Solved: Inconsistent Ad Orders After Budget Increase

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. It's a really common problem, and tbh, one that trips up a lot of advertisers. You've hit a scaling plateau, and you're right to question whether just chucking more money at it is the right move. The answer isn't as simple as 'yes' or 'no', it's about looking at the right data to understand what's really going on under the hood.

The core of the issue is that ad platforms don't scale linearly. You can't just expect a 50% budget increase to give you 50% more orders, especially once you've found a bit of a rhythm. What you're experiencing is the law of diminishing returns, and the key isn't to just push harder, but to get smarter about how you scale. Let's get into it.

You're asking the right question, but looking at the wrong metric...

Right, first things first. Let's bust a myth. The goal of scaling isn't just to get more orders. The goal is to get more orders profitably. By focusing only on the 50 orders per day, you're missing the most important part of the story: how much did it cost you to get them?

This is where metrics like Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – or in your case, Cost Per Order – and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) come in. These tell you about the efficiency of your spend.

-> CPA (Cost Per Order): Total Ad Spend / Number of Orders
-> ROAS: Total Revenue from Ads / Total Ad Spend

Let's imagine your old budget was £1,000/day. At 50 orders, your CPA was £20. If your new budget is £1,500/day and you're still getting 50 orders, your new CPA is now £30. You're paying 50% more for the exact same result. That's inefficient scaling, and it points to your first scenario being correct – you would have gotten those orders anyway with less money.

However, if your CPA has only gone up slightly, say to £22, while the budget increased by 50%, then it's a different story. This might suggest your second scenario is closer to the truth. Perhaps performance was about to dip due to market changes or creative fatigue, and the extra budget helped you maintain your position by reaching slightly more expensive, but still viable, parts of your audience.

The only way to know is to look at the numbers. ROAS is even better because it ties everything directly to revenue. If your ROAS was 4x at £1,000/day spend (£4,000 revenue) and it's now 2.6x at £1,500/day spend (still £4,000 revenue), then you know the budget increase has hurt your profitability.

I've dropped a simple ROAS calculator below. Plug in your old numbers and your new numbers to get a clear, objective picture of what's happened to your efficiency. This is the first step in diagnosing the problem. You need to stop guessing and start measuring what matters.

I'd say you need to diagnose the problem properly...

Okay, so once you have your efficiency numbers, you can start to diagnose what's actually happening. It's almost always one of a few common culprits when scaling goes wrong. Tbh, it's very rarely a good sign when you increase spend by 50% and see no uplift in volume. It's a huge red flag that something in your strategy is maxed out.

The flowchart below gives you a simple way to think about it. Walk through the steps with your own data. This will help you move from feeling uncertain to having a clear idea of where the problem lies. It's the same process we'd use to start an audit of a new client account.

Most of the time, for most accounts I've seen, the result will be the bottom path: a significant increase in CPA. This means you've hit a wall. In paid advertising, this wall is usually audience saturation or creative fatigue.

Audience Saturation: You've simply reached the most valuable, most likely-to-convert people in your targeted audience. The algorithm has done its job. When you give it more money, it's forced to go after the next best people, who are inherently less likely to buy. This drives up your costs. It might also increase your ad 'frequency' – showing the same ads to the same people more often, which just annoys them and stops working.

Creative Fatigue: Your audience has seen your ads too many times. They've become blind to them. The ads that worked brilliantly for weeks or months have lost their power. Pushing more budget behind tired creative is like flogging a dead horse. It's not going to get you anywhere.

You'll need a better way to scale than just increasing the budget...

This is where real performance marketing comes in. Scaling isn't a single action; it's a process of constant optimisation and expansion. Just turning up the budget dial is the lazy way, and it rarely works long-term. Here's what you should be doing instead.

1. Fix the Funnel First

Before you even think about spending more on ads, you have to make sure your website is converting as well as it possibly can. Every pound you spend on ads is wasted if your website leaks customers. A tiny improvement in your conversion rate can have a massive impact on your profitability, making your existing ad spend more effective and unlocking the ability to scale.

I remember one campaign we worked on for an e-commerce client selling cleaning products. By thoroughly optimising their Meta Ads campaigns, we helped them achieve a 633% return on ad spend, which contributed to a 190% increase in their total revenue. A key factor in successes like this is ensuring the website itself converts well; a higher conversion rate makes every ad click more valuable and unlocks the ability to scale. You've gotta look at your store and be brutally honest: does it look trustworthy? Is it easy to buy? Are the product photos top-notch? These things matter more than most people think.

2. Deepen Your Customer Value (LTV)

Here's a contrarian thought for you. Maybe the problem isn't that your ads are too expensive; maybe it's that your customers aren't valuable enough. The secret to out-spending your competition is to be able to afford to. And you can afford to if your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is higher than theirs.

Are you doing enough to get repeat purchases? Do you have an email list you market to? Are you upselling or cross-selling related products? A customer who buys from you once for £50 is one thing. A customer who buys from you four times a year for a total of £200 is a completely different asset.

When you know your LTV, your entire perspective on ad costs changes. A £30 CPA might seem high if the first order is only £50. But if you know that customer will be worth £200 over their lifetime, then paying £30 to acquire them is an absolute bargain. You need to know this number. It's probably the single most important metric for a growing e-commerce business. I've built another calculator for you below to figure it out.

You probably should restructure your campaigns for growth...

If your funnel is solid and you know your numbers, the next bottleneck is almost always the ad account structure itself. A structure that works for £100/day will break at £1,000/day. You can't just have one or two ad sets and hope for the best. You need a systematic approach that mirrors the customer journey.

I'd recomend a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel) structure. It's a classic for a reason. It lets you speak to people differently depending on how familiar they are with your brand, and it ensures you're constantly filling the pipeline with new potential customers while converting those who are ready to buy.

-> ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting): This is where you find new people who've never heard of you. Your goal here is to introduce them to your brand and products. You'd test broad audiences, interest-based targeting, and lookalike audiences based on your existing customers. The messaging is about the problem you solve or the desire you fulfil. You're not going for the hard sell just yet.

-> MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Consideration): This is your retargeting campaign for people who've shown some interest but haven't bought. They've visited your website, watched a video, or engaged with your social media. Here, you can show them testimonials, user-generated content, or highlight specific product benefits. You're building trust and overcoming objections.

-> BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Conversion): This is for people who are right on the edge of buying. They've added a product to their cart or initiated checkout. These ads need to be direct. Remind them what they left behind, maybe offer a small incentive like free shipping to get them over the line. This is where you close the deal.

By splitting your campaigns like this, you can allocate budget more intelligently. You can spend more on prospecting when you need new customers and more on retargeting when you need to convert the interest you've already generated. It also allows you to test audiences and creative methodically within each stage of the funnel, which is absolutly vital for scaling. A lot of people just lump all their audiences into one campaign, which gives the algorithm mixed signals and makes it impossible to know what's actually working. You definately need to get this sorted.

Here's a simplified view of what that structure might look like in your ad account.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this up, you're at a critical point. Continuing to push budget into a strategy that has hit its limit will just burn cash. You need to take a step back and shift from a tactic of 'spending more' to a strategy of 'building a scalable system'. It requires more work up front, but it's the only way to achieve sustainable growth without destroying your profit margins. From my experience with numerous e-commerce clients, from subscription boxes to apparel, those who succeed are the ones who are methodical about this process. They test, they measure, and they optimise every part of the machine.

This might seem like a lot to take on, and honestly, it is. Managing this kind of multi-layered strategy, constantly analysing data, and producing a steady stream of new ad creative is a full-time job. It’s why businesses often bring in specialists. An experienced eye can spot the bottlenecks in your funnel or account structure much faster and implement proven systems for growth.

If you'd like to go over your specific account and numbers, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your campaigns together and give you some more tailored, actionable advice on how to break through this plateau and get back to profitable growth.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh