Solved: Adjusting Meta Ads Budget and Adding Ads Safely

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out with your questions. It's good that you're thinking about this stuff – shows you're taking it seriously. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what we see day-in, day-out running these campaigns for clients.

Honestly, the questions you're asking get right to the heart of a massive misunderstanding about how platforms like Meta actually work. There's so much noise out there about the 'learning phase' that it makes people terrified to touch their own campaigns. The truth is, the path to a profitable campaign isn't about tiptoeing around the algorithm; it's about feeding it the right data through relentless, structured testing. Let's get into it.

Let's be honest about the 'Learning Phase'...

Right then. The single biggest thing holding advertisers back is this almost mythical fear of 'breaking' or 'resetting' the learning phase. You've heard it, I've heard it, it's everywhere. The idea that your campaign is this delicate little flower that will wilt if you so much as look at it funny. Tbh, it's mostly nonsense, and it's costing you money.

Think about it. What is the algorithm actually 'learning'? It's learning who, within your chosen audience, is most likely to take the action you want (clicks, leads, purchases) based on the creative you've given it. If your audience is wrong, or your creative is weak, what exactly are you so carefully preserving? You're just letting the algorithm get really, really good at finding the wrong people, or showing a bad ad to people who will never convert.

I'd go as far as to say that for most new advertisers, the learning phase is a trap. You set something up, it goes into 'learning', and you sit on your hands for a week, burning cash, waiting for the magic to happen. It rarely does. Effective advertising isn't passive. It's an active, iterative process of improvement.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is when people set their campaign objective to something broad like "Reach" or "Brand Awareness" because they want to "warm up" an audience. When you do this, you're giving Meta a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly what you asked. It seeks out users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. You don't want the algorithm to 'learn' how to do that better. You want it to learn who your actual customers are, and the only way to do that is to optimise for conversions from day one and constantly test what works.

So, to directly answer your third question: yes, making massive changes (like swapping out your entire targeting from the UK to Japan) can reset the learning process. But adding a new ad? Changing a headline? Upping your budget slightly? The system is built for that. It's constantly learning and adjusting anyway. Your goal isn't to avoid resetting the learning phase; your goal is to make sure the algorithm is learning from the *right* inputs. That means you absolutley should be making changes.

So, how should you actually manage your campaign?

This brings us to your first two questions, which are about the practical side of managing the campaign day-to-day. The answer becomes much simpler once you stop being afraid of the algorithm.

On adjusting budget distribution: You said you want Meta to spend more on your second ad. My question back to you is, why? If your campaign is set up with Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), which it should be, the algorithm is already trying to spend the budget on the ad it predicts will get you the best results for the lowest cost. If it's not giving budget to your second ad, it's because it's already determined that the first ad is more promising. By trying to manually force spend, you're essentially telling the multi-billion dollar AI that you know better. You don't.

The correct response here isn't to force the budget. It's to analyse the situation. Is Ad 2 getting no impressions at all? Or is it getting impressions but a terrible Click-Through Rate (CTR)? If it's not performing, the answer is to turn it off and replace it with a new creative to test. If Ad 1 is getting all the spend and delivering results, great! Now, your job is to create a new ad (Ad 3) and see if you can beat Ad 1. This is optimisation. Fighting the algorithm is not.

On adding a new ad: Yes, you can and you absolutely should. This is the primary way you improve performance. You don't need to pause, duplicate, and relaunch. That's a massive waste of time and creates a messy account structure. Simply go into your active ad set, click 'Create Ad', build your new ad, and publish it. The algorithm will then start showing it, testing it against your existing ads, and allocating budget based on its performance. We add new creatives to client campaigns every single week without a second thought. It's standard procedure.

The only time you'd really duplicate a campaign is if you're making a fundamental structural change. For example, if you wanted to test a completely different campaign objective (e.g., changing from 'Leads' to 'Sales') or scale a winning ad set into its own dedicated campaign with a much larger budget (a strategy called CBO scaling). For simply testing a new picture or headline, just add it to the live ad set.

You need a better structure for testing...

The reason these questions feel so complicated is likely because your campaign structure isn't built for testing. A proper structure makes testing simple and logical. For pretty much any business, we start with a variation of the classic ToFu/MoFu/BoFu funnel.

This sounds like jargon, but it's dead simple:

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): This is your prospecting campaign. Its only job is to find new people who have never heard of you before. This is where you test different interests, behaviours, and lookalike audiences.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): This is your warm audience campaign. Its job is to retarget people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a high-intent action yet. This could be people who watched 50% of your video ad, visited your website, or engaged with your Instagram page.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): This is your hot audience campaign. Its job is to retarget people who are on the verge of converting. People who added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited your pricing page.

You should have these as three separate, always-on campaigns. Each one has a different job. Your ToFu campaign is your testing ground for new audiences and creative. Your MoFu and BoFu campaigns are your conversion machines, bringing interested people back to finish the job. This structure makes it clear *what* you're testing and *why*. Instead of one campaign where you're just throwing things at the wall, you have a logical system.

Here is a visual representation of how this works in practice:

Within your ToFu campaign, you'd have multiple Ad Sets. Each Ad Set would target a different audience (e.g., Ad Set 1 targets people interested in 'Shopify', Ad Set 2 targets a 1% lookalike of your past customers). Then, within each of those Ad Sets, you'd have 3-5 ads testing different images, headlines, and ideas. This is your testing machine. It's organised, it's scalable, and it takes the fear out of making changes because the entire structure is *designed* for change.

Your ads are talking, but are they saying the right thing?

Even with the perfect structure, your campaigns will fail if your message is wrong. Most ads are terrible. They're generic, they're boring, and they talk about features instead of benefits. You need to stop thinking about your customer as a demographic ("females aged 25-34") and start thinking about their problems. What is the specific, urgent, expensive nightmare that keeps them awake at night? Your ad's only job is to show up in their feed and offer a lifeline.

Let's say you sell project management software. Your competitor's ad says "The #1 Project Management Tool. Try our Kanban boards and Gantt charts!" It's awful. No one cares.

Your ad, using a simple framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve, would say: "Another project deadline missed? Is your team drowning in confusing email chains and you're the one who has to answer to the boss? (Problem) It feels like you're herding cats, and every new 'urgent' task pushes your most important goals further away. (Agitate) Get a clear, single view of every project. Our platform turns chaos into predictable progress. See how in a free trial. (Solve)"

Another powerful framework for SaaS or services is Before-After-Bridge. "Before: Your marketing team is guessing what works, burning budget on campaigns with no clear ROI. After: Imagine knowing exactly which ad brought in your most valuable customer, and confidently doubling down on it. Bridge: Our analytics dashboard is the bridge that connects your ad spend to your revenue, giving you the clarity to scale."

This is what you should be testing. Not just different button colours, but fundamentally different angles that speak to the deep-seated pains of your ideal customer. Once you nail this messaging, the algorithm has something genuinely powerful to work with. I remember one SaaS client we worked with who saw their Cost Per User Acquisition drop from a painful £100 to just £7. It wasn't because we found some 'secret' targeting hack. It was because we completely rewrote their ads to focus on the career-threatening frustration their software solved for medical recruiters, instead of just listing its features.

What should you expect to pay? Running the numbers...

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it? The answer is always "it depends," which is frustrating but true. It depends on your industry, your targeting, your offer, and a dozen other things. However, we can create a simple model to give you a ballpark idea of what's possible and how the different levers affect your final Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Your CPA is basically a function of two things: how much it costs to get someone to click your ad (Cost Per Click, or CPC), and what percentage of those people convert on your landing page (Conversion Rate, or CVR). The formula is simple: CPA = CPC / CVR.

In developed countries like the UK, US, or most of Europe, a typical CPC on Meta might be anywhere from £0.50 to £1.50. A decent landing page conversion rate for a lead or signup might be between 10% and 30%. Let's see what that means for your costs. Use the calculator below to see how these numbers interact.

As you can see, small improvements make a huge difference. Improving your ads and targeting to lower your CPC from £1.50 to £1.00 has a big impact. But improving your landing page conversion rate from 10% to 20% can literally halve your acquisition cost. This is why you need to focus on the entire system, not just the ads themselves.

If all else fails, it's not the ads. It's your offer.

This is the final, brutal truth of paid advertising. You can have the best targeting in the world, the most persuasive ads, and the perfect campaign structure, but if what you're offering at the end of it isn't compelling, you will fail. The number one reason campaigns don't work is a weak offer.

I see it all the time. A B2B company trying to get a busy CEO to "Request a Demo". This is possibly the most arrogant call to action ever invented. It presumes the prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction and low-value. No wonder it doesn't convert.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. For a SaaS company, this is a free trial with no credit card required. Let them use the product and see the value for themselves. For a service business, this could be a free, automated audit tool, a valuable checklist, or a short, insightful video training. For us, it's a completely free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns and provide actionable advice. We solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

Look at what you're asking people to do after they click your ad. Is it genuinely valuable and low-risk for them? Or is it all about you? If it's the latter, that's almost certanly your biggest problem, and no amount of fiddling with the campaign settings will fix it.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've broken down the main recommendations into a simple action plan for you below. This is the shift in thinking you need to make to go from worrying about your campaigns to confidently managing them for growth.

As you can probably tell by now, running paid ads effectively is a complex skill. It's not just about pushing the right buttons in the Ads Manager; it's a mix of strategic thinking, direct response copywriting, data analysis, and a deep understanding of customer psychology. You can absolutely learn all of this yourself through trial and error, but that process often involves wasting a significant amount of time and money.

Working with an expert can shortcut that learning curve dramatically. Instead of spending months figuring out what works, you can leverage years of experience from day one. We've run these kinds of tests across hundreds of accounts for clients in dozens of niches, from B2B SaaS to eCommerce, and we bring that wealth of data and experience to every new campaign.

If you'd like to have a more detailed chat about your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy call. We can take a direct look at your campaign, your website, and your offer, and give you some more tailored, actionable advice on how to get things moving in the right direction.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh