel / product / offer Ad Sets per Campaign 2 ad sets per campaign Ads per Ad Set 3 ads per ad set Creative Grouping Separate videos and images into different ad sets Aspect Ratio Group 9:16 and 16:9 creatives separately This structure makes it easier for Newsbreak’s algorithm to process performance signals and helps you identify what’s working without added noise. Recommended Budgets The fastest way to stall a campaign on Newsbreak is by underfeeding the algorithm or overextending before you have data. A well-calibrated budget gives your campaigns enough room to perform while avoiding unnecessary spend during the learning phase. Use the table below as a baseline: Campaign Type Daily Budget Ad Set Count Creative Count per Ad Set Lead Gen Less than $200/day 2 2 to 3 creatives per ad set Lead Gen More than $200/day 2 3 to 5 creatives per ad set eCommerce Less than $200/day 2 2 to 3 creatives per ad set eCommerce More than $200/day 2 3 to 5 creatives per ad set Search Arbitrage From $50/day 2 2 to 3 creatives per ad set Search Arbitrage $100 or more per day 2 to 3 3 to 5 creatives per ad set These recommendations are based on real campaign data and give you the best shot at reaching enough conversions to exit the learning phase. Aim for 30 conversions within 4-5 days. Recommended Optimization Rules Even with the right structure and budget, campaigns still need ongoing management. But constantly monitoring performance by hand is not scalable, especially if you are running multiple ad sets or spending at higher volumes. This is where automatic optimization rules come in. They help you take action quickly, without lifting a finger. Here are 7 automatic rules you can set up right away: Pause Non-Converting Campaigns This rule pauses those campaigns that spent at least $200 in the last 3 days and have not generated a single conversion. It checks the performance every 30 minutes to catch underperforming campaigns on time and prevent ad spend waste. Pro Tip: Use this rule during new launches or when testing aggressive scale campaigns. Fast feedback loops prevent overspending, especially in volatile verticals.   Pause Low-Performing Ad Set This rule targets ad sets that are statistically worse than campaign averages. It pauses ad sets that have spent over $300, generated less than 30% of the campaign total conversions. It also checks if ad the ad set has a CVR below 70% campaign average, and a CPA that’s 10% higher than your payout.   Pro Tip: Switch conditions from CPA to ROI or ROI (tracker) if you are tracking the ROI and your conversion values are not static.   Pause Low CTR Non-Converting Ads This rule catches underperforming creatives and cuts them before they affect your return on investment. The rule is looking at non-converting ads if they have spent more than 100% of the Avg. CPA, have a CTR below 1%, and are performing worse than 60% of the campaign’s average CTR. Pro Tip: Low CTR is often a creative issue, not just audience mismatch. Use this rule to eliminate weak creatives early and free up budget for ads that actually generate interest. Alert: Check Performance – Not Enough Conversions This rule flags ad sets that are burning budget without delivering sufficient conversions. It sends you an alert when an ad set has spent over $400 in the last 5 days, generated less than 20 conversions, and have a CPA greater than $50. This is a classic quality-control filter to surface low-performing ad sets before they burn through more spend. Pro Tip: Keep this rule in alert-only mode to evaluate borderline ad sets before killing them, especially when testing new audiences or creatives. Also, if needed consider switching conditions from CPA based to ROI based. Increase Ad Set Budget Twice Weekly This rule gradually increases ad set budgets twice a week by 30%, but only if performance criteria are met. It checks if over the last 8 days the ad set has spent 5x the daily budget, generated at least 50 conversions, and consistently hit over 20% ROI for three days in a row for the last three days. Pro Tip: This rule changes budgets at midnight according to the account time zone. If your account reporting is in a different time zone, switch the time zone of the “Hour of Day” condition to yours.   Alert: Switch Ad Set to tCPA This rule sends you an alert for when its best to switch your ad sets from Max Conversions to Target CPA. It compares CPA across two time frames, a prior “good” window (13–5 days ago) and a recent performance window (last 5 days). If CPA was previously under $50 and has now climbed above $50, the rule sends an alert suggesting a switch to tCPA.   Alert: Add New Ads to Good Performing Ad Set This rule helps you to identify ad fatigue on good performing ad sets. It checks if it has a significant ad spend over the last 7 days. Compares the CVR of the last 7 days if its less than 80% of that of 14 – 8 days ago. Does the same comparison for the ROI and also checks if it has generated over 100+ conversions over the last 14 days. Pro Tip: Adjust the “Hour of Day” condition to get alerts within your daytime hours to make sure you don’t miss the chance to refresh your creatives on good ad sets.   By following the right campaign structure, setting realistic budgets, and using data-backed automatic rules, you can cut out the guesswork and scale confidently. The rules we’ve outlined here follow Newsbreak optimization best-practices and what’s actually working for high-volume media buyers on their platform right now. So instead of reacting late or manually babysitting your ads, let automation do the heavy lifting.

Scaling Meta Ads (Facebook Ads) sounds like a simple thing for most media buyers. Just increase budgets and keep adding new creatives, right? Well, you know that the very moment you touch a profitable campaign, it tanks! The challenge isn’t getting a winning campaign at low scale. It’s keeping winners profitable while you scale them. And when you’re spending serious money, every move counts. In this guide, I’ll break down the exact decisions that make or break your scaling strategy. When to start scaling a campaign and by how much? How do you know it’s the right time to clone? What should you clone: campaigns or ad sets? When does it make sense to clone across multiple ad accounts? After cloning, do you keep duplicating or scaling budgets? Let’s break it all down so you can scale more reliably. When Should I Start Scaling a Campaign and by How Much? Most media buyers either fail to scale a profitable campaign properly or make the mistake of scaling it too early. For example, even though you might be getting a good CPA within the first couple of days of your ad set or campaign running, it doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough to be scaled unless you have collected enough conversion data. According to Meta’s official documentation, ad sets and campaigns need to go through at least a full 7-day learning period and collect a minimum of 50 conversions. However, real-world results show something slightly different. If your campaign generates around 8-10 or more conversions a day consistently, you don’t necessarily need to wait a full week before starting to scale your campaign. Here’s why: . As you can see from the above graph, during the first couple of days, CPAs are fluctuating in the high range, sort of like 2x-5x your CPA goal or even higher. During this period, Meta seems to be testing different audience pools in order to find the best audience able to deliver the highest number of results for the allocated budget. By day 3, the CPA has the tendency to come closer to the desired CPA. By day 4, you might hit your desired goal, which will then continue delivering results at a similar CPA or lower. With these patterns in mind, you should give Meta at least 3-4 days with a consistent amount of generated conversions before starting to scale your campaign or ad set budget. If you do it earlier, or you have generated less than 8 conversions a day, then you’re likely playing russian roulette, and what you scaled might tank the next day. Besides the number of days running and the generated amount of conversions, how much and how often you increase your campaign or ad set budgets is quite important. Years ago, Meta used to recommend increasing the daily budget by not more than 30% at a time. This was the safe mark that helped you scale smoothly without shaking the algorithm’s learnings. These days, Meta’s official documentation is quite vague and refers to extreme budget changes like 10x the current budget without giving any percentage references. However, when looking at hundreds of thousands of campaigns and their scaling dynamics, we can confidently say that the safest approach would be to stay within the 20%-30% range for medium to high CPA campaigns. For lower CPA campaigns, you can also push it to 50% or even 100% budget increases at a time. Just make sure you have enough conversions and you don’t do it way too often. Stop wasting money: Add this stop-loss rule » How Often Should You Change Budgets? Budget change frequency is quite important too! In fact, exaggerated budget changes are counted as “significant edits” for Meta, which leads to resetting the learnings the campaign has collected so far. Too frequent budget changes continuously impact your ad set or campaign learnings, which later might lead to a fluctuating CPA that never settles. Check out the following graph: In this graph, you may notice how the CPA increases every time a budget change is applied to an ad set or campaign. In fact, every time a significant budget change is applied, the CPA tends to increase for 1-2 days, then settle back down to its optimal range. Of course, the CPA is highly influenced by the ad strength and competition, however, it’s important to consider how significant budget changes impact the stability of the ad set or campaign. As such, for more stable campaigns, it’s best to scale your budgets once every two to three days. If your CPA is low enough and you have enough margin, you can also change it more frequently in exchange for a slightly higher CPA, lower margin, but higher net profit. Grow faster: Add this budget scaling rule » When Should I Clone Ad Sets or Campaigns? Another way of scaling campaigns is to clone your best performers multiple times. This not only allows you to have more campaigns using the same winning set of creatives and funnels. It also allows you to reach a much larger audience than you couldn’t have reached through a single campaign with a limited budget. Interestingly enough, when you clone ad sets or campaigns, your likelihood of reaching a different audience pool is pretty high. For this very reason, you might notice an important performance difference between the original ad set or campaign, even after you’ve run the new one past the initial learning period. Getting back to when it’s the right time to clone… once you find a winning ad, ad set, or campaign, it’s best to start scaling it not only vertically (by increasing budgets), but horizontally too (cloning it). In a nutshell, if the ad set or campaign generates 8-10 conversions a day consistently on optimal CPA or ROI and has exited the learning phase by day 5, you are good to go. If it takes longer for the ad set or campaign to exit the learning phase, then give it enough time to collect at least 50 conversions/week on a good CPA or ROI, then go for it. What Should I Clone: Campaigns or Ad Sets? The short answer to this is both. However, there are some nuances and situations when you’d want to clone campaigns over ad sets, ad sets over campaigns, or even just ads from one campaign to another. If you are running CBO (campaign budget optimization) campaigns (currently labeled as Advantage Campaign Budget), it makes more sense to clone campaigns. Cloning ad sets inside such campaigns won’t make much sense unless you plan on changing the audience targeting, since Meta will try to focus the campaign budget on the best-performing ad set. In other words, you won’t be scaling your spend. If you are running ABO (ad set budget optimization) campaigns (meaning you’re setting the budget on the ad set level), it makes sense to clone ad sets within the same campaign. By doing so, you are leveraging campaign-level learnings that have been collected so far and utilizing them on the newly cloned ad sets to exit the learning phase faster and potentially perform very similarly to the original one. On top of it, for ABO you can also clone campaigns, and that will very quickly scale the ad spend multiple times from the current one. Pro tip: When cloning ABO campaigns, make sure you reset your scaled ad set budgets to a reasonable amount, otherwise your newly created campaign and ad sets will start spending on hefty budgets and that might not make much sense. Clone winners: Add this campaign cloning rule » Does it Make Sense to Clone Across Ad Accounts? Most new Meta ad accounts have a default spending limit that progressively increases as you build up some spending history with them. This often may prevent you from scaling winners fast and taking advantage of the momentum to generate more profits. Besides that, depending on the type of campaigns that you’re running or how aggressive your ads are, ad accounts might be at risk of getting restricted from advertising. Both these cases prevent you from scaling or squeezing any potential profits from your winning campaigns. As such, cloning campaigns across multiple ad accounts is the next level of scaling your winning campaigns. This not only allows you to multiply your current scale faster, but also helps you mitigate any potential ad account restrictions that might turn your […]

If you are currently running or aim to run paid campaigns on Meta Ads at scale, it means that you are or will soon be managing multiple campaigns simultaneously. Spread across multiple ad accounts, testing multiple hooks, angles, creative elements, etc. Imagine having like 30-50 campaigns running at the same time, having to review their ad performance every day, work on new creatives, new angles, not to consider everything else you need to optimize down your campaign funnel. These X automatic rules will help you get rid of babysitting your campaigns, especially if you are managing considerable daily budgets. Automatically Stop Low-Performing Campaigns Not every campaign or ad set you launch is guaranteed to succeed. Only a small percentage of all launched campaigns or ad sets become winners. As such, shutting down low-performing campaigns or ad sets on time is crucial to save ad spend waste. The following rule will shut down a low-performing campaign after its 3rd day of running in case it doesn’t deliver the aimed results. As you can see from the screenshot below, the rule analyzes the total ad spend of the campaign, its daily performance over the last 3 days. Then on midnight of the specified time zone, it pauses the campaign automatically. This approach ensures each newly launched campaign or ad set gets enough time and budget. An alternative way of setting up this automatic rule is by replacing the CPA with the ROI (tracker), which is calculated based on the ad spend reported from Meta Ads and the revenue reported by your analytics platform. This is one of the unique capabilities of TheOptimizer, which allows you to optimize based on accurate combined statistics from more than one information source. Both of the above rules are set to execute actions at the campaign level. Using the same logic, you can easily set up rules at the ad set level. Automatically Scale Budgets on Good-Performing Campaigns Once you land on a good-performing campaign, your next optimization step is scaling it. However, this is something you shouldn’t do on gut feelings (like most media buyers do). Instead, you should take a data-driven approach that you can replicate and scale confidently. This is what the following rule does. It looks at the total spend of the campaign, the number of collected results over the last 7 days, as well as the actual day-to-day CPA over the last 3 days. Once everything meets the thresholds, the rule will increase the daily budget of the campaign 2x a week by 20%. This rule executes budget changes at the beginning of the day according to the selected time zone (usually ad account time zone) to ensure a smooth budget pacing throughout the day. Also, the frequency of budget changes ensures smooth, consistent scaling while accounting for CPA fluctuations that can occur after a budget increase. Alternatively, you can change budgets 3x a week or even more frequently by adding one more day in the execution schedule. Automatically Drop Budgets on Increased CPA Campaigns Quite often, when you increase budgets too aggressively, the CPA tends to go a bit higher than your CPA goal. When this happens, it’s best to drop back the budget to levels when your CPA was within your CPA goal. It’s a form of telling Meta that you don’t like the results you’re getting. This rule drops the bid specifically for when your campaign or ad set has been running with a good CPA (below a specific threshold), then in the last couple of days the CPA has increased (above a specific threshold). If the CPA is higher than your threshold for two consecutive days, then the rule will drop the daily budget of the campaign or ad set by 20% at the beginning of the day, according to the ad account time zone. You can create a similar rule using ROI or ROAS as a metric. Just make sure your conditions properly qualify which campaigns or ad sets the rule is going to adjust budgets too. Automatically Pause Degrading Campaigns or Ad Sets Sooner or later, campaigns come to a dead end where they don’t perform that good anymore. Especially those that used to be good performers and generate good profits. When that moment comes, it’s best to turn off the campaign to prevent wasting the profits it generated. This rule looks at campaign performance over the past 7 days. It first checks whether the campaign has generated at least 50 conversions during that period. If it meets that threshold, it then compares the ROI from days 6 to 4. If ROI during that window was higher than 20%, the rule proceeds to evaluate the ROI over the most recent 3 days, one day at a time. If it detects a consistent decline and sees that the ROI on the most recent day has dropped below -20%, it pauses the campaign or ad set. The goal of this rule is to cut wasted ad spend as early as possible when performance starts to decline. If you prefer a less aggressive approach, you can expand the time frame and allow more than one day of negative performance before triggering a pause. You can also adapt the rule to use ROAS or CPA instead of ROI, depending on how you track performance. Update Saturated Ads – Alert Rule This rule constantly monitors the performance of your ads and sends you an email, slack, or telegram alert to notify you it’s time to refresh your ads. This way you don’t let a good-performing campaign degrade to a point of no recovery; instead, you keep on feeding it with fresh creatives. The rule first checks if the ad has spent at least $5 over the last 6 days. If it meets that condition, it then looks at the CPA for the most recent 3 days and confirms whether performance has been consistently good across all three. Finally, it checks the ad frequency between days 3 and 1. If frequency is 3 or higher, the rule sends a notification prompting you to refresh the creatives. Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign. Automatically Pause Saturated Low-Performing Ads While you keep on feeding your campaigns with fresh ads to keep up the performance of your campaigns, it is best to kill any saturated ads that are generating results above your KPI goals. This rule checks if your ad has spent $5 or more over the last 7 days. It reviews the CPA for each day to see if it consistently exceeds a specific threshold. It also checks if the ad’s frequency is higher than 3. If all these conditions are true, the rule automatically pauses the ad. Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign. Automatically Clone Winning Campaigns – Same Ad Account As part of your scaling strategy, apart from increasing campaign budgets, you should also clone winning campaigns. This not only allows you to scale up the ad spend, but also gives the opportunity to land on a broader audience pool that will allow you to further scale your winners. On top of it, the cloned campaign will carry on part of the learnings from the original one. This rule checks if the campaign has spent at least $150 over the last 5 days. It also verifies that the campaign has generated 50 or more results in the last 7 days. If those conditions are met and the CPA has stayed below your set threshold for the last 4 days—indicating stable performance—the rule triggers the creation of 3 clones of the original campaign. The cloning process runs every Tuesday at midnight (PST), and each clone starts with a reset budget of $100/day. Cloning at midnight (based on the ad account’s time zone) prevents issues where campaigns are cloned mid-day and end up spending their full daily budget in just a few hours. The rule creates 3 clones instead of just one because not every new campaign will perform well. By launching multiple versions, you increase your chances of finding at least one that continues to deliver results. Since performance isn’t guaranteed right away, starting with a $100 daily budget helps reduce […]

  In this live training, we’re diving deep into the exact strategies top media buyers use to track, automate campaign launches, test keywords, and scale effortlessly—so you can focus on what really matters: driving results.   Training agenda: 🛠️ Tracking Setup:  Learn how to set up tracking efficiently to better track and analyze the performance of your campaigns. ⚖️ Keyword & Domain A/B Testing:  How to split-test domains and keywords to maximize your margins. ⛔ Tested Stop-Loss Rules:  The only stop-loss rules you need to safeguard your budgets. 📈 Campaign Auto-Scaling: Take the guesswork out of scaling by automating your growth and maintaining control. 🚀 Bulk Campaign Launching:  Streamline your process to launch multiple campaigns at once, effortlessly. 📊 Campaign Analysis:  What to look for and how to quickly analyze the performance of your campaigns. 🎛️ Fine-Tuning Rules:   The data-driven approach on how to fine-tune your existing rules or create new ones.

In this live training, we dived deep into the exact strategies top media buyers use to automate campaign launches, test keywords, and scale effortlessly—so you can focus on what really matters: driving results. Training Agenda Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll learn from this training: Tracking Setup : Learn how to set up tracking efficiently to better track and analyze the performance of your campaigns. Keyword & Domain A/B Testing : How to split-test domains and keywords to maximize your margins. Tested Stop-Loss Rules : The only stop-loss rules you need to safeguard your budgets. Campaign Auto-Scaling : Take the guesswork out of scaling by automating your growth and maintaining control. Bulk Campaign Launching : Streamline your process to launch multiple campaigns at once, effortlessly. Campaign Analysis : What to look for and how to quickly analyze the performance of your campaigns. Fine-Tuning Rules :  The data-driven approach on how to fine-tune your existing rules or create new ones. Q&A  and Key Takeaways

Check out these tested optimization strategies that helped 5-figure a day Meta Ad buyers scale their campaigns profitably without wasting their life behind screens.

Learn how to leverage TheOptimizer.io’s latest features, reporting upgrades, automation rules, bulk launching, and expert tips to boost your campaign profits.

Search arbitrage media buyers waste thousands of dollars a month testing different strategies on Meta Ads before finding success. But what if there was a way to cut your losses, boost your profits, and streamline your workflow? These 5 automatic optimization rules are the unfair advantage you’ve been missing. Before you begin! Please note that thresholds and time zones defined in the following rules are for reference purposes only! It is highly recommended to adjust performance thresholds to your actual thresholds, as well as adjust the time zone settings to your ad account reporting time zone or another time zone that fits your needs. Cut Non-Promising Campaigns Part of your day-to-day process is that of regularly launching new campaigns daily. This process helps you find new winning campaigns, but at the same time increases your ad spend and the possibility of generating bigger losses from testing. This optimization rule will help you minimize your ad spend waste by automatically turning off non-promising campaigns on time. Rule explanation: The rule checks if a campaign has been running for more than 4 days and if it has generated less than 40 conversions. It also checks the ROI between the last 2 and 4 days, and for yesterday if it is worse than negative -30%. Additionally, the rule targets the hour of day at which the actions are executed. Here we select the ad account time zone and combine it with the execution frequency of every 1 hour. The goal of this rule is to pause newly launched campaigns if after 4 days of running the campaign hasn’t reached the break-even zone.   Detect Performance Dips The purpose of this rule is to detect negative performance changes in a good campaign and prevent losses before it wastes any profits generated so far. It aims to identify campaigns that have been performing well but have recently experienced significant performance decreases. Rule explanation: The rule checks if the tracker ROI between the last 4 to 2 days has been greater than 10% and if the ROI for yesterday has been less than negative -10%. In addition, it checks if the CPA has a 50% increase compared to the CPA between the last 6 and 2 days. It executes the next day after the previous day’s revenue has been finalized by using the Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of every 1 Hour.   Clone Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you scale your Meta campaigns horizontally by detecting and cloning winning ad sets 2 times each 3 times a week. Rule explanation: The rule evaluates the performance of your Meta campaign ad sets over two-time intervals: the last 6 to 3 days and the last 2 to 1 days. If the performance is greater than 15% in both intervals, the rule initiates a cloning action. Additionally, the rule incorporates an Hour of Day condition, which restricts the cloning to occur only three times a week, specifically at 1 am in the ad account’s time zone. This condition is implemented by combining it with an execution frequency of every 1 hour.   Scale Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you automatically scale the budget of your winning ad sets or campaigns by automatically increasing the ad set or campaign budget by a specific % of the current budget. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your ad set or campaign has more than 50 conversions in the last 7 days (excluding today). Then it checks if the ROI of your campaign or ad set between the last 6 to 3 days and 2 to 1 days is greater than 20%. By using an Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of 1 hour it makes sure to update the budget only 3 times a week at 1 am your specified time zone (ad account time zone). Once all these conditions are true, it increases the budget by 40% of the current budget by respecting the minimum and maximum budget limits.   Low-Performance Alerts The purpose of this is pretty straightforward. What it does is alert you if any of your Meta campaigns or ad sets are running on a negative ROI for more than 4 days. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your campaign or ad set has less than 30 conversions over the last 5 days. It also checks if the ROI between the last 4 to 3 days, 3 to 2, and 2 to 1 days is worse than negative -10%. It executes every 2 hours and sends an alert via email, slack, or telegram with the names of your Meta campaigns or ad sets that meet the rule conditions. No optimization action is executed.   Running search arbitrage campaigns shouldn’t be a struggle. These simple-to-implement rules put campaign optimization on autopilot, giving you the freedom to scale your winners and ditch the losers without breaking a sweat. It’s time to work smarter, not harder, on your Meta Ads.  

Ever get that sinking feeling that your Meta campaigns are a black hole for your budget? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) has changed a lot over the past few years and media buyers like you and me have to constantly change the way we buy traffic to get the desired results. Let’s go over a quick checklist of things you need to keep present before launching your next Meta campaigns in 2024. Conversion API Tracking and Attribution As new regulations are being constantly added to the online advertising industry, so are the tracking limitations too. Since Apple’s IOS 14 privacy move, we saw that relying on website pixels is not sustainable anymore. In fact, new privacy changes have been introduced by major browsers like Firefox and Chrome by putting an end to 3rd party cookies. What this means is that you need to move from relying on website pixels to Conversion API solutions. By making this move, you will be able to accurately track your Meta campaigns performance and have a clear understanding of where results are coming from, while still being able to feed Meta Ads with the right conversion signals and user information it uses to optimize your campaigns. If you don’t have any idea where to get started with Conversion API, I would recommend checking out ClickFlare.io. It offers a pretty solid conversion API solution for Meta and the team behind it is always ready to help if you need a hand with the setup.   Meta Ads Audience Targeting Back in the days, it was pretty easy to deal with Facebook Ads (now Meta Ads). All you had to do was combine the right targeting options with the right ads to build up your optimal audience and boom, you had a decent campaign running. Now with all the privacy changes imposed by government regulations, you’d rather go for broad targeting instead of picking specific audience interest. To put it simple, adding interest targeting to your ad sets will likely increase your CPMs without providing any additional benefits in terms of results. So unless you are promoting a niche product or service, I would highly recommend going broad.   Meta Ads Creative Testing Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) continues to be a creative centric platform. Before anything else, Meta focuses on creative engagement – after all people hang on Facebook and instagram to get entertained or be informed. So one of the most important things for a creative is to drive a healthy amount of engagement. Think of likes, positive comments, and clicks. If you are planning to test image ads, it is very important to test angles and design styles separately. In case you are into video ads, that applies there too. Whether you are doing stock image and footage animations with voiceovers or UGC-style ads, make sure to separate the angles, actors, and video styles accordingly. Pro tip: If you’re going to use UGC video ads, make sure your first couple of seconds have a strong thumb-stopping hook. Thought-provoking or controversial statements help a lot with that.   Meta Ads Budget Allocation Still to this day, Meta Ads is looking for at least 50 conversions in 7 days for your campaign (or ad set) before it exits the learning phase. So allocating the budget wisely is crucial for your campaigns or ad sets. Instead of allocating random budgets from what you feel right to test waters, do some basic calculations and allocate the right budget amount for your goal CPA. Example – You want to collect auto insurance leads at $20 per lead. Min Daily Leads: 50 Convs ÷ 7 Days = Around 7 leads/day Daily Budget: 7 leads x $20 = $140 /day You can always test the waters with smaller budgets, but the chances of you getting out of the learning phase on time and being able to scale your campaigns fast enough are pretty low.   Funnel Optimization for Meta Ads The best tool you can use to pitch your products and services after the prospect has clicked on your ads is your landing page. There is where you can further capture your prospects’ attention using the power of story-telling or make them engage in a smooth and fun to interact questionnaire. Adding landing pages to your funnels gives you the ability to further refine your angles and optimize your funnels by A/B testing different angles or landing page styles to see what resonates best with your audience. Pro tip: Make sure to A/B test one element of your landing page at a time as well as isolate landing page testing from creative testing. Testing multiple creative and landing page elements all at once often leads to unreliable results. Check out Landerlab.io if you’re getting started with landing pages, or looking to upgrade your current landing page solution. It is packed with hundreds of ready-to-use landing page templates you can easily customize through its fully-fledged visual builder, run A/B test experiments, as well as collect and access lead information without having to deal with 3rd party tools.   Meta Ads Campaign Optimization and Automation There are two types of Meta media buyers. Those who launch and manage a handful of campaigns on a monthly basis, and there are those who launch tens if not hundreds of campaigns a day and manage hundreds or thousands of campaigns at any point in time. If you belong to those that run a handful of campaigns, you can handle most of your campaign optimization tasks manually on your own. However, if you’re one of those who consistently launches 10s of campaigns every day, and manages hundreds or thousands of campaigns simultaneously, then you need a solid automation solution. By adding an automation solution to your media buying routine you will be able to launch more campaigns while spending less time, detect your campaign performance changes, cut out losers and scale winners without having to waste your days behind your ads manager. TheOptimizer offers you the power to do all of that from a single dashboard. Besides all the automation capabilities, TheOptimizer allows you to bring hundreds of Meta ad accounts in one single dashboard, so no more need to jump from one ad account to another.   In conclusion, Meta campaigns in 2024 require a strategic approach considering conversion API tracking, audience targeting, creative testing, budget allocation, funnel optimization, and campaign optimization and automation. By following this checklist and incorporating the recommended tools, you can effectively handle the ever-changing Meta Ads and achieve successful campaign outcomes. Remember, adaptation and continuous optimization are key to staying ahead in the ever-changing digital advertising environment.  

You can pour your heart and soul into crafting the perfect ad campaign, but the truth is that not every campaign is destined to succeed. From the campaign start date to the day it breaks even, there are so many variables involved that sometimes it feels like a guessing game when it comes to finding winners. Remember, each campaign you launch gets served to a different audience, who reacts differently to your creatives, angles, offers, etc. So, instead of throwing good money after bad campaigns, there’s a smarter way for you to handle these situations. Frequent Use Cases Campaign Start Date in Campaign Mass Launching If you’re launching multiple campaigns on a daily basis you may already know that most of these campaigns will end up getting stopped if they don’t reach specific KPIs within a given time. Challenge: For instance, if you’re mass-launching campaigns on Meta you know that it might take 2-3 days of running before a campaign starts showing promising results. So you have to consider that and carefully monitor your campaigns daily to make sure that you’re stopping bad campaigns on time. If not, you can easily waste hundreds of $$ on bad campaigns. The Solution: Instead of handling this process manually, you simply create an automatic rule that stops all bad-performing campaigns automatically. Campaign Start Date for Controlling Bids One of the best practices for running native advertising campaigns is that of starting a campaign with a high bid, then after a while dropping it to a more conservative level. Doing so helps you get over the initial learning phase quicker as well as test your ads against the top publisher sites where the competition is higher and you generally need a higher bid. The Challenge: While resetting bids to a more conservative level manually, can be an easy task if you’re only launching 2-3 campaigns a week. It becomes pretty challenging when you launch tens of campaigns each day. You have to remember when you launched the campaign, analyze each campaign’s data, and then lower your bid at the right time. The Solution: Create an automatic rule that resets your campaign bid to a specific level based on your campaign’s actual performance. Campaign Start Date for Scaling Winners Every traffic source has its own campaign learning phase and optimization cycles. So before you start scaling a potential campaign, you have to make sure you’re following these cycles and systematically adopting your scaling strategy according to each traffic source. The Challenge: Tracking the launch date of multiple campaigns, and analyzing each campaign and ad group results manually is pretty challenging even for the most organized media buyers. Most buyers scale their campaigns quite randomly ending up doing quite the opposite of what the traffic source algorithm needs. As a result, turning a potentially profitable campaign in a looser. The Solution: Create automatic rules to increase your campaign or ad group budgets automatically in steps after X days if the campaigns or ad groups are showing potential results. Obviously, there are way more situations worth looking at or that need to be addressed using automation, but that would make this post extremely long and hard to follow. Let’s move on to the good stuff and learn how to set up these automatic rules.   How to Add Campaign Start Date in Rules With the help of automatic optimization rules on TheOptimizer platform, you can automatically pause campaigns or ad groups, change bids and budgets, or run other important optimization actions based on the start date of your campaign. To use the campaign start date in rules, create an automatic rule of your choice and add any prequalifying conditions like ROI, spend, etc. Then add “Campaign Start Date” as a condition. Choose from “Greater Than”, “Greater Than or Equal To”, “Less Than”, or “Less Than or Equal To” in the list of logical operators. Then, select the option for using the current date or a specific date. When using the current date, you can use the logic of “current date minus X days” to look back in the past, or “current date plus X days” to look forward into the future days. When using a specific date, you are simply executing actions based on a specific date. For example, if “If campaign start date is greater than March 28, 2024” To put it simply, use “current date” minus or plus a specific number of days when you want to run an action relative to the start date of a campaign. Alternatively, use a specific date if you want to run an action before or after a specific event, such as the end of a promotional campaign or the start of another one. Log in to your account, or sign up for a free trial today and experience the power of automated campaign management.

How to identify and address your campaigns’ performance drops before they significantly impact your profits and ROI…

If you are currently running, or planning on starting, social to search arbitrage campaigns, this guide is for you. It has everything you need to know, including a comparison of the top ad networks & search feed providers, information on tracking & campaign setup, and tips on how to optimize your campaigns. What is Social to Search Arbitrage? Social to search arbitrage involves buying social media traffic through paid ads, and redirecting it to a parked domain (i.e., monetization page) displaying related search results. These monetization pages are provided by companies such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and each search result represents an ad for which other advertisers are paying. Companies like Google work with partners to supply the search results you see on a monetization page. These partners are also called search feed providers. We will give a list of the top search arbitrage feed providers in a bit and explain how you can apply for these platforms.  Is Social to Search Arbitrage Profitable? Before you dive any deeper, you probably want to know if this type of traffic arbitrage is profitable. If you are running social to search arbitrage campaigns, you will be making a profit by buying traffic for cheaper on social ad networks like Meta or TikTok, and selling it for a higher price to search feed providers.  Search arbitrage is a business of small margins. The payouts are generally low, resulting in low revenue-per-click. However, conversion rates for search arbitrage offers can be very high if you make your ads highly relevant to the keywords you are targeting, and continuously optimize your social media campaigns based on KPIs. When we discuss campaign optimization, we will give some tips on which metrics to prioritize.  So, in short, social to search arbitrage can be very profitable, but your profitability will highly depend on other factors. We already discussed traffic quality above, but traffic quantity is another important factor. Since search arbitrage has small margins but high conversion rates, a larger amount of traffic means more revenue.  Finally, apart from mastering social media advertising (highly relevant ads, good copy, top creatives, the right targeting strategy etc) and investing in getting more traffic, you also need to choose your ad networks wisely. When looking for the right ad network, your focus should be on finding platforms with high engagement and low cost-per-click. Let’s take a look at the top social ad networks next. Top Social Ad Networks to Buy Traffic From As of now, Meta and TikTok are the two main social ad platforms for social to search arbitrage. So, what are the key differences between these two platforms?  Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Meta’s biggest advantage is its audience reach and diversity. With over 3 billion users for Facebook and 1.35 for Instagram, this is by far the biggest social media platform in 2023. This means that the audience is also more diverse in terms of demographics and interests.  The key downside is that competition on Meta is higher, leading to more expensive cost-per-clicks (CPC). Keep in mind that this is only a generalization, and the actual cost of traffic will heavily depend on your ads and targeting strategy.  2. TikTok TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for search arbitrage. At 1.7 billion users as of recently, its audience is considerably smaller compared to Meta’s.  TikTok’s biggest strength is its superior audience engagement rate of 5.69%, compared to Facebook’s 0.06% and Instagram’s 0.47%. Ads on TikTok generally blend in very well with the rest of the content on the platform, resulting in higher conversion rates. Which platform you decide to run paid ads on will highly depend on the keywords and offers you are promoting. For example, if you are promoting dental implant results, you will most likely want to prioritize older demographics.  We have a full comparison article between Meta vs TikTok ads here. You can also find more information on how to run TikTok to search arbitrage campaigns here. Top Search Arbitrage Feed Providers Tonic  Tonic is a German-based traffic monetization platform, known for its Tier1 search feed, high EPCs, and quick creative approval process. You can apply here.  2. System1 System1 is another major player in the social to-search arbitrage space, providing offers from top advertisers and verticals, including health, finance, and travel. You can get in touch with them via this form.  3. Ads.com (previously Bodis) Another top traffic monetization platform, Ads.com has over 15+ years of experience in the industry, and they also partner with Tier1 ad search providers. You can create an account with them here. You may be asked for an invitation code, in which case you can contact the team inside the platform to inquire about your next steps.  4. Domain Active Similarly, DomainActive partners with top advertisers and helps you monetize your paid social traffic. You can sign up here.  5. Sedo Sedo is one of the largest domain marketplaces in the world. You can register here.  Before approving your application, these companies will most likely need to see some sort of proof of spend. There is no specific budget you need to spend to qualify, but generally, top search feed providers are looking for media buyers who have the potential to spend more or less 4 figures per day. Traffic quality will also be very important, as well as a few basic rules such as no incentivized, push or fraudulent traffic. Social to Search Arbitrage Campaign Setup The way you set up your search arbitrage campaigns will determine how data moves from TikTok or Meta to the search feed, and it will define your tracking capabilities.  You can set up your campaigns in two different ways. The direct flow is when you do not use a tracker in between, while the tracked flow includes the use of a third-party tracker. Direct Flow Since there is no tracker present with this setup, the final destination for your TikTok or Meta ads will be the link provided by your search feed provider. Generally, you need to build the campaign links manually under the direct flow. If you are not sure how to build your links, you can find examples of the top search feed providers and social media ad networks below. Please make sure to replace the domain and specific parameter information based on your specific case.  The direct flow is straightforward, easy to set up, and cost-effective, but it limits what you are able to track for your campaigns. If you are just starting out, this could be a simple solution, but if you are trying to scale and working with larger budgets, you will most likely need more granular data to be able to optimize your campaigns efficiently. Apart from this, you would also miss out on the ability to split test keyword groups or different search feeds under one domain. Sending conversion postbacks to TikTok or Facebook is also more limited depending on the search feed.  For these reasons, most search arbitrage experts opt for the tracked flow. 2. Tracked Flow  The tracked flow involves using a third-party tracker. For this to be possible, you would need to use a tracker that has direct integration with social media ad platforms like TikTok and Meta, but also with the search feed providers you are working with. ClickFlare is a good example of a tracker that has an integration with all the platforms mentioned in this article.  Your campaign URLs in this case will be generated by your chosen tracking platform.  Using a tracker like ClickFlare, you will get access to deeper data about your visitors, including country, region, city, device type, OS, OS version, user agent, etc. You will also be able to rotate two or more keyword groups under a single domain, split test search feed providers, and send accurate postback conversion data back to TikTok and Facebook. ClickFlare will also automatically update revenue data from your search feed providers, removing the need for you to manually update finalized revenue data via CSV. Social to Search Arbitrage Campaign Optimization As we mentioned above, search arbitrage is a business of small margins, so in order to scale and succeed, you will most likely need to launch a large number of campaigns and advertise from different ad accounts, or from different platforms.  To ensure that you are not wasting your time and money on unprofitable campaigns, you […]

Are you running TikTok to Search campaigns with Tonic and looking for a comprehensive guide to help you through this process?  We’ve got you covered!  In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about setting up TikTok to search arbitrage campaigns with Tonic, from tracking, to tips on how to make your campaigns profitable! What is TikTok to Search? TikTok to search arbitrage is when you buy traffic from TikTok (via paid ads) and direct that traffic to a monetization page with relevant search results. The monetization page will display a few different results, and each result will send the user to the website of the business running search engine campaigns. Usually, the TikTok advertiser would get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of these search results.  These search results are displayed by search feed providers. Search feed providers are Google, Yahoo, or Bing partners. We will dive deeper into search feed providers in a moment.  This process of buying and selling traffic is commonly referred to as “traffic arbitrage”. It’s extremely effective for conversions, because it ensures that each visitor is qualified twice – firstly, when they click on the ad, and secondly, when they click on a specific result on the monetization page. Instead of buying traffic from TikTok, you can buy it from essentially any advertising platform, such as Meta, Google, Taboola, Outbrain, and more. So, why are we focusing on TikTok to search arbitrage?  TikTok has become one of the fastest growing platforms within the search arbitrage space over the past two years. Being a relatively new platform, the cost of buying traffic from TikTok is lower than most other platforms at the moment. TikTok’s smart algorithm, advanced targeting options, and unprecedented high engagement rates, are also attracting more and more search arbitrage marketers to join the platform. Search arbitrage feed providers As mentioned above, the search landing pages linked to various offers are generated by search feed providers. These providers are going to be the ones paying you in the end, so you need to review them carefully.  Some of the most popular search feed providers are:  Tonic  Sedo  Domain Active System 1 Ads.com For the purpose of this article, we will focus on Tonic. They have a large range of over 1,000 offers, and they only accept a select number of advertisers. You can apply via the form here. Tonic offers a number of benefits, such as high EPCs, accurate reporting, automated features to reduce your workload, quick creative approval process, and excellent customer support, amongst other things.  Tonic search arbitrage campaign setup flows Do you have your TikTok ad account and your Tonic account ready? Now, it’s time to learn how to set your campaigns up for success. The campaign setup will dictate how the data will flow from TikTok to Tonic, and what type of information you will be able to track.  There are two general ways to set up your campaigns – the direct flow (without a tracker), and the tracked flow (with a tracker).  Direct flow  With the direct flow, the visitor will go directly from the TikTok ad to the link provided by Tonic.  In this case, you will usually have to build the campaign link manually. You will need to append the required tracking information to the links provided by Tonic, and use them as destination URLs for your campaigns.  Here is an example of how the direct flow links for your campaigns should look like: Note: this is just an example, please make sure to replace information set on parameters like IDs and event names to match the ones you will use in your campaigns.  Although the direct flow is simple to implement, it comes with its own limitations, especially when it comes to tracking. Your tracking capabilities will be limited to the tracking & reporting capabilities of the search feed provider. That means that you will have limited access to detailed visitor data, which makes optimizing your campaigns more difficult.  This is why most search arbitrage marketers run their campaigns using the tracked flow. 2. Tracked flow  With the tracked flow, a third-party tracker is added between TikTok and Tonic.  With the tracked flow, instead of using the tracking URL you get from Tonic as the destination URL for your campaigns, you will need to use the tracker generated campaign URL.  There are plenty of affiliate trackers out there, but ClickFlare is one of the only trackers that has a direct integration with major search feed providers, including Tonic. The main benefit of using a tracker like ClickFlare is that it provides you with extremely granular data on a click level. ClickFlare has a direct integration with both TikTok & Tonic, meaning that after the initial setup, it will automatically update your cost & revenue data. If you are not very keen on the technical side of tracking, ClickFlare offers a free on-boarding session where an expert will guide you through the entire setup process.  Apart from getting access to more accurate & detailed visitor data, the tracked flow also allows you to easily A/B test two or more sets of keywords or tracking domains under a single campaign. Or, if in the future you want to test another search feed apart from Tonic, with ClickFlare you can also split test the different search feed providers under the same campaign. How to make TikTok to Search Tonic campaigns profitable In order to make your TikTok to Search Tonic campaigns profitable, you will need to nail down targeting, have strong creatives & update them frequently, and constantly optimize your campaigns based on your KPIs.  Let’s start with targeting. TikTok allows you to target based on three dimensions – demographics, interests & behaviors, and device. Many advertisers make the mistake of being highly selective with their target audience, and in return receive very little traffic.  Whenever you apply a new targeting criteria, for example “only include visitors from the US”, TikTok provides an estimated audience size (highlighted on the right). This will indicate whether your target audience is too narrow, narrow, balanced, or fairly broad. While there is no right or wrong way to do this, generally you might want to avoid being on the “too narrow” or “narrow” side. “Balanced” is what is usually recommended by TikTok, and “fairly broad” could also work, especially if you are trying to gather data.  When it comes to creatives, TikTok is one of the platforms with the highest ad fatigue. TikTok recommends updating your creatives every 7 days! It sounds daunting, but it can be easier than you think. You can use TikTok Creative Center to see what types of ads are working for your niche. Then, go to a free stock video platform, such as Pexels, and browse over 1,000+ free TikTok videos. You can edit your videos using a free video editor, like CapCut.  If you want to take your TikTok creative game to the next level, you can actually pay TikTok creators to make ads for you. This is called UGC (user generated content), and this type of content converts extremely well on the platform. There are platforms out there, such as Trend.io or Trendzi, that can connect you to top TikTok creators. If you want to learn more about platforms or tools that can help you with your TikTok journey, we have a full article on that here.   We hosted a large search arbitrage meetup during Affiliate World Barcelona 2023. Jack Antaki, COO of Trendzi, talked about their TikTok to search Game-Changing Strategy Behind $110M of Testing. You can watch his presentation full of golden nuggets here. TikTok to Search: How to run Tonic search arbitrage campaigns on autopilot with The Optimizer We talked about targeting & creatives, now it’s time to focus on campaign optimization. You may have heard that search arbitrage is a “numbers game”, which means that in order to succeed with TikTok to Search, you will most likely need to launch many campaigns & ads, sometimes using different ad accounts.  This is where automation tools like The Optimizer come in handy. You can connect all your TikTok ad accounts, as well as your tracker or search feed accounts (depending on which campaign flow you go for) in only a few steps. This will allow you to optimize all your search arbitrage activities from a single platform.  If […]