Solved: Meta Ads - Budget vs. New Ad Justification

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your Meta ads question. It's a common one, but the way most people think about scaling budget and adding creatives is, frankly, a bit backwards. You're asking about a rule of thumb, but the real answer is to throw the rulebook out and focus on what the data is actually telling you. Let's get into it.

The Real Reason Your Scaling Strategy is Flawed...

Alright, let's tackle your main question head-on. The idea of adding one new ad for every $50 increase in budget is a myth. It sounds logical, like you're giving the algorithm more to 'play' with, but that's not how it works, especially not with Advantage+ campaigns (ASC).

Think about it from Meta's perspective. The algorithm's job is to find the cheapest conversions possible with the assets you give it. When you have a few winning ads, it'll pour the budget into those. Adding more ads just for the sake of it doesn't help; it just dilutes the learning phase and can actually confuse the algorithm. You're essentially asking it to spread a small amount of learning across more variables, which slows everything down.

The trigger for adding a new ad should never be your budget. It should be performance data. You add new creative when:

• Creative Fatigue Sets In: You'll see this in your metrics. Frequency will creep up, CTR (Click-Through Rate) will drop, and your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) will start to rise. The ad has saturated its effective audience and is no longer fresh. THIS is when you need something new.
• You Have a New Angle to Test: Your goal shouldn't be to just have 'more ads'. Your goal should be to find 'more winning ads'. This comes from methodical testing of different hooks, angles, and formats.
• You're NOT hitting your goals: If none of your current ads are working, you don't add more to the pile. You pause the losers and start a fresh test with completely new ideas. Throwing more money at failing ads is the fastest way to burn through your budget.

Here's a simple way to visualise the wrong approach versus the right one. Most people follow the path on the left. You need to follow the path on the right.

So before we even talk about specific ad tactics, we need to take a step back. The number of ads you're running is a minor detail. The real question is, are you running the *right* ads to the *right* people with the *right* offer? Because if any of those peices are missing, it doesn't matter if you have 3 ads or 30.

We need to look at your offer first, it's probably not good enough...

This is the number one reason I see campaigns fail, and it has nothing to do with Meta's algorithm. The offer is weak. I've seen founders spend ages building the 'perfect' product, only to find no one actually wants it. A lack of demand is a campaign killer.

A great offer isn't just about your product. It's about how you frame it. A successful offer does three things incredibly well:

1. It targets a specific audience. You can't be everything to everyone. Your ads and your offer need to feel like they are speaking directly to one person's specific problem. When you try to appeal to everybody, you end up appealing to nobody. This is where most people go wrong. They think a broader audience means more potential sales, but it just means your message becomes generic and ignorable.
2. It identifies an urgent, expensive problem. People don't buy features; they buy solutions to pain. They buy a way out of a 'nightmare'. You don't just sell "accounting software"; you sell "an end to the fear of a surprise tax audit". You don't sell a "project management tool"; you sell "an escape from the chaos of missed deadlines and stressed-out teams". This emotional connection is what makes someone stop scrolling and actually click.
3. It presents a clear, tangible solution. Your offer needs to be easy to understand and feel low-risk. For a service, this could mean productising it, like a "1-Day Website Audit" instead of vague "consulting". For SaaS, this is almost always a free trial with no credit card required. Let them experience the value first. The "Request a Demo" button is a conversion killer. It's high-friction and screams "I'm about to get a hard sell". You need to give value *before* you ask for their time or money. We offer a free ad account audit for this very reason; it solves a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the bigger one.

If your offer isn't hitting these three points, then tinkering with your ad count is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. You need to fix the foundations first.

I'd say you need to understand your customer's nightmare...

This leads to the next critical peice of the puzzle: your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Forget the rubbish you've been told about demographics. "Females aged 25-40 who like yoga" is useless. "Companies with 50-100 employees in the tech sector" tells you absolutely nothing important.

Your true ICP is defined by their pain. It's a problem state, not a person. You need to become an obsessive expert on their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare.

• Your client isn't a "Marketing Manager". She's a leader who's terrified of reporting poor results to her CEO at the end of the quarter, fearing her budget will be cut.
• Your customer isn't a "homeowner". He's a dad who lies awake at night worried that the strange noise in the boiler will finally give up in the middle of a freezing winter week.

When you understand the nightmare, you know exactly what to say in your ads. You also know where to find these people. What podcasts do they listen to? What newsletters do they *actually* read? What software do they already pay for? What influencers do they follow? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. Without it, you're just guessing. You have no business spending a single pound on ads until you've done this work.

You probably should focus on what the numbers really mean...

So many advertisers get obsessed with the wrong metrics. They chase a low Cost Per Click (CPC) or a high Click-Through Rate (CTR). These are vanity metrics. The real question isn't "How low can my CPA go?" but rather, "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a valuable customer?"

To answer that, you need to know your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the single most important number for any business that relies on recurring revenue or repeat purchases. Once you know this, you can advertise with confidence, knowing exactly how much you can spend to get a new customer and still be profitable.

The calculation is pretty simple:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Customer * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say you run a subscription box service. The box is £50 a month, your gross margin is 70%, and you lose about 5% of your customers each month (churn).

LTV = (£50 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £35 / 0.05 = £700

Each customer you acquire is worth £700 in gross margin over their lifetime. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £233 to acquire a new customer (£700 / 3). Suddenly, a £100 CPA on Meta doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like a great deal.

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. It frees you from the stress of daily CPA fluctuations and lets you focus on long-term profitable growth. Use the calculator below to figure out your own numbers.

You'll need a proper testing structure...

Right, so now that we've established the foundations – a strong offer, a deep understanding of your customer's pain, and your core financial metrics – we can talk about the actual ads. Your approach of just 'adding ads' lacks structure. What you need is a methodical testing framework.

Even with ASC, where Meta controls the audience, the creative is your only real lever. You need to test different *angles* or *hypotheses* based on your ICP's nightmares. Don't just test a blue button vs. a red button. Test entirely different reasons *why* someone should buy.

For example, if you're selling an eCommerce product like a high-end coffee bean subscription:

• Angle 1 (The Connoisseur): Focus on the unique tasting notes, the origin story, the artisanal roasting process. This speaks to the customer who sees coffee as a hobby.
• Angle 2 (The Convenience Seeker): Focus on "never run out of amazing coffee again," the ease of delivery, the time saved. This speaks to the busy professional who just wants a great cup without the fuss.
• Angle 3 (The Ethical Buyer): Focus on the fair trade sourcing, the sustainable packaging, supporting small farms. This speaks to the customer who buys based on their values.

These are three distinct hypotheses. You should structure your campaigns to test these angles against each other. A simple way to think about it is this:

With ASC, you'd load these different creative angles into the one campaign. The algorithm will figure out which angle and which specific ad resonates best. You then monitor the results. If the "Connoisseur" angle is getting you sales at a £20 CPA and the "Convenience" angle is at £80 CPA, you know where to focus. You pause the losing ads and double down on the winning angle, creating more variations of *that* message.

This is how you scale intelligently. Not by adding ads when your budget hits a magic number, but by systematically finding winning messages and then creating more of what works. I remember one SaaS client where we reduced their CPA from £100 down to just £7 simply by finding the right message angle that spoke to their customer's biggest frustration, something their previous ads had completely missed.

Finally, you'll want to pay Meta to find buyers, not viewers...

This might sound obvious, but it's a trap many fall into. There's an uncomfortable truth about certain campaign objectives on Meta. If you choose "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are literally paying the algorithm to find the cheapest people to show your ad to. And who are the cheapest people? They're the ones who never click, never engage, and definately never buy anything. Their attention is cheap because no other advertiser wants it.

You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It's madness.

The best brand awareness you can get is a happy customer. That only comes from a conversion. Luckily, you're using an ASC campaign, which is correctly optimised for sales. But the principle is vital to understand. Always, always optimise for the action you actually want. If you want leads, optimise for leads. If you want purchases, optimise for purchases. Let the algorithm do the heavy lifting of finding people who are likely to perform that specific, valuable action.

What can you expect in terms of costs? Well, it varies massively by industry, country, and the quality of your ads and landing page. But based on the campaigns we've run, here are some very rough ballpark figures to give you an idea.

As you can see, acquiring an actual sale is much more expensive than a simple lead or signup. This is why knowing your LTV is so important – it justifies the higher upfront cost of finding real customers. For one eCommerce client selling subscription boxes, we hit a 1000% Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Their CPA was within these ranges, but because their LTV was so high, it was incredibly profitable.

Tying it all together, I've detailed my main recommendations for you below. This is the approach you should be taking instead of the "add an ad per $50" rule.

As you can probably tell, getting paid ads right involves a lot more than just tweaking settings inside Ads Manager. It's about understanding the deep foundations of marketing: the offer, the customer, the financials, and the message. It's not easy, and it takes a lot of experience to diagnose problems quickly and implement strategies that actually work.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. Instead of spending months and thousands of dollars on trial and error, you can tap into the experience of someone who has managed millions in ad spend and seen what succeeds and what fails across dozens of industries.

If you'd like to go through your account and strategy in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation. We can take a look at your campaigns together, and I can give you some more specific, actionable advice based on what I see.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh