Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads beyond $100 - Agency or Consultant?

Hi there,

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on your situation. Hitting a scaling ceiling like the one you described is incredibly common, especially with software products on Meta. It's frustrating when you have a good ROAS but just can't seem to push the spend up without everything falling apart. It doesn't necessarily mean your niche is too small, it more often points to a bottleneck somewhere in your strategy that needs a proper look.

You've basically saturated the small pool of people most likely to convert at your current offer and with your current ads. To scale, you need to either convince more people to convert or find new pools of people. It sounds simple, but getting it right is the tricky part. Let's break down where I'd start looking.

We'll need to look at your funnel and offer first...

Before we even touch the ad account, the funnel is the first place I'd start digging. You can have the best ads in the world, but if the funnel is leaky or the offer isn't compelling enough, you're sending traffic to a dead end. This is doubly true for software. You're not selling a t-shirt; you're asking a business or an individual to integrate a new tool into their workflow, which is a big ask.

My first question would be about your offer. You mentioned it's an original software product. How are you getting people in the door? Is it a demo request? A direct purchase? A free trial? I've run quite a few campaigns for B2B SaaS and what I see time and time again is that the offer is everything. One client I worked with was selling an accounting system and they couldn't understand why ads were failing. They were asking people to book a demo. The problem is, who's going to switch their entire accounting system based on a demo? The commitment is huge and the risk feels high.

A completely free, no-credit-card-required trial is almost always the best way to get people to give your software a go. It lowers the barrier to entry to almost zero. Get them using the product, show them its value through a solid onboarding process (emails, in-app guides), and then ask for the sale. If your customer lifetime value is high, you can afford to let them play around for 7, 14, or even 30 days. Increasing that customer lifetime value is another thing to think about. If each user brings in more money over time, you can afford to spend more to acquire them, which directly helps with scaling.

Then there's your landing page. When a user clicks your ad, what do they see? It needs to be a seamless transition. The page should have one goal and one goal only: get them to take that next step (e.g., start a free trial). This means persuasive, professional copy that speaks directly to their pain points and highlights your solution. We often use a dedicated copywriter with SaaS experience for our clients because it makes that much of a difference. Remove all distractions – no complex navigation, no links to your blog, just a clear headline, compelling benefits, and a massive call-to-action button.

I'd say you need a more sophisticated ad strategy...

You mentioned you've tested "loads of creative," and that's great. But scaling on Meta is often less about finding one magic creative and more about having a robust targeting and campaign structure. It sounds like you've found a small, profitable audience but can't expand out of it.

This is where audience prioritisation comes in. For a newish account, you'd start with detailed targeting (interests, behaviours). But once you have data, the real power comes from custom and lookalike audiences. I suspect you might not be leveraging these to their full potential. You want to build your campaigns around the different stages of the funnel:

• Top of Funnel (ToFu): This is for finding new people. Instead of just broad interests, you need to get specific. If you sell software for, say, ecommerce store owners, targeting "ecommerce" is too broad. You'll get customers, not owners. You'd want to target users who admin Facebook pages for retail, or who have interests in Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. Once you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally many more), you start building Lookalike audiences. Don't just make a lookalike of website visitors. You need to prioritise. A lookalike of actual purchasers or people who completed a trial is infinitely more valuable than a lookalike of people who just visited your homepage.


• Middle of Funnel (MoFu): This is for retargeting people who've shown some interest but haven't converted. Think website visitors, people who watched 50% of your video ad, etc. You show them different ads, maybe highlighting a specific feature or showing a customer testimonial.


• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): This is for closing the deal. You retarget people who abandoned the checkout or sign-up process. These are your hottest leads, and your ads to them should be very direct, perhaps with a reminder or a small incentive to finish signing up.

Structuring your campaigns this way, with separate budgets for each part of the funnel, allows you to control spend and scale the parts that are working. For creative, you might have exhausted static images, but have you tried user-generated content (UGC) style videos? We had several SaaS clients see fantastic results with simple, authentic-looking videos of someone using the software and talking about how it solved their problem. It feels less like an ad and more like a real recommendation.

You probably should look beyond Meta...

The other reality of scaling is that every platform has a ceiling. Once you've squeezed as much as you can from the Meta audience pool, it's time to find new ponds to fish in. Relying on a single channel is always risky anyway.

Given you have a software product, the most obvious next step is Google Search Ads. People on Meta are often in a discovery mindset, not a buying one. But people on Google are actively searching for a solution to a problem right now. If someone types in "software to do X" and your product does X, you want to be the first result they see. This is high-intent traffic and often converts at a much higher rate. I remember one client saw their user acquisition cost plummet once we layered in a proper Google Ads strategy alongside their Meta campaigns. We reduced their Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 to £7 for a Medical Job Matching SaaS.

If your software is B2B, then LinkedIn Ads are another powerful option. The targeting is unmatched for reaching specific job titles, industries, and company sizes. It's more expensive on a CPL basis, for sure, but the lead quality can be far superior. We ran a campaign for a B2B software and were getting leads from key decision makers for around $22 a pop, which was a brilliant return for them.

You'll need a clear plan of action...

This is a lot to take in, I know. The key is to be methodical. You don't have to do everything at once. You asked about an agency vs a consultant. With your budget, a consultant or a one-off audit is probably the right first step to get a clear diagnosis and a strategic plan. An agency might be overkill until you're ready to spend more significantly across multiple channels.

When you look for help, check their case studies. Have they actually scaled a software product before? Don't be swayed by flashy promises. We've taken on clients who have been burned by agencies that apply a generic ecommerce strategy to a SaaS product, and it just doesn't work. We've helped one software client generate over 45,000 signups because we understand the specific nuances of marketing software. The app growth campaign saw signups at under £2 cost per signup across Meta, Tiktok, Apple and Google Ads.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Breaking through a scaling plateau is about shifting from finding the lowest-hanging fruit to building a machine that can consistently cultivate an entire orchard. It requires a more sophisticated, multi-faceted approach than what got you to your first $100/day. This involves deep dives into your funnel analytics, constant audience testing, and a strategic view across different platforms.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can spot the bottlenecks much faster and implement proven strategies to fix them, saving you a lot of time and wasted ad spend. If you'd like, we offer a free initial consultation where we can go through your ad account and funnel together and provide some more specific, actionable advice. It's a good way to get a sense of the expertise needed to get to that next level of growth.

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh