Solved: Instagram Ad Budget Scaling for Increased Sales?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Thank you for your enquiry, it's a great one to have. Seeing an ad work so well that you're thinking about scaling is a fantastic position to be in, so well done on finding something that resonates.

It’s a very common thought process to just want to pump more money into what’s working. Simple maths, right? More money in should mean more money out. Unfortunately, as you suspect, it’s rarely that straightforward with platforms like Meta (Instagram/Facebook). In fact, just increasing the budget on a successful ad is often the quickest way to break it and see your returns plummet. It’s a bit of a myth that scaling is a linear game.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance on how a professional would approach this situation. Instead of just gambling with a bigger budget, we need to think more like a strategist, understand what’s happening under the hood, and build a proper system for growth. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at why simply increasing the budget is a trap...

First, let's get this major misconception out of the way. When you give an ad campaign a small budget, like your $10 a day, Meta's algorithm is pretty good at finding the lowest-hanging fruit. It identifies the people within your target audience who are most likely to convert – the keenest buyers, the ones who are already pretty much sold. You’re essentially paying to reach the best of the best.

When you suddenly increase that budget, say to $50 or $100 a day, you're telling the algorithm "find me more people, and find them fast". The algorithm, doing exactly what you asked, will start to expand its reach. It has to. It will go beyond that core group of super-keen buyers and start showing your ad to people who are less interested, more on the fence, or maybe not interested at all. This is what we call audience saturation.

The result? Your costs go up. Your Cost Per Click (CPC) might rise, and more importantly, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – the cost to get one sale – will almost certainly increase. Your brilliant 6x to 10x Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) could quickly shrink to 3x, 2x, or even become unprofitable. I've seen it happen countless times. A campaign that's a star performer on a small budget suddenly starts burning cash when the budget is cranked up without a proper plan.

Think of it like this: you've found a small, rich gold vein. You're happily chipping away and getting pure gold. If you just decide to bring in dynamite (a massive budget increase) to get more gold faster, you're not going to get more pure gold. You're going to get a lot of rock, dirt, and dust, with a little bit of gold mixed in. Your 'purity' (your ROAS) drops dramatically. The goal isn't to use dynamite; it's to find other rich veins to mine.

This is a particularly uncomfortable truth about so-called 'awareness' campaigns. If you were to run a campaign just for reach, Meta would actively find you the cheapest people to show ads to – the ones who never click, engage, or buy. Because their attention isn't in demand. While you're optimising for sales, which is correct, a sudden large budget increase pushes the algorithm in a similar direction: finding quantity over the quality you're currently enjoying.

I'd say you need to become obsessed with your metrics...

Before you even think about spending an extra dollar, you need to have a rock-solid understanding of your current performance. This isn't about just looking at the sales number at the end of the day. This is about the diagnostic metrics that tell you the health of your campaign. If you start to scale, these are your early warning signals.

Here’s what I’d be watching like a hawk:

-> Click-Through Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who see your ad and actually click on it. A high CTR means your ad creative and copy are highly relevant to the audience seeing it. As you scale, if you see this number start to drop, it's a huge red flag. It's the first sign that you're reaching a less interested audience.

-> Cost Per Click (CPC): How much you're paying for each click. This is often tied to your CTR. As CTR drops, CPC often rises because the platform has to show the ad to more people to get that one click. If your CPC starts creeping up, your profitability is taking a direct hit.

-> Conversion Rate (CVR): This is the percentage of people who click your ad and then go on to make a purchase on your website. This is a measure of your website's effectiveness and your traffic quality. If you scale your budget and your CVR drops, it means you're now paying for clicks from people who have no intention of buying. Your targetting is probably off, or your ad is making promises your landing page can't keep.

-> Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): This is your headline figure. (Total Revenue from Ad / Total Ad Spend). You’re getting a fantastic 6x-10x ROAS right now. The goal of scaling isn't just to make more sales, it's to make more sales while maintaining a profitable ROAS. You need to decide what your minimum acceptable ROAS is. Is it 3x? 4x? Knowing this number tells you when to pull back.

To show you what I mean, here’s how things can go wrong. Let’s imagine your current stats:

This is a dramatisation, of course, but it illustrates the principle of diminishin returns. You have to scale intelligently, not just aggressively. This brings me to how you should actually be structuring things.

You probably should be building a proper advertising funnel...

A single ad is not a strategy. It's a tactic that happens to be working right now. To scale sustainably, you need to build a machine, a system. In paid ads, we call this the funnel. It's usually broken down into three stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

Your current ad is a ToFu ad. It's targeting cold audiences – people who might not know you exist – and turning them into customers. That's great! But you're missing the other two stages, which are often the most profitable.

Here’s a better structure for your account:

1. ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting): This is where you find NEW people. Your current ad lives here. The goal of this campaign should be to constantly test new audiences to find more pockets of customers. You don't just scale one ad set; you find more winning ad sets and run them alongside each other. You're looking for more of those rich gold veins.

2. MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Engagement): This is for people who have shown some interest but haven't made a high-intent action yet. This is your retargeting campaign for people who have visited your website, watched a percentage of your video ads, or engaged with your Instagram/Facebook page. You show them different ads, maybe with testimonials, showing different product uses, or telling your brand story. You're warming them up.

3. BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Conversion): This is for the hottest audience. People who have added a product to their cart but not puchased, or who have initiated checkout but abandoned. These people are on the verge of buying. You hit them with very direct ads: "Still thinking about it?", "Forgot something?", or maybe even a small discount code to get them over the line. This is often the highest ROAS campaign in any account.

By splitting your budget across these three campaigns, you create a complete customer journey. You're not just relying on a single ad to do all the work. You're systematically moving people from being unaware of you, to considering you, to buying from you. I see so many accounts that are just hammering cold traffic and completely ignoreing the goldmine of their own website visitors and cart abandoners.

You'll need to hunt for your next winning audience...

Okay, so how do you find those new "gold veins" in your ToFu campaign? You test. Systematically.

Instead of increasing the budget on your existing ad set, you should duplicate it. This preserves the 'learning' the original ad set has. Then, in the duplicated versions, you test ONE variable at a time. The most important variable at this stage is the audience.

Here’s the order of priority for audiences I would test for an eComerce business like yours:

#1 Detailed Targeting (Interests/Behaviours): This is your bread and butter to start. But you have to be smart. If you sell, say, handmade leather bags, don't just target "Fashion". That's way too broad. Think about your Ideal Customer. What magazines do they read (Vogue, Harper's Bazaar)? What other brands do they buy (Coach, Kate Spade, but also maybe smaller Etsy creators)? What influencers do they follow? Get really specific. Create 3-5 different ad sets, each with a tightly themed group of interests, and run them against each other at a small budget ($5-$10/day each). Let them run for 3-5 days and see which one performs. Cut the losers, and give a small budget increase (say, 20%) to the winners.

#2 Lookalike Audiences (LALs): This is where Meta's algorithm really shines, but you need data first. Once you have at least 100-200 purchases tracked by your Meta Pixel, you can create a Custom Audience of your buyers. Then, you can ask Meta to create a Lookalike Audience – an audience of millions of people who share the same characteristics as your existing customers. This is incredibly powerful. You can create Lookalikes from various data sources, in order of value:

• -> Lookalike of your previous customers (highest value)
• -> Lookalike of people who Initiated Checkout
• -> Lookalike of people who Added to Cart
• -> Lookalike of all your Website Visitors

Testing a 1% Lookalike of your purchasers is one of the first things I would do once you have the data. I remember one client we worked on, a women's apparel brand, where implementing a proper testing structure and rolling out Lookalike audiences took their ROAS to over 691%. It works.

The key here is that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. You're diversifying your audience portfolio. Some will work, some won't. But you're building a resilient system that doesn't depend on one single ad set to survive.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Scaling is a process of disciplined testing and optimisation, not just flicking a switch. It requires a bit more work, but it's how you build a sustainable and profitable business through paid ads, rather than just having a lucky streak. Here is a blueprint of the actions I would take if I were in your shoes.

As you can probably tell, scaling properly is a bit more involved than just adjusting a budget slider. It's a systematic process that separates the businesses that get lucky for a month from the ones that build predictable, long-term revenue streams from their advertising.

It's about understanding the 'why' behind the numbers, building a resilient structure, and being disciplined in your testing. It can be a lot to manage, especially when you're also running the rest of your business. This is where getting professional help can make a huge difference. An expert can implement these structures far more quickly, interpret the data correctly, and avoid the costly mistakes that can come from learning as you go.

If you'd like to have a more detailed chat where we could look at your actual ad account together and map out a specific growth plan for you, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session. It might be helpful to have a second pair of expert eyes on it. Just let me know.

Either way, you're in a great spot. Be smart, be patient, and build the system. Don't just chase the quick win.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh