Solved: Bad Results Scaling Meta Campaigns (5-10%)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It's good that you've highlighted this, it's a problem pretty much everyone hits when they try to grow their ad spend. You've got something that works, you give it more money, and then it just... stops working. It's frustrating as hell, and most people assume they're doing something wrong with the budget increase itself, like the 5-10% rule you mentioned.

Tbh, that's rarely the real issue. The problem isn't *how* you're scaling, but *what* you're scaling. Your campaigns, your audience, your offer—they probably aren't strong enough to handle the extra pressure. When you scale, you're not just showing your ads to more of the same people; you're forcing Meta's algorithm to find new people, who are often less interested and more expensive to convert. So the entire system needs to be rebuilt for scale from the ground up, not just tweaked. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts on how we'd approach this.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get this out of the way first because it’s the root of about 90% of scaling problems. You probably have an 'ideal customer profile', or ICP. And I bet it looks something like this: "Females, aged 25-45, living in London, interested in wellness and yoga." Or for B2B: "Companies in the tech sector with 50-200 employees, job title Head of Marketing."

I'm telling you now, that is utterly useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to the kind of generic, wallpaper ads that get ignored. This kind of targeting works fine on a small budget because the algorithm is brilliant at finding the tiny slice of that massive audience who are, by sheer luck, ready to buy *right now*. These are your cheap conversions. But when you tell Meta to spend more, it has to go look for conversions in the rest of that huge, uninterested audience. And that's when your CPA goes through the roof.

You need to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about pain. Your real ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's a specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting because their workflow is a mess. Your customer isn't just 'interested in wellness'; she's a new mum who feels completely disconnected from her own body and is desperate to feel like herself again, but only has 30 minutes a day to spare.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything else falls into place. Your ad copy stops being about features and starts talking directly to that pain. Your targeting changes. Instead of targeting "wellness", you target followers of specific post-natal fitness influencers. Instead of "Head of Marketing", you target members of niche Slack communities for marketing ops professionals, or people who use complimentary software tools like Asana or HubSpot. This intelligence isn't just data; it's the entire blueprint for a campaign that can actually scale, because you're targeting a genuine need, not a vague interest.

Do this work first. Map out the actual, painful problem. If you can't articulate it in a single sentence, you have no business spending another pound on ads. You're just burning cash.

You'll need to get your numbers right if you want to scale

The second reason scaling fails is because people panic. They see their Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) creep up from £20 to £30 and they immediately pull the plug, thinking the campaign is broken. They're asking the wrong question. The question isn't "How low can my CPA go?" but rather "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a great customer?"

The answer to that is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Without knowing this number, you're navigating a storm without a compass. LTV tells you exactly how much profit a customer will generate for you over their entire relationship with your business. Once you know that, you can work backwards to determine a sustainable CPA.

Let's do the maths. You need three bits of info:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of goods/service are taken out?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say your ARPA is £200, your Gross Margin is 75%, and your monthly churn is 5%.
LTV = (£200 * 0.75) / 0.05
LTV = £150 / 0.05 = £3,000

In this example, each customer is worth £3,000 in gross margin. A healthy business model aims for an LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio of at least 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,000 to acquire a single customer. Suddenly, that CPA of £30 doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently bid for higher-value customers.

I'd say you need to rethink your audience structure

Okay, so you've nailed your ICP's nightmare and you know your numbers. Now we get tactical. Your account structure is probably too simple. Most people have one or two campaigns, chuck a few interest-based audiences in one ad set, a retargeting audience in another, and hope for the best. This breaks the second you try to scale.

You need to structure your account like a proper sales funnel. We call it ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu – Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, and Bottom of Funnel. Each part has a different job and needs to be managed and scaled differently.

ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold Audiences): This is where you find new people who have never heard of you. The goal here is prospecting. This is where you use your pain-point targeting.
-> Audiences: Detailed targeting (interests, behaviours based on your ICP research), and Lookalike audiences (built from your best customers, highest LTV customers, or people who've completed a purchase). When we start with a new account, we test a load of detailed targeting audiences first to gather data. Once there's enough data, we move on to Lookalikes, which almost always preform better.

MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm Audiences): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They've visited your website, watched a video, or engaged with a post. The goal here is to nurture them and move them towards the conversion.
-> Audiences: Website visitors (last 30-90 days), people who watched 50%+ of your video ads, Instagram/Facebook page engagers. You must exclude anyone who has already purchased or reached the checkout page.

BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot Audiences): These are your hottest prospects. They were on the verge of buying but got distracted. The goal is to close the deal. This is your highest returning ad spend, usually.
-> Audiences: People who have added a product to the cart, initiated checkout, or visited the checkout page in the last 7-14 days. These audiences should be small, highly-targeted, and get very direct, offer-driven ads.

When you want to scale, you don't just increase the budget on everything. You primarily scale your ToFu campaigns. This feeds more new people into the top of your funnel. Your MoFu and BoFu campaigns will then naturally scale as the audiences grow larger. By seperating them, you can control the messaging for each stage and allocate budget much more intelligently. A lot of the time we see accounts where the retargeting audiences are starved of budget, which is madness because that's where the easiest conversions are.

When you're testing new ToFu audiences, be ruthless. The rule of thumb is to let an ad set spend up to 2x or 3x your target CPA. If it hasn't delivered a conversion by then, it's a dud. Kill it and test something else. Constant, disciplined testing is the engine of scale.

You probably should look at your creative and offer

Let's be brutally honest. Even with perfect targeting and a flawless account structure, you can't scale garbage. Scaling brutally exposes any weakness in your ads and your offer. An ad that converts okay with a small, warm audience will die a horrible death when shown to a colder, broader audience at scale.

You need a relentless creative testing process. This doesn't mean changing the button colour. It means testing fundamentally different ideas:

• Messaging Angles: Are you leading with the pain point? The ultimate benefit? A surprising statistic? A customer testimonial? You need to test completely different ways of framing the problem you solve.
• Formats: Static image vs. video vs. carousel. We've had several SaaS clients see really good results with simple, authentic User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos because they cut through the corporate noise. I remember one campaign for a software client where moving to UGC-style ads helped us reduce their CPA from £100 down to just £7. That's the kind of change that makes scaling possible.
• Hooks: The first three seconds of your video or the headline of your ad are everything. You need to be testing new hooks constantly, because creative fatigue is real. The ad that worked wonders last month will eventually stop working.

And then there's your offer. This is maybe the most overlooked part. A lot of businesses, especially in B2B, have an arrogant offer. "Request a Demo" is the classic example. It's high-friction and low-value for the prospect. You're asking for their time in exchange for a sales pitch. Why would they bother?

To scale, your offer has to provide undeniable value upfront. It needs to be an "aha!" moment that makes them sell themselves on your solution. For a SaaS company, this is a free trial or a freemium plan 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, a valuable PDF guide, a calculator, or a short video course that solves a small piece of their problem for free. We offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad accounts. This shows our expertise and builds trust, earning us the right to talk about a paid engagement.

Your offer’s only job is to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. If your offer isn't compelling enough, no amount of budget will fix it.

We'll need to look at expanding beyond Meta

Finally, you have to accept that every platform has a ceiling. There will come a point where you've genuinely saturated the addressable audience on Meta for your product. You've optimised your funnel, your creative is great, your LTV is healthy, but you simply can't spend more without the CPA becoming unprofitable. This is quite normal, especially for niche software or high-ticket products.

That's the point where you stop trying to force more spend into Meta and start diversifying your channels. You take your winning formula—your nightmare-focused ICP, your proven messaging angles, your high-value offer—and you deploy it elsewhere.

• Google Ads: This is for capturing active demand. People searching for solutions to the nightmare you solve. For a lot of B2B businesses, Search ads are their most profitable channel.
• LinkedIn Ads: If you're B2B, this is essential. The targeting is unmatched for job titles, company size, and industry, but it's expensive. You need a high LTV to make it work. One campaign we worked on managed to get a $22 CPL for B2B decision makers for a software client, which was incredibly profitable for them.
• TikTok Ads: Don't dismiss it. The audience is huge and often cheaper to reach than on Meta. It requires a different creative approach (more native, less polished), but it can be a massive scaling channel.
• Apple Search Ads: If you have an app, this is a must. You're reaching people literally searching for apps like yours in the App Store. The intent couldn't be higher.

I recall one app client who we helped scale to over 45,000 signups at under £2 per signup. We couldn't have done that on Meta alone. We achieved it by building a system that used Meta, Google, TikTok, and Apple Ads together, each playing to its strengths. Scaling isn't about going deeper on one channel; it's about going wider across multiple channels once the first one is truly maxed out.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Here's a summary of the core strategic shifts you need to make. This isn't a checklist of small tweaks; it's a fundamental change in how you approach paid advertising if you want to scale successfully.

As you can probably see, successfully scaling Meta campaigns is a lot more involved than just nudging the budget up. It requires a strategic, data-driven approach that touches every part of your marketing, from your core customer understanding to your financial models and your offer itself.

It's complex, and it's where a lot of businesses get stuck. Getting it right is often the difference between stagnating and achieving significant growth. This is precisely the kind of challenge we specialise in solving. We help businesses build the foundations they need to scale profitably and predictably.

If you'd like to walk through your specific campaigns and see how these principles could be applied to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your account together and identify the biggest opportunities for you to scale effectively.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh