Recap:

In the first post, you learned the 3 Rules Of Paid Traffic and why you need to become a master at lowering your CPAs to create "room in the math" to scale.

In the second post, you learned how to break down your math to figure out WHERE your greatest problems / opportunities lie and how to build useful priority lists for your team.

In the third post, you learned how to take a step back to develop hypotheses as to WHY your math is breaking down where it is.

In the fourth post, you learned HOW to develop and test experiments aimed at addressing your hypotheses to allow you to Scale To The Math.

You can take those lessons and set to work on implementing them to grow your business...but if you want to continue to scale over the long run, you're going to need to learn how to repeat this process on a regular basis to find more wins.

And that's what we'll discuss in this post.

The Reality Of The Scaling Process

The process of scaling with paid traffic is front-loaded with excitement.

Your initial experiments result in massive improvements in performance which allow for big jumps in spend and revenue.

But as you continue to optimize, the "adrenaline pumping wins" disappear.

The need for continued wins becomes no less important (small improvements on a bigger business still results in massive revenue increases)...but the process isn't nearly as "sexy."

At times, the process can start to feel a bit like a grind:

It's at this point you have to decide whether to treat the process like a grind...or turn it into a game.

THIS is exactly why Sammy and I created the concept of The Scaling Game.

We wanted to wake up every day excited to set to work finding wins no matter if we were in the exciting early stages or the more incremental win late stages.

And we found the key to maintaining the same level of buy-in at each stage was to consistently repeat our evaluation process to figure out where our next phase of scale would come from.

That's when we created our monthly Scaling Planning process.

Why Planning Is The Key To Consistent Growth

The hardest part of paid traffic isn't managing ad campaigns or huge budgets...

It's managing expectations.

Over the last decade, I've watched companies repeatedly set outrageous growth goals that just aren't possible. 

I've also found the only way to crush poor expectations is to bring data to the table that explains WHY these expectations are poor...and then proposes what a good expectation would be.

And there are three factors in setting reasonable goals:

Factor #1: Understanding What Your "Proven Base" Can Produce

The goal of a paid traffic customer acquisition program is to develop a set of campaigns that can consistently produce at the maximum amount of spend while maintaining your profitability targets.

This collection of proven assets is what we refer to as your "proven base."

Month after month, you want to continue to "stack wins" so your base continues to grow by having more platforms, creatives, and SKUs (if you sell multiple products) that can reliably bring in new customers.

You need to understand, on a month by month basis, what your "proven base" can produce as it will make up the bulk of your projections.

Factor #2: Understanding The Cost Climate You Are Heading Into

Once you have a rough idea of what your "proven base" is producing, you need to factor in the cost climate you are about to head into.

So it's important to understand how costs are going to be changing over the next 30-90 days so you can make decisions in regards to what needs to happen.

If your CPMs are about to increase by 25% in the next 30 days, you're going to have to make some decisions:

The CPM climate will determine if your "proven base" is going to be able to produce more, less, or about the same as what you've seen in the last 30 days

Factor #3: Identify Your Points Of Leverage To Produce Additional Growth

Factor #1 and #2 will determine what you can expect your "proven base" to produce over the next 30-90 days without any additional wins.

But as our goal is figuring out how to continue scaling, we need to identify a list of wins that the team can constantly be working on to out-produce what we've projected.

Conclusion: #1 x #2 + #3 Helps Set Reasonable Goals

When we combine the different factors, we are able to provide our clients with a set of projections we believe are reasonable to achieve but also stretch the team to continue figuring out how to improve performance.

And we've gotten so good at this process, our projections typically come in +/- 6% for a client 90 days before we get there.

If our projections don't line up with their goals, the company is able to use this extra lead time to set up other initiatives to drive sales and profit so they aren't left holding the bag.

So now that we've covered how this process works to set reasonable goals, let's talk about the 4 variables we review to help us develop these projections.

The 4 Variables We Review To Help Us Develop Our Plans

Variable #1: Cost Planning (Cost Climate Impact)

Every month, we review what is going to happen with a client's CPMs over the next 90 days to help us align on what is likely to happen, and then, what decisions we want to make about them.

We review the data on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis to help us understand WHAT is likely to happen and WHEN it is likely to happen.

This process helps us work with our clients to determine when we need to push to maximize volume at the best prices and when we are likely going to need to pull back to preserve profit.

We start by doing this on a monthly basis and then, once we understand the seasonality curve for the entire year, we figure out how to maximize volume and ROI on a rolling 12 month basis.

Variable #2: Creative Performance (Leverage Points)

When looking at our ad creative performance, we want to be able to determine if we should place our focus on optimizing our costs OR increasing the number of messages in our "message stack."

To do this, we run a "Diminishing Returns" analysis that helps us see if our ads are in the "Zone Of Diminishing Returns" for our CPMs:

If our ads are OUTSIDE the Zone Of Diminishing Returns, we know that focusing on improving our Ad CTRs is an important leverage point because it could drastically improve our traffic costs.

But if we are INSIDE the Zone Of Diminishing Returns (like the client in the above image is), we want to focus on increasing the size of our message stack because we've already optimized for costs.

For the above client, it's clear that additional work on CTR won't produce a lot of return on our time so we need to focus on adding more messages that acquire new pockets of customers.

Variable #3: Funnel Performance (Leverage Points)

When looking at our funnel performance, we want to continually identify which steps in our sales process hold the greatest ability to improve our CPAs the most.

We have a variety of analyses we utilize that help us calculate the CPA impact (as well as estimating the increase in revenue):

These analyses helps us ensure we are focusing on constantly running tests and finding ways to improve our overall economics so we can create more "room in the math" to scale.

Variable #4: Platform Performance (Leverage Points)

The final factor we consider is how diversified our customer acquisition is by ad platform.

We want to ensure we aren't operating on a "one-legged stool" that puts the business at risk of collapse if a payment is missed or an ad account is suspended.

So the first thing we do is review the current diversification of spend and sales:

Our goal is to ensure no ad platform is responsible for more than 50% of spend and sales.  As you can see for the client example above, Meta is responsible for 62.4% so we are still working to get that number down by adding more platforms.

This analysis helps us understand if diversification is a MUST or just a "nice to have."

Once we can see the health of our ads program, then we develop an Expansion Map that prioritizes which ad platforms we want to add next:

This list helps us understand how we need to prioritize efforts for things like:

Whenever we are in need of adding new platforms, we return to this list and figure out where we should be heading next to continue to expand our customer acquisition program.

Turning The Findings Into A Plan

Once we've run all of these analyses, we are able to create a "Scaling Plan" for our clients that contains the following pieces:

This helps us head into every month with each of our clients aligned on what to expect for performance as well as which initiatives we plan to invest our time and attention on.

Why This Planning Process Has Helped Us Do Better In 2024 Than Ever Before

This planning process has been the key to us having better results in 2024 than we have at any point in the past.

We've been able to help our clients increase their spend AND profitability to the greatest points they've seen in the last 5 years.

And the reasons for that are very simple:

I can't encourage you enough to implement a process similar to ours to drastically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your paid traffic program.

It will truly be the best thing you've ever done.

Would You Like Our Help Doing This?

I've laid out all of the steps we follow in developing our Scaling Plans every month for our clients, you are free to use them to help you improve your performance.

But what I've found is that most people would like us to help them do this for their company.

If that's you, I'd be honored if you reached out.

All you need to do is click here start our application process to see if we'd be a good fit.