Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads for Newsletter Sign-Ups

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my thoughts on your scaling problem.

It’s a really common issue, and honestly, it’s one of the biggest myths in paid ads that you can just pump more money into a campaign and expect the same results, just bigger. The problem isn't just about the budget itself; it's about understanding how the Facebook algorithm actually works and what you're telling it to do. When you doubled your budget from $1 to $2, you probably sent the ad straight back into the 'learning phase', forcing it to find a new, more expensive audience. I'll walk you through why that happened and a much more reliable way to scale your sign-ups without just burning cash.

We'll need to look at why simply increasing your budget doesn't work...

Right, let's get into the nitty-gritty of it. The first thing to understand is something called the "learning phase". Every time you create a new ad set or make a significant change to an existing one—and yes, doubling the budget is a huge change percentage-wise—Facebook has to learn who to show your ad to. It tests your ad on different pockets of people within your target audience to see who responds best.

With a tiny budget of $1 a day, the algorithm might have gotten lucky. It might have found a small, cheap-as-chips group of people who were really responsive. It was delivering what you asked for within that tight constraint. But when you suddenly told it to spend $2, you forced it out of that comfortable little pocket. It had to go looking for more people to show the ad to, and the next-best group was naturally more expensive to reach. Think of it like fishing. On day one, you cast your line in a small pond and immediately caught a few fish. On day two, you decided you wanted twice as many fish, so you started casting into the wider, deeper lake. It's going to take more effort and better bait (a bigger budget) to find them, and there's no guarantee you'll be as lucky.

This is why we never recommend making massive percentage-based changes to a budget. If an ad set is working well and you want to scale it vertically (i.e., increase the budget), the rule of thumb is to increase it by no more than 20-30% every few days. This gives the algorithm time to adjust without completely resetting its learning and going haywire. But honestly, for your situation, vertical scaling isn't the answer yet. You first need to find what actually works consistently.

You'll need to forget about your cost per click...

This is probably the single biggest mindset shift you need to make. Your cost per click (CPC) is almost completely irrelevant. It's a vanity metric. I've worked on campaigns where we had a high CPC of £3-£4 but an incredible conversion rate, leading to a very profitable cost per result. I've also seen campaigns with a CPC of £0.20 that never got a single sale because they were attracting the wrong type of person.

You are trying to get newsletter sign-ups. So the only metric you should care about is your Cost Per Sign-up (also called Cost Per Acquisition or CPA). Who cares if it costs you $0.50 or $2.00 for a click, if that click leads to a sign-up at a price you're happy with?

The relationship between CPC and Cost Per Sign-up is all about your landing page conversion rate. Let's say your landing page converts 10% of visitors into newsletter subscribers.

• If your CPC is $0.50, your Cost Per Sign-up is $5.00 ($0.50 / 0.10).
• If your CPC is $1.00, your Cost Per Sign-up is $10.00 ($1.00 / 0.10).

You can see how a higher CPC directly impacts your real costs. But what if you could improve your landing page to convert at 20%?

• With a $1.00 CPC, your Cost Per Sign-up is now $5.00 ($1.00 / 0.20).

Suddenly that "expensive" click is just as profitable as the cheap one was on a worse landing page. Your focus should be on the final cost, not the intermediate steps. Use the calculator below to get a feel for how these numbers interact. It should make it clear why obsessing over CPC is a waste of time.

You probably should focus on conversion optimisation...

This brings me to the most critical piece of advice I can give you. Based on your post, it sounds like you might be running a 'Traffic' campaign. The objective of a traffic campaign is to get the cheapest possible clicks. When you select this objective, you are literally telling Facebook: "Find me the people in my audience who are most likely to click on links."

This sounds great in theory, but it's a trap. There's a huge segment of users on social media who are 'click-happy'. They click on everything out of curiosity but rarely ever follow through, make a purchase, or sign up for anything. You are paying Facebook to find you an audience of window shoppers. It's doing exactly what you asked, but it's not what you actually want.

You need to be running a 'Conversions' campaign. To do this, you need to have the Meta Pixel installed on your website and you need to set up a 'Custom Conversion' or 'Standard Event' that fires whenever someone successfully signs up for your newsletter (usually on the 'thank you' page). Once that's set up, you create a new campaign with the 'Conversions' objective and tell Facebook to optimise for that specific sign-up event.

Now, you're giving the algorithm a much more intelligent command: "Don't just find me people who click. Sift through my target audience and find the specific people who have a history of not just clicking, but also completing actions like filling out forms and signing up for things. Show my ads to them."

Your CPC will almost definitly go up. But your Cost Per Sign-up will plummet, because the quality of the traffic you're buying is infinitely better. This is the difference between advertising and just getting clicks.

I'd say you need a proper campaign structure to scale...

So, how do you actually scale? You don't scale an ad. You scale an ad *set* or a campaign that has proven itself to be a winner. And you can't find a winner until you do some proper testing. This is where 'horizontal scaling' comes in.

Instead of one ad set with a $2 budget, you should set up multiple ad sets, each with a small budget (say, $5-$10 a day, if you can manage it), and test different things against each other. Your goal isn't to spend a lot of money right away; it's to gather data on what works. This is what we do for all our clients, from small startups to large B2B companies. Testing is everything.

Here’s a simple structure you could start with:

Campaign: Newsletter Sign-ups (Conversions Objective)

• Ad Set 1: Audience - Interest A. Budget: $5/day. Target people interested in a topic directly related to your newsletter. E.g., if your newsletter is about gardening, target "Gardening" or specific magazines like "Gardeners' World".
• Ad Set 2: Audience - Interest B. Budget: $5/day. Target a different, but still relevant, interest. E.g., "Organic gardening" or "Permaculture".
• Ad Set 3: Audience - Competitors. Budget: $5/day. Target people who follow pages of similar newsletters or influencers in your niche.

Inside each of these ad sets, you should run at least 2-3 different ads (creatives). This could be a different image, a different headline, or different ad copy. This way, you're testing audiences *and* creatives at the same time.

After a few days (you need to let them run long enough to get some data), you'll look at the results. But you won't look at CPC. You'll look at your Cost Per Sign-up.

• Ad Set 1 might get a cost per sign-up of $7.
• Ad Set 2 might get a cost per sign-up of $4.
• Ad Set 3 might get no sign-ups at all.

Now you have real data. You'd turn off Ad Set 3. You'd keep Ad Set 2 running as your winner, and you might start slowly increasing its budget (the 20% rule!). You'd then create new ad sets to try and beat its performance. This methodical process of testing, finding winners, and then scaling those winners is the only reliable way to grow your ad spend and your results at the same time. It's more work than just bumping up a budget, but this is what separates sucessful advertisers from people who just lose money on Facebook.

Based on our experience running campaigns for everything from software to eCommerce, here is the general priority of audiences we test. You can use this as a roadmap.

So, what should you expect to pay?

This is the million-dollar question. The cost of a newsletter sign-up can vary wildly depending on your industry, your audience, and the country you're targeting. From the campaigns we've managed, for a general newsletter in developed, English-speaking countries (like the US, UK, Canada), you should expect a cost per sign-up somewhere in the range of £1.60 to £15.00 ($2 to $18 roughly).

Yes, that's a huge range. A highly niched-down newsletter on a topic like B2B financial software will be at the higher end, while a broad consumer newsletter about cooking could be at the lower end. I remember one campaign we worked on for an app where we were getting signups for under £2, which was a fantastic result. But we've also worked with B2B clients where a $22 lead was considered very profitable.

Your current $1/day budget probably isn't even enough for the algorithm to get you one sign-up per day if you're in that typical range. That's another reason the performance is so erratic. I'd recomend a minimum budget of at least $10-$20 per day when you're testing, just to give Facebook enough room to actually find converters and exit the learning phase.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

That was a lot of information, so here's a simple, actionable plan for what you should do next. This is the exact process we'd follow if we were taking over your account today.

Following these steps will put you miles ahead of most beginners. It moves you from just "boosting posts" to running a proper, strategic advertising campaign.

While this framework will get you started on the right path, the process of continuous testing, audience discovery, creative iteration, and scaling is a full-time job. It’s where deep expertise can make a huge difference, saving you thousands in wasted ad spend and months of frustrating trial and error. Getting from a few sign-ups a day to a few hundred requires a much more advanced strategy.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply our experience to your specific goals and potentially take over the whole process for you, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can go through your account together and give you some more tailored advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh