Performance marketing is about achieving the best results at the lowest cost. It sounds simple, but managing ad budgets can be tricky -- especially today, when the costs of paid social ads are extremely volatile.

So for a marketer who wants to scale Facebook campaigns while keeping ROI high, we're typically looking at hours and hours of work, often going beyond the typical 9-to-5 schedule. A marketer’s alarm clock would go off early in the morning to start campaigns, and late on the weekends to check and pause the ones that don’t perform. And then there’s the constant stress over spending too much, or not enough, or wasting the ad budget on an experiment that fails.

Below, we look at how Marco Fabbri, CEO at Black Media, takes back control of his time with automated Facebook rules using the AdStage platform.

Black Media uses automation to take back control

Marco Fabbri founded Black Media, a performance marketing and digital consultancy, to help businesses find customers and grow revenue through paid social media. Based in Bologna, Italy, Marco works with clients in Europe and U.S. to boost their website traffic, bring more leads, and increase sales.

Dayparting and bidding tactics to keep Facebook CPA low

Marco’s signature approach to managing paid social media includes a combination of dayparting and bidding tactics. Some of these tactics he learned over time by testing, like the “Parachute” technique, in which Marco runs an ad set where the cost per result is higher than the desired max CPA (cost per acquisition) for 30 minutes until it reaches a significant percentage of the daily ad set budget, and then pauses it. Every 30 minutes, another rule automatically checks if any ad set became profitable after the latest “Parachute” run. Marco picked up other similar tactics at seminars and trainings, like the “Surfing Strategy” by Tim Burd, in which he increases the ad budget incrementally during the day based on performance.

Marco’s techniques worked for his clients, but making small adjustments throughout the day took hours of work. “I would check at 8am, then again at noon, at 6pm, and around midnight to restart things,” Marco says. Such manual work meant fewer hours Marco could spend on other tasks involved in managing social media accounts or scaling his business.

“I hired a team focused on the comments and was planning to hire 1-2 extra people to pause campaigns and do other manual bid adjustments, but with AdStage, now I don’t have to.”

Scaling Facebook campaigns, the smart way

With AdStage's software for Facebook ads automation , Marco was able to cut the time spent on making manual bid adjustments, improve campaign performance, and boost his agency’s revenue by taking on more clients.

“When you run Facebook ads at scale, you need to take care of many things, like comments, checking bounce rate on page, pausing and restarting,” Marco says. “I hired a team focused on the comments and was planning to hire 1-2 extra people to pause campaigns and do other manual bid adjustments, but with AdStage, now I don’t have to.”

AdStage also helped Marco save money by reducing wasted ad spend through auto-pausing campaigns that don’t perform well. On average, Marco saved $10,000 per month (with a typical monthly ad budget of about $50,000) by removing inefficiencies with automation.

Eliminating tedious, manual work saved time, too. “AdStage gave me extra 2+ hours a day for the real work, for creativity,” Marco says. “And as you scale more, you save more time and money.”