Solved: Duplicate Advantage Plus Ad While Keeping Social Proof

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your situation. It's a great problem to have when an ad is performing so well that you want to put more money behind it.

Your question about duplicating an existing Advantage+ ad while keeping the social proof (the likes and comments) is a common one, and it gets to the heart of how to scale campaigns effectively on Meta. Let's get into it.

First off, yes you can do that... but it might not be the best way to scale

The short answer is yes, you can. When you're in Ads Manager, instead of duplicating the ad set or campaign, you can use an existing post. You'd create a new campaign and ad set, and then at the ad level, instead of creating a new ad, you choose 'Use Existing Post' and enter the post ID of your successful ad. This will carry over all the existing engagement, which is great for social proof.

However, and this is a big however, just taking one successful ad, duplicating it, and cranking up the budget isn't a sustainable scaling strategy. It can work for a bit, but you'll likely see your costs (your CPA) start to creep up pretty quickly, and performance will eventually plateau or even drop off. I've seen this happen countless times. You have a winner, you get excited, you throw more money at it, and a week later you're wondering what went wrong. The algorithm needs more to work with if you want to scale properly and you need a much more robust structure in place to manage it.

The real question isn't how to duplicate the ad, but what's the right way to build on this success and scale your ad spend without your returns falling off a cliff? That's what the rest of this letter is about.

We'll need to look at your campaign structure...

When I audit new client accounts, one of the most common issues I see is a messy or non-existent campaign structure. Often it's just a collection of ad sets that were tested at some point, with one or two clear winners carrying all the weight. This makes it really difficult to scale in a controlled way.

A much better approach is to structure your campaigns based on the marketing funnel. You've probably heard of Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). This isn't just marketing jargon; it's a practical way to organise your ads so you can target different types of customers with different messages.

Here's how I'd typically break it down:

-> ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold Audiences): This is for reaching people who have never heard of you before. Your successful Advantage+ ad is likely doing a great job here. This is where you test broad audiences, interests, and lookalikes to find new customers.

-> MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm Audiences): This is for re-engaging people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. Think website visitors, people who watched a certain percentage of your videos, or engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page. They know who you are, so the message can be different. You're reminding them why they were interested in the first place.

-> BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot Audiences): This is your highest-intent audience. These are the people who added a product to their cart but didn't buy, or initiated checkout. They were this close to converting. These are often your most profitable ads, and you need to be hitting them with compelling reasons to complete the purchase, like a reminder, a testimonial, or maybe even a small discount.

Having seperate campaigns for each part of the funnel lets you control your budget and messaging precisely. You can allocate more spend to what's working and test new things without disrupting your core performers. I remember one campaign we worked on for an outdoor equipment brand; implementing a clear funnel structure was the first thing we did, and it was fundamental to us driving over 18,000 targeted website visitors and scaling their sales.

A simple structure might look something like this in your account:

By setting things up this way, you're not just relying on one ad. You're building a machine that can be scaled.

I'd say you need a solid testing strategy...

Your one successful ad is fantastic, but it's just one data point. To scale effectively, you need a systematic way to find your next successful ad, and the one after that. This means constant testing.

There are two main things to test: Audiences and Creatives.

1. Audience Testing<br> This should be your first priority. The best creative in the world won't work if you're showing it to the wrong people. Your Advantage+ campaign is probably doing a good job finding an audience for you, but for a manual campaign, you need to be more deliberate. A mistake I see a lot is people choosing interests that are way too broad. For instance, if you're selling high-end kitchen knives, targeting the interest "Cooking" is probably a waste of money. Millions of people who just watch the occasional cooking show on telly are in that audience. You'd be better off targeting interests like "Le Cordon Bleu", "Fine Dining", specific celebrity chefs known for their technique, or followers of high-end kitchenware brands. You have to think about what interests your ideal customer has that the average person doesn't.

Once you have enough data (you need at least 100 conversions, but honestly a few hundred is better), you can build Lookalike audiences. These are usually your strongest performers in cold campaigns. I'd prioritise them like this:

-> Lookalike of your highest value customers<br> -> Lookalike of all purchasers<br> -> Lookalike of people who initiated checkout<br> -> Lookalike of people who added to cart<br> -> Lookalike of all website visitors

You test these in seperate ad sets within your ToFu campaign. Let them run for a few days and see which one performs best. A good rule of thumb is to turn off any ad set once it has spent 2-3x your target CPA without a single conversion. Don't get emotionally attached to an audience you think should work. The data tells you the truth.

2. Creative Testing<br> Once you have some winning audiences, you can start testing different creatives against them. Your current winning ad is your 'control'. Now, you need to try and beat it. Don't just change the button colour; you need to test meaningful variations. For B2B SaaS clients, we've seen brilliant results by testing User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos against polished corporate ones. The UGC videos often feel more authentic and trustworthy, and they can absolutley crush the professionaly produced content.

Here are some things you could test:

• Format: Image vs. Video vs. Carousel.
• The Hook: The first 3 seconds of your video or the headline of your image ad. Test a completely different opening.
• The Angle: Are you focusing on a product feature? A customer benefit? A problem you solve? Test a different core message. If your winning ad focuses on 'quality', test a new one that focuses on 'convenience'.
• The Copy: Test long-form, story-based copy against short, punchy copy.

This systematic testing is how you build a library of winning creatives. When one starts to fatigue, you have another one ready to swap in. This is how you acheive long-term, scalable success, not just a one-off win.

You probably should manage your budget and costs carefully...

This is a big one. As you increase your budget, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will almost always go up. It's just the nature of the beast. The algorithm first goes after the 'low-hanging fruit' – the people most likely to convert. To get more conversions, it has to reach people who are a bit less likely to buy, which costs more. Your job is to manage this increase and keep it profitable.

What you should expect to pay can vary massively. It depends on your industry, your target country, and your objective. For one of our B2B software clients, we achieved a Cost Per Lead of $22 using LinkedIn ads, targeting senior decision-makers. For a childcare service using Google Ads, we were seeing signups for around $10. For an eCommerce store, your cost per purchase can be all over the place.

Here’s a rough idea of what we see for eCommerce sales in different regions, just to give you a ballpark:

As you can see, the range is huge. If your CPA is already at the high end of this, simply increasing the budget will likely make it unprofitable very quickly. This is why having a proper structure and testing plan is so important. It helps you find more efficient pockets of users and better-performing creatives, which keeps your average CPA down as you scale.

We worked with a medical recruitment SaaS platform whose CPA was around £100 when they came to us. It was completely unsustainable. By restructuring their account, refining their targeting on both Google and Meta, and rolling out a creative testing framework, we managed to bring that CPA down to just £7. That's the kind of change that turns a failing ad account into a growth engine, and it comes from process, not just from having one lucky ad.

You'll need to think about the entire funnel...

Tbh, even the world's best ad campaign will fail if your website or landing page isn't up to scratch. You can spend a fortune sending traffic, but if the destination doesn't convert, you're just burning cash. This is another area where I see people fall down when they try to scale.

You need to look at your analytics. Where are people dropping off?

• High traffic but low 'Add to Carts'? -> Your product page probably needs work. Are the images compelling? Is the description persuasive? Is the price right? Do you have reviews?
• Lots of 'Add to Carts' but few 'Initiated Checkouts'? -> Something on your cart page is putting people off. Maybe unexpected shipping costs are a shocker.
• Lots of 'Initiated Checkouts' but few purchases? -> Your checkout process is too complicated, or it doesn't look trustworthy. Are you asking for too much information? Do you have trust badges like Visa/Mastercard logos?

Improving your website's conversion rate is one of the most powerful ways to make your ad spend more effective. If you can double your conversion rate from 2% to 4%, you've effectively halved your Cost Per Acquisition without even touching your ads. It goes a long way. For our B2B SaaS clients, we always work with a specialist copywriter because we know persuasive copy on a landing page can make or break a campaign. For B2B especially, the offer is everything. A free trial nearly always works better than just a demo, as it gets people in the door.

The other peice of the puzzle is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). If a customer spends £50 on their first purchase but, on average, goes on to spend £200 with you over the next year, your real return is much higher. If you know your LTV, you can afford to have a higher CPA and still be very profitable. This is absolutley fundamental for scaling.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've put the key recommendations into a table for you. This is the framework I would use to take the success of your one ad and build it into a proper, scalable advertising system.

As you can probably tell by now, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about understanding your audience, having a rigorous testing process, optimising your targeting, creating compelling ads, and fine-tuning your entire funnel. It's a full-time job to do it properly, and it requires a deep level of expertise built over many years and millions in ad spend.

That's where a professional consultancy like ours can make a huge difference. We live and breathe this stuff every single day. We can provide insights you might not have thought of and, more importantly, we can implement this entire strategic framework for you, ensuring that every pound you spend is working as hard as it possibly can to grow your business.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this kind of process to your ad account, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your current setup and give you some more specific, actionable advice. Let me know if that sounds interesting.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh