Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads CBO Campaign Correctly

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Sounds like you're in a good spot with your campaign doing well, but you've hit on the classic scaling dilemma – how to grow without wrecking what's already working. It's a question we see all the time, and honestly, it's where most advertisers get it wrong. They get a bit of success, get excited, and then throw more money at it too quickly, only to see their costs spiral and performance tank.

The good news is there's a much better way to think about it. Scaling isn't just a single action, like bumping up the budget. It's a process of expanding in a controlled way, both vertically (more spend) and horizontally (more audiences, more creatives). I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and walk you through how we approach this for our clients. It's less about following a rigid '20% rule' and more about understanding your numbers and building a solid foundation to grow from.

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

First things first, let's debunk this idea that there's a magic percentage or timeframe for scaling. The whole "increase by 20% every 3-4 days" is advice you see plastered all over the internet. It's not completely wrong, but it's dangerously incomplete and misses the bigger picture. It's like telling someone learning to drive to just "press the accelerator gently". It's a piece of the puzzle, but it won't get you to your destination safely or efficiently.

When you make a significant edit to a campaign or ad set—and a budget increase is a significant edit—you risk sending it back into the 'Learning Phase'. During this phase, Meta's algorithm is exploring and trying to figure out who the best people are to show your ad to in order to get the results you want. Perfomance is often volatile and costs are higher. Your campaign that was "going really well" was likely out of this phase and had found a stable pocket of performance. A sudden budget hike can knock it right back in, and there's no guarantee it'll find its groove again in the same way.

With a daily budget of $144, your audience size is probably not massive. If you keep pumping money into the same ad set, you'll also accelerate something called 'ad fatigue'. People in your audience will see the same ad over and over, stop paying attention, and your costs (CPM and CPC) will start to creep up while your click-through rate (CTR) drops. This is the "going back wards" you're worried about, and it's a very real risk if your only scaling strategy is to increase the budget.

This is why we need to seperate two types of scaling:

• Vertical Scaling: This is what you're doing now. Increasing the budget on a proven, winning ad set or campaign. It's simple, but has limits.
• Horizontal Scaling: This is where the real, sustainable growth comes from. It means finding *new* audiences, *new* creatives, and even expanding to *new* platforms. You're not just making your existing machine run faster; you're building more machines.

Before you can do either of these effectively, though, you need to know your numbers inside out. Without them, you're just guessing.

I'd say you need to understand your real scaling ceiling...

The single most important question in advertising isn't "What's my Cost Per Lead?" or "What's my ROAS?". The real question is: "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a customer and still be profitable?" If you don't know the answer to this, you can't make smart decisions about scaling.

The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This figure tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire time they do business with you. Once you know this, you can determine your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Let's break down the maths. It's simpler than it sounds:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much revenue does a customer bring in per month (or per year, just be consistent)?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

For example, if you have a subscription box that costs £50/month, your gross margin is 70%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month, your LTV would be (£50 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £700.

This means, on average, each customer you acquire is worth £700 in profit. A healthy business model often aims for an LTV to CAC ratio of at least 3:1. This means for a £700 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £233 to acquire that customer. Suddenly, worrying about a £15 Cost Per Purchase doesn't seem so bad, does it?

Use the calculator below to figure out your own numbers. This isn't just a nice-to-have; it's the foundation of your entire paid advertising strategy. It tells you how aggressive you can be and what success actually looks like.

You probably should focus on Horizontal Scaling first...

Okay, so you know your numbers. Now what? Before you start aggressively increasing the budget on your one winning CBO, you need more winners. This is horizontal scaling. Your goal is to find more audiences and more ad creatives that work, creating a stable of assets you can rely on. One sucessful CBO campaign is great, but it's a single point of failure. If it dies, you're back to square one. A portfolio of winning ad sets is a much more robust foundation for growth.

The way to do this is through systematic testing. For Meta ads, we usually structure this around the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Prospecting): Reaching new people who have never heard of you. This is where you test interests, behaviours, and lookalike audiences.
• MoFu (Consideration): Re-engaging people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a high-intent action yet (e.g., website visitors, video viewers).
• BoFu (Conversion): Retargeting people who are close to converting (e.g., added to cart, initiated checkout) and also targeting past customers for repeat business.

For your next step, instead of increasing your existing budget, I'd recomend taking a portion of that budget (or a fresh budget, even if it's small) and launching a new testing campaign. Your priority should be to find more winning ToFu audiences. When we take on a new account, this is our priority list for testing, from top to bottom:

1. Detailed Targeting: Start with interests and behaviours that are highly relevant to your ideal customer. Don't just target "Amazon" if you sell eCommerce software. Target interests like "Shopify", "WooCommerce", or followers of eCommerce-focused publications. Get specific.
2. Lookalike Audiences: Once you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally 1,000+), you can create Lookalike audiences. These are incredibly powerful. Prioritise them in this order: Lookalikes of your highest value customers, all customers, people who initiated checkout, people who added to cart, and so on. Start with a 1% Lookalike in your target countries and expand from there.
3. Broad Targeting: This means targeting with minimal restrictions (e.g., just age, gender, location). This can work incredibly well once your pixel has thousands of conversion events and Meta has a deep understanding of who your customer is. But don't start here with a new account.

The diagram below shows a simplified structure. You'd have seperate campaigns for each stage of the funnel. Inside your ToFu campaign, you would have multiple ad sets, each testing a different audience (e.g., one for Interest Group A, one for Interest Group B, one for a 1% Purchaser Lookalike). They all use the same winning ad creatives. This allows you to identify which audiences perform best, so you can scale them later.

Then, you'll need a solid Vertical Scaling strategy...

Once you have a few different ad sets or campaigns that are consistently hitting your target CPA (which you now know thanks to your LTV calculation), it's time to vertically scale them. This is where you carefully increase the budget.

So, how do you do it without causing chaos? Here are a couple of methods we use, which are far more reliable than a blanket "20% rule":

1. Rule-Based Scaling: Set clear rules for yourself. For example: "If an ad set's ROAS is above 3.5 for 3 consecutive days, I will increase its budget by 20%." This takes the emotion out of it and forces you to be data-driven. You're only scaling what is absolutly proven to be working over a period of time, not just after one good day.
2. Duplication Method: This is often safer than editing a live campaign. Once your CBO campaign has proven itself stable and profitable at $144/day, you simply duplicate it and set the budget on the new campaign to a higher level, for example $250/day. Then you turn off the original campaign. This creates a fresh campaign that doesn't have its learning disturbed by an edit. It's a clean start at a higher budget. This is a very common and effective technique for more aggressive scaling.

Your current campaign is a CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation), which means Facebook is automatically distributing your $144 budget across the ad sets within it to get the best results. This is great, but when you scale, you need to monitor it. Sometimes, CBO will favour one ad set heavily. If you add new testing ad sets into a proven CBO, the algorithm will likely keep spending on what's already working and not give your new ad sets a fair chance. That's why we always recomend a seperate campaign for testing new audiences.

The chart below illustrates what can happen when you make a sudden, large budget change to a stable campaign. You often see an initial spike in your cost per acquisition (CPA) as the algorithm re-learns and adjusts. While it might settle down again, it's a period of inefficiency and risk that can often be avoided with a more structured approach like duplication.

Your offer is probably the real bottleneck...

This is the part most people don't want to hear. You can have the best campaign structure and the most advanced scaling strategy in the world, but if your offer is weak, you will hit a wall. And you'll hit it fast.

Your campaign is working well now, which is fantastic. But it's likely working well on a relatively 'warm' or easy-to-convert segment of the audience. As you scale and your budget increases, Facebook will be forced to show your ads to colder, more sceptical audiences. These people don't know you, they don't trust you, and they need a much more compelling reason to click and convert.

An offer isn't just your product and its price. It's the entire value proposition. Why should someone buy from you, right now, instead of from anyone else, or instead of doing nothing at all? The number one reason we see campaigns fail to scale is that the offer doesn't solve a specific, urgent, and expensive problem for a well-defined audience.

Think about it. Are you selling "accounting software"? Or are you selling "peace of mind for freelance creatives who hate spreadsheets and are terrified of getting their taxes wrong"? The second one speaks to a real nightmare. I remember one B2B software client we worked with who was struggling to get signups. They were trying to sell demos for their platform. We shifted the strategy and offer to a completely free trial, no credit card required. Their cost per trial plummeted. For another client, a medical job matching platform, we managed to reduce their cost per user from a crippling £100 down to just £7 by overhauling their funnel and offer to be more user-centric.

Before you spend another dollar on scaling, take a hard look at your landing page and your offer. Is it irresistible? Does it remove all friction and risk for the user? Does it deliver a moment of instant value? If the answer is anything less than a resounding "yes", then your focus shouldn't be on the ads manager. It should be on fixing your offer. No amount of ad spend can fix a fundamental lack of demand or a high-friction conversion process.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've broken down the main recommendations into an actionable plan for you below. This is the exact process we'd follow to take a promising campaign like yours and turn it into a scalable growth engine.

As you can see, proper scaling is a methodical process. It requires patience, rigorous testing, and a deep understanding of your business's economics. Getting it right can unlock incredible growth, but getting it wrong can burn through your budget with nothing to show for it.

This is where having an experienced partner can make all the difference. We've been through this process with dozens of businesses, from eCommerce stores to B2B software companies. We can help you build the right structure, identify the highest-potential audiences, and ensure every pound you spend is an investment in profitable growth, not just a guess.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at your ad account and build out a tailored scaling plan for you. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your business this month.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh