Solved: Adding New Ads to CBO Campaign Impact Performance?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look over your question and it's a good one. First off, congrats on having a winning campaign spending $200 a day – that's a great position to be in and a problem a lot of people would love to have.

You're at a really interesting point. You've found something that works, and now the question is how to build on that success without breaking the thing that's already making you money. It's a classic scaling challenge. I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance based on what we see all the time with the campaigns we manage. It's a bit more complex than a simple yes or no, but hopefully I can give you a clear path forward.

We'll need to look at the immediate question: Adding new ads to your CBO...

Okay, so the short and simple answer to your direct question – "will uploading these ads negatively impact performance?" – is maybe, but probably only temporarily. And yes, you can absolutely add new ads to a running CBO campaign. In fact, Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) is designed specifically for this. The whole idea behind it is that you give Meta's algorithm a budget and a bunch of assets (audiences in your ad sets, and ads within those ad sets), and it figures out how to best spend the money to get you the results you're optimising for.

When you add two new ads into the mix, the algorithm will start feeding them a small part of the budget to see how they perform. It needs to gather data. This is the 'learning phase' all over again, but just for the new creatives. During this initial period, which could be a few hours or a couple of days, you might see your overall campaign CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) wobble a bit. It might go up. This is normal. The system is diverting a bit of cash away from your proven winner to test the new contenders. It’s an investment in finding your next winner.

There are a few potential outcomes here:

-> The best case: One or both of your new ads are even better than your current winner. The algorithm will quickly spot this and start shifting more and more of the $200/day budget towards them. Your overall campaign performance improves, your costs go down, and you've successfully scaled your creative. This is the goal.

-> The neutral case: The new ads perform okay, maybe about the same as your other two non-winning ads, or maybe slightly worse than your main winner. The CBO will continue to give them a little bit of budget every day, but will still heavily favour your original winning ad. Your overall performance stays roughly the same. No real harm done, but no major gain either.

-> The worst case: The new ads are duds. They just don't resonate with the audience. They get poor click-through rates, high CPCs, and no conversions. The algorithm will still spend some money on them to be sure, which can drag down your overall campaign performance and increase your CPA. This is the risk you're rightly worried about.

So, what do you do? You don't just throw them in and hope for the best. You add them, and then you watch them like a hawk for the first 48-72 hours. Don't make any knee-jerk reactions after just a few hours. But if after a couple of days one of the new ads has spent a fair chunk of money (say, more than your target CPA) without a single conversion, while your old winner is still performing, you can be pretty confident it's not working. At that point, you just pause the underperforming new ad. Simple as that. You've given it a fair shot, it didn't work, so you turn it off and let the CBO refocus the budget back onto what's proven to work. The key is to have a clear idea of your main KPI – whether it's ROAS or CPA – and be diciplined about turning off ads that are clearly pulling it down after a reasonable test period.

I remember one campaign we worked on for a client selling online courses. We were in a similar spot, a good CBO campaign chugging along nicely. We introduced new video ads directly into it. For the first day, the CPA went up by about 15%. The client got nervous, but we advised holding steady. By day three, one of the new videos had found its feet and started bringing in conversions at a much lower cost than the original winner. That campaign, as you might recall, went on to generate over $115k in revenue in just a month and a half on Meta Ads.

I'd say you need to reconsider the 'no testing campaign' rule...

Now, I have to be brutally honest with you here, because that's what's most helpful. You said you don't want to split the budget for a testing campaign. I completely understand why. You've got something working, and the idea of taking money away from it to fund an experiment feels like a bad move. It feels like you're taking a guaranteed return and betting it on an unknown. But in my experience, this is a bit of a backwards way of looking at it, especially as you start to spend more.

The standard, professional, and ultimately safer way to do this is to have a seperate, dedicated testing campaign. Think of your main CBO campaign as your 'Proven Performers' campaign. It's the engine room, the reliable workhorse. You only put creatives and audiences in there that have already proven they can work.

The testing campaign is your laboratory. It's where you try out your new, wild ideas. It gets a much smaller budget, maybe 10-20% of your total ad spend, so in your case, $20-$40 a day. In this campaign, you're not expecting amazing results straight away. You're just looking for signs of life. You're trying to find the next creative that's good enough to 'graduate' into the main campaign.

Why is this a better approach? It's all about isolating variables and managing risk.

-> It protects your winning campaign. By testing in a seperate environment, you never risk disrupting the performance of your main campaign. The $200/day campaign keeps doing its thing, reliably bringing in results, completely unaffected by your new experiments. There's no performance wobble, no risk of the algorithm getting confused. It's clean.

-> It gives you clearer results. When you test in an isolated campaign, you get a much clearer picture of whether a new ad is truly any good on its own merit. If you just chuck it into your main CBO, its performance can be influenced by the other ads. CBO might not give it enough budget to properly prove itself, or it might get shown to a segment of the audience that's already seen your other ads. In a dedicated testing campaign, the ad has to stand on its own two feet. The results are undeniable.

-> It builds a scalable system. This is the big one. Your current winning ad will not be a winner forever. I can promise you that. Ad fatigue is a very real thing. Audiences get bored of seeing the same thing. Eventually, its performance will decline. If you don't have a system for finding its replacement, your entire advertising effort will grind to a halt. A dedicated testing campaign is that system. It's a creative pipeline. You are constantly feeding new ideas into the testing campaign to find the next winner, so that by the time your current winner starts to fade, you already have one or two proven replacements ready to go. This is how you move from just having one winning campaign to having a robust, long-term advertising strategy that can actually scale.

At $200/day, you're spending about $6,000 a month. Thinking about it, risking that entire budget on two completely unproven ads seems a lot scarier than carving out just $600-$1,200 of it to de-risk the whole operation and build a foundation for future growth. It's a change in mindset from 'protecting today's budget' to 'investing in tomorrow's profit'.

You probably should think about your overall campaign structure...

This brings us to a wider point about structure. A single CBO campaign is a great place to start, but to really scale effectively and efficiently, you'll likely need to evolve into a more sophisticated structure. The most common and effective one we use is based on the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

This might sound like marketing jargon, but it's actually a very simple and logical concept. You talk to different people in different ways depending on how well they know you.

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Cold Audiences
This is your prospecting campaign. Its job is to reach people who have never heard of you before. This is likely what your current CBO campaign is doing. The audiences here are based on interests, behaviours, demographics, or Lookalike audiences created from your existing data. The goal is to introduce your brand and get them to your website for the first time. Your creative testing campaign would also be a ToFu campaign.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Audiences
This is a retargeting campaign. It's for people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They know who you are. The audiences here would be people who have visited your website, watched a certain percentage of your videos, or engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page. The messaging here can be different. You don't need to introduce yourself. Instead, you can show them testimonials, answer common questions, or highlight different benefits of your product. You're trying to build trust and move them closer to a decision.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Audiences
This is also a retargeting campaign, but for the hottest prospects. These are people who have gone almost all the way. The audiences are people who have added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited the checkout page but didn't complete the purchase. The messaging here can be much more direct. You might offer a small discount to nudge them over the line, remind them of what they left in their cart, or create a sense of urgency. These are often your most profitable ads.

Setting up your account like this, with seperate campaigns for each part of the funnel, gives you incredible control and efficiency. You can allocate budget specifically to where it's needed most and tailor your message perfectly to the audience's temperature. It's far more effective than trying to make one single campaign do everything. For an eCommerce account, this structure is almost essential for scaling.

Here's a very simplified look at how you could structure your audiences, which is a framework we often start with. The further down the list, the 'hotter' the audience and usually, the better the performance.

Even if you're not ready to implement this full structure tomorrow, it's definately something you should be aiming for. Your question about adding new ads is really the first step into this bigger world of systematic advertising.

You'll need a solid creative testing process...

This all comes back to your original desire to introduce new creatives. The most successful advertisers we see, the ones who scale their spend from hundreds to thousands a day, don't just see creative as something you make once. They see it as a constant process of testing and iteration. They have a machine for it.

As I mentioned, your current winner has a shelf life. The goal of a creative testing process isn't just to find one more winning ad. It's to build an always-on system that constantly uncovers new winners, new angles, and new formats. This is what allows you to fight off ad fatigue and consistently give the algorithm fresh material to work with, which is the only real way to scale your spend while keeping your CPA stable.

I remember working with a B2B software client. They had scaled their Meta ads to a certain point and then just hit a wall. Their CPA started climbing no matter how much they spent. They were stuck. The issue was they had been running the same 3-4 creatives for almost a year. We came in and built out a systematic testing process for them. We tested:

-> Different formats: single image vs. carousel vs. video.
-> Different hooks: Starting the ad copy with a question vs. a bold statement vs. a statistic.
-> Different angles: Focussing on a pain point vs. a desired outcome.
-> Different styles: Polished corporate videos vs. low-fi, user-generated content (UGC) style videos.

Within six weeks, we found a new winning creative style (UGC videos, in their case) that cut their CPA by over half. This is the power of a proper testing process. It's not just about swapping one image for another; it's about methodically exploring what messages and formats truly resonate with your audience.

This all goes to say: you're asking the right question, but the solution isn't just a simple tweak. It's about adopting a more professional and systematic approach to how you manage your campaigns. This is the difference between having a lucky winning streak and building a predictable, scalable customer acquisition machine.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To put it all together, I've broken down my main recommendations into a table. This is a simplified roadmap from where you are now to where you could be with a more robust system in place.

So, where do you go from here?...

Look, what I've outlined here is a process. It's a move from running ads to becoming a sophisticated advertiser. It's not just about flicking a switch; it's about implementing a framework and managing it day in, day out. It takes time, a fair bit of expertise, and constant attention to the data to get right.

It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about deeply understanding your audience, having a logical structure to reach them, constantly optimising your targeting and creative, and fine-tuning your landing page and offer. We've seen clients transform their businesses by getting this right. I recall one SaaS company we worked with in the medical recruitment space that was struggling with a Cost Per User Acquisition of over £100. By implementing this kind of systematic testing and optimisation structure on Meta and Google Ads, we were able to bring that cost all the way down to just £7.

That's where professional help can often make a huge difference. An experienced agency or consultant has already built and managed these systems hundreds of times. We've made the mistakes, we've seen what works across different industries, and we can implement these proven frameworks for you, helping you get to that next level of scale much faster and with less wasted ad spend.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful and gives you a much clearer picture of the path ahead. If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail and have us take a look at your account, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could walk through your campaigns together and give you some more specific, actionable advice.

Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh