Solved: Scaling Ad Spend w/o Killing ROAS (Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's a common problem you're facing, probably one of the biggest challenges in paid advertising. Lots of people can get a campaign to work at a small budget, but as soon as they try to pour more money in, the whole thing falls apart and ROAS tanks. It's frustrating, and it feels like you're hitting an invisible wall.

The good news is, it's a solvable problem. But the solution isn't about finding a magic button to press to increase spend. The truth is, scaling isn't a spending strategy; it's a systems strategy. When you increase your budget, you're essentially putting your entire marketing and sales process under a microscope, and any small cracks become massive fissures. So, the key to scaling profitably is to fix those cracks *before* you ramp up the spend.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how we approach this. It boils down to reinforcing your foundations, understanding your customer economics on a much deeper level, and then building a sophisticated machine for testing and expansion. Let's get into it.

The Real Problem Isn't Your Spend, It's Your Foundation...

Before we even touch your ad campaigns, we have to talk about what happens *after* the click. This is where most scaling attempts fail. You can have the best ads in the world, but if you're sending traffic to a leaky bucket, pouring more water in won't fill it up. It'll just make a bigger mess on the floor.

I've seen this time and again with software clients. They get a decent CPA with a small budget, they get excited, double the spend, and suddenly their CPA triples. Why? Because their funnel wasn't strong enough to handle the colder, less-qualified traffic that comes with scaling. At a low budget, the platforms are brilliant at finding the most eager, low-hanging fruit. When you ask for more, the algorithm has to work harder, reaching people who are less problem-aware, more skeptical, and need more convincing.

Your website, your landing page, your offer – this is your conversion engine. A 1% improvement in your landing page conversion rate can have a bigger impact on your profitability than finding a new ad creative. If your current conversion rate is 2%, bumping it to 3% means you get 50% more customers from the exact same ad spend. That's massive. That's the difference between being able to scale and going bankrupt trying.

And then there's your offer. Is it truly compelling? Tbh, this is the number one reason campaigns fail. An offer that isn't valuable enough or doesn't have a clear audience that needs it. I see it all the time. For B2B, the classic "Request a Demo" button is one of the worst offenders. It's high friction and offers zero immediate value to the prospect. You're asking a busy decision-maker to give up 30 minutes of their time to be sold to. Why would they? When you're spending £100 a day, you might find a few people desperate enough to do it. When you're trying to spend £1,000 a day, you'll find that nobody else cares.

To scale, your offer needs to provide undeniable value, right now. For a SaaS business, this is a free trial or a freemium plan. Let them use the product and see the value for themselves. I remember one campaign we worked on for a B2B SaaS client in the recruitment space; their initial Cost Per User Acquisition was over £100. We helped them restructure their offer around a completely free trial. The result? We got their CPA down to £7. That's not a typo. A 14x improvement, just by fixing the offer. For a service business, it might be a free automated audit, a valuable PDF guide, or a short, sharp strategy session. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their bigger problems for money.

You Need to Rethink Your Customer, Not Just Your Audience...

Right, so you've tightened up your funnel and sharpened your offer. The next mistake people make when scaling is thinking in terms of broad demographics. "Our customer is a company in the finance sector with 50-200 employees." That's useless. It tells you nothing about their problems, their fears, or their ambitions. It leads to generic ads that get ignored.

To scale, you have to get obsessively specific. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a 'nightmare'. What is the urgent, expensive, career-threatening problem that keeps them awake at night? Your product is the solution to that specific nightmare. For one client, a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare wasn't a vague 'need for document management'. It was the visceral fear of a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and getting sued for malpractice. When you frame your advertising around that pain point, it cuts through the noise like a laser.

Understanding this 'nightmare' is how you find them online. They aren't just 'on LinkedIn'. They're listening to specific podcasts on their commute, reading niche industry newsletters, and following specific influencers. Your job is to map this out and use it to build your targeting. This is the work you must do before you spend another pound on ads.

Once you understand who you're targeting, you need to understand their economic value to your business. The real question isn't "How low can my CPA go?" but "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a great customer?" This is where understanding Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) becomes non-negotiable. If you don't know your LTV, you're flying blind. You're making decisions based on short-term ROAS when you should be making them based on long-term profitability.

Let's do the maths. A customer's LTV is their average monthly revenue multiplied by your gross margin, divided by your monthly churn rate. So, if a customer pays you £200 a month, your margin is 75%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month, the LTV is (£200 * 0.75) / 0.05 = £3,000. Now you know that each customer is worth £3,000 in gross margin to you. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,000 to acquire a customer and still have a very profitable business. Suddenly, a £100 lead doesn't seem so expensive, does it?

This single calculation changes everything. It allows you to bid more aggressively, out-compete others who are only focused on cheap clicks, and unlock audiences that were previously "unprofitable".

I'd say you need a more sophisticated campaign structure...

Armed with a solid foundation and a clear understanding of your customer economics, we can now look at your ad account. Scaling isn't about just increasing the budget on your one winning ad set. That's a recipe for disaster. At scale, you need a proper structure that manages the entire customer journey, from complete stranger to loyal customer. We typically structure this into three layers: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

Top of Funnel (ToFu): This is your prospecting layer. Its job is to find new people who have never heard of you. For a new account, you'd start with detailed targeting - interests, behaviours, etc., that align with your ICP's nightmare problem. Once you have enough data (and I mean a lot, hundreds or thousands of conversions), you can start testing lookalike audiences. The mistake I see most often is people creating a lookalike of "all website visitors." That's too broad. You need to prioritise. A lookalike of your highest value customers is gold dust. A lookalike of people who purchased is next best. Then add to cart, then initiated checkout, and so on. You're giving the algorithm a much better quality signal to work with.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu): This is for people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They might have visited your website, watched 50% of your video ad, or engaged with your Instagram page. The goal here is to nurture them, build trust, and move them further down the funnel. You might show them case studies, testimonials, or different angles on your product's benefits. These audiences are warmer and should have a lower CPA than your ToFu campaigns.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): These are your hottest prospects. They've added a product to their cart, visited the checkout page, or maybe even added their payment info but got distracted. This is your retargeting safety net. Your goal here is to get them over the finish line. You might show them an ad reminding them of what's in their cart, maybe with a small incentive like free shipping to close the deal. This should be your most profitable campaign with the highest ROAS.

When you scale, you need all three of these layers working in harmony, with seperate budgets for each. You'll spend the most on ToFu to keep feeding the machine with new people, while your MoFu and BoFu campaigns work to convert that interest into revenue. It's a system, not a single campaign.

You'll have to get serious about creative...

As you increase spend, you will burn through audiences and creative much faster. The ad that was a winner for three months will suddenly die after three weeks. This is called creative fatigue, and it's the silent killer of scaled campaigns. The solution is to build a creative testing engine. You need a constant stream of new ads—new images, new videos, new copy, new angles—always testing to find the next winner.

This goes back to your ICP's nightmare. For every problem, there are dozens of ways to talk about it. Your ads need to reflect that. You don't just sell "accounting software"; you sell "an end to stressful month-ends," "confidence in your cashflow," or "more time to focus on growth." Each of these is a different angle you can test.

We've had several SaaS clients see fantastic results with User Generated Content (UGC) style videos. These are simple, authentic-looking videos, often filmed on a phone, that feel more like a recommendation from a friend than a corporate ad. They build trust and can be incredibly effective, especially with skeptical audiences you encounter at scale. The key is to test relentlessly. Always have multiple creatives running in an ad set, give them a few days to perform, kill the losers, and replace them with new contenders. It's a continuous process of optimisation.

Think about a high-ticket product, like lab equipment. You don't just list the specs. You state the consequence. An ad shouldn't say, "Our spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error." It should say, "Publish results with unshakeable confidence, secure more funding, and attract top talent that other labs can only dream of." You're selling the outcome, not the feature. At scale, this distinction is everything.

We'll need to look at platform expansion...

Finally, there's a hard limit to how much you can scale on a single platform. Every platform has a finite pool of your ideal customers. Once you've reached most of them, your costs will inevitably rise as you're forced to show ads to less relevant people. The answer is to diversify.

If you've maxed out Meta (Facebook/Instagram), it's time to expand. This doesn't mean just copying and pasting your ads everywhere. Each platform has its own context and audience mindset.

• Google Search Ads: This is for capturing intent. People are actively searching for a solution to their problem. For B2B, this is often the next logical step. If you're selling accounting software, you want to be there when someone searches "best accounting software for small business." One software client we worked with acquired 3,543 users purely through Google Ads by focusing on these high-intent keywords.
• LinkedIn Ads: The go-to for B2B. The targeting is unmatched—you can target by job title, company size, industry, etc. It's more expensive, but the leads can be extremely high quality. For a software client, we achieved a $22 CPL for B2B decision-makers on LinkedIn, which was incredibly profitable for them given their LTV.
• TikTok/Pinterest/Apple Ads: Depending on your product and audience, these can be huge untapped markets. We helped an app grow to over 45k signups by building out a multi-channel strategy across Meta, TikTok, Apple, and Google. Each channel brought in a different type of user, which diversified their growth and made it more stable.

The key is to approach each new platform as a fresh start. Research the audience, adapt your creative, and start with a small test budget. Once you find what works, you can scale it up, adding another pillar to your growth engine.

Your Action Plan...

I know this is a lot to take in. Scaling profitably is a complex process with many moving parts. It requires a shift from just 'running ads' to building a comprehensive growth system. To make it more concrete, I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table. This is the step-by-step process we would take.

As you can see, this is a far cry from just sliding the budget bar to the right. It's a strategic, data-driven approach that builds a robust and predictable growth machine for your business. It takes expertise and a lot of work to implement correctly, but it's the only way to break through the scaling wall without your ROAS falling off a cliff.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. We've been through this process with dozens of clients, from eCommerce brands to B2B SaaS companies, and we've built the systems and developed the expertise to navigate these challenges efficiently. We can help you implement this entire process, from calculating your LTV and auditing your funnel to building out multi-channel campaigns that scale profitably.

If you'd like to discuss how this could apply specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your current campaigns and give you some tailored advice on your biggest opportunities for growth. Feel free to get in touch if that sounds helpful.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh