Solved: Scale Facebook Ads With Limited Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. It's a good problem to have, by the way – finding winning adsets is the hardest part, and you've already done that. Scaling is the next logical step, but you're right to be cautious. Just cranking up the spend can wreck a perfectly good adset.

The short answer is you need a structured approach that combines carefully increasing the budget on your current winners with a much more aggressive strategy of finding *new* winners. Let's get into how that actually works.

You'll need to understand why just increasing the budget can break things...

Before we talk about what to do, it's worth understanding *why* your gut feeling is correct. When you have an adset on a low budget that's performing well, the Facebook algorithm has found a small, very specific pocket of people within your target audience who are converting cheaply. It's in a happy place.

When you suddenly double or triple the budget, you force it out of that comfort zone. The algorithm panics a bit and has to rapidly find a much larger group of people to spend that new money on. This often means it goes after lower-quality users, your costs (CPA) shoot up, and the adset leaves the 'learning phase' again, often never recovering its original performance. It's a classic mistake, and probably the most common way people kill their own success.

So, the entire game of scaling is about giving the algorithm more money without triggering that panic response. There are two ways to do this: slowly and safely on what you have (Vertical Scaling), or quickly and aggressively on new things (Horizontal Scaling). You need to do both.

I'd say you should start with "Vertical Scaling", but do it carefully...

This is the one you're probably thinking about: just increasing the budget on your five existing adsets. It’s the simplest method, but it has a low ceiling and you have to be patient.

The general rule of thumb is to increase the budget by no more than 20% every 48-72 hours. This gives the algorithm enough time to adjust to the new spend level without getting reset. If you have an adset at £10/day, you'd bump it to £12. Wait two or three days. If performance holds, bump it to £14.50, and so on. It's slow, and it's tedious, but it's the safest way to squeeze more out of a proven adset without breaking it.

This is a decent first step to get a few more sales, but it's not how you're going to 10x your business. For that, you need to think wider.

You probably should focus on "Horizontal Scaling" for real growth...

This is where the real money is made. Instead of trying to force more spend through your five existing adsets, you create *more* adsets. You're scaling horizontally, not vertically. The goal is to find another 5, 10, or 20 winning adsets that you can run alongside your current ones. This is the only sustainable way to significantly increase your daily purchases.

The safest way to do this is to set up a new, seperate campaign specifically for testing. This way, your original campaign with its proven winners keeps ticking along, bringing in consistent sales, completely untouched and safe. Your new campaign is your laboratory.

What do you test in this new campaign? There are two main levers: audiences and creatives.

1. Audience Expansion
Your current adsets are targeting specific interests or demographics. The first step is to simply duplicate your best-performing adset and just change one thing: the audience. If you're selling, say, eco-friendly cleaning products, and your winning adset targets people interested in "Sustainable living", your new test adsets might target:

• → A different, but related interest, like "Zero waste".
• → A lookalike audience of your past purchasers (this is usually a goldmine).
• → A lookalike audience of people who have added to cart.
• → A broader audience with no interest targeting at all, once your pixel has enough data.

The idea is to methodically work your way through audiences that are most likely to perform, based on how close they are to the final conversion action (a purchase). For one eCommerce client selling cleaning products, we grew their revenue by 190% almost entirely by systematically testing lookalikes of purchasers, then initiated checkouts, then add to carts. It's a very reliable process.

2. Creative Expansion
The other lever is your ad creative. You have ads that are clearly working. But it’s almost certain they won't work forever (ad fatigue is real), and they might not work for all audiences. The creative that resonates with a "Sustainable living" audience might be different from what works for a "Busy mums" audience.

So, in your testing campaign, you should also be constantly testing new creative ideas. Take your best-performing ad and try:

• → A different headline.
• → A different main image or video.
• → A completely different angle. If your current ad talks about how effective your product is, a new one could talk about how much time it saves.
• → A different format. If you're using images, test a short user-generated style video. We've seen UGC videos work wonders for SaaS clients, and it's no different for eCom.

The ideal scenario is finding a new winning creative *and* a new winning audience at the same time. That’s how you really start to scale things up.

We'll need to look at switching to CBO...

Right now, I'm guessing you're using Adset Budget Optimization (ABO), where you set a specific daily budget for each of your 5 adsets. This is perfect for testing and for the early stages.

However, once you start scaling and have lots of adsets running, managing them all with individual budgets becomes a nightmare. This is where Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) comes in. With CBO, you set one single budget at the campaign level, and you let Facebook's algorithm decide how to spend it across all the adsets within that campaign. It will automatically push more budget towards the adsets that are performing the best on any given day, and pull back from the ones that are struggling.

It's a more hands-off approach that's built for scale. My advice is to keep your original, proven campaign on ABO to keep it stable. But your new, big testing campaign? Run that on CBO. Put 5-10 new audiences in there as adsets, give the campaign a healthy budget, and let Facebook do the hard work of finding the winners for you. After a few days, you can turn off the adsets that are clearly losing, and the CBO will reallocate that spend to the survivors.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This all might sound a bit complex, but it's a very repeatable process. The goal is to move from a fragile setup with a few good adsets to a robust, antifragile system where you are constantly finding and scaling new winners while your core performers are protected. Here’s how I would structure things if I were in your shoes right now.

Following a structure like this is how you scale without the anxiety. Your current revenue stream is protected, and you have a dedicated, systematic process for finding new revenue streams. Over time, you'll build a much more resilient and profitable ad account.

I know this is a lot to take in. Moving from a few working adsets to a full-blown scaling system involves a lot of moving parts, and getting the structure or testing methodology wrong can be an expensive mistake. The difference between guessing which audiences to test next and having a data-driven process can be thousands of pounds in wasted ad spend.

If you'd like a second pair of expert eyes on your account to map this out more specifically for your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session. We can look at your current campaigns together and build a concrete scaling plan for you. It's often helpful just to talk it through with someone who does this all day, every day.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh