Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads in the UK (A Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look over your situation with scaling your Facebook ads in the UK. It's a really common problem to hit a wall where what worked initially just stops delivering as you try to grow. You see some promise, you up the budget, and then your cost per acquisition skyrockets and the return on ad spend plummets. It's frustrating and feels like you're just throwing money away.

The good news is, it's almost always a solvable issue. The bad news is that the solution isn't a quick fix or a secret 'hack'. Scaling effectively isn't about finding a magic audience or just cranking up the spend. It's a fundamental shift in how you approach your entire advertising strategy. It requires you to get brutally honest about who your customer is, what you're offering them, and how you're measuring success.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience scaling campaigns for a lot of different businesses. Forget about quick tips for a moment; we need to rebuild your foundations first. Let's get into it.

The Scaling Myth: Why Just 'Increasing the Budget' is a Guaranteed Fail

Let's get one thing straight right away. The idea that you can take a campaign that's working at £50 a day, change the budget to £500 a day, and expect 10x the results is a complete fantasy. It will never, ever work. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or incompetent.

Why? You have to understand how the Meta algorithm works. When you give it a small budget, it goes after the low-hanging fruit. It finds the people within your target audience who are *most likely* to convert, the easiest to reach, the cheapest to persuade. These are the people who were probably already close to buying anyway. As you force the algorithm to spend more money, it has to venture further afield. It has to start showing your ads to people who are less interested, more skeptical, and more expensive to convince. This is called audience saturation.

Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will inevitably rise. This is quite normal for software campaigns and ecommerce alike. Your spend will plateau at some point where you can't scale further without a much lower ROAS or higher CPA. This happens because you are only selling one product and there will be a limited number of people likely to convert for this product in any given audience. So as you scale, your costs will naturally increase.

The mistake people make is they see this rising CPA, panic, and either turn the campaign off or slash the budget back down, concluding that "Facebook ads don't scale". That's the wrong conclusion. The real problem isn't the budget; it's that your strategy wasn't built for scale in the first place. Your targeting, your messaging, and your offer were only good enough for the easy-to-convert segment of your audience. To scale, you need a strategy that can profitably convert the *other 95%* of the market.

This all goes to say: The challenge isn't to fight the algorithm. The challenge is to build a machine that's so efficient at turning strangers into customers that you can afford the higher costs that come with reaching a broader audience. And that starts with truly understanding who you're talking to.

I'd say your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

This is probably the single biggest reason your campaigns aren't scaling. I'd be willing to bet your targeting looks something like this: "Men, 25-45, living in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, interested in 'Business' or 'Technology'". Am I close?

Forget that. That sterile, demographic-based profile tells you absolutely nothing of value and leads to the generic, wallpaper ads that everyone ignores. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their *pain*. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a *problem state*. Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of missing her quarterly target and having to explain it to the board. Your eCommerce founder client isn't just an 'entrepreneur'; he's awake at 3 AM worried that his rising ad costs will make his entire business unprofitable. These are the nightmares that keep them up at night. Your product or service needs to be the aspirin for that headache.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can get specific with targeting. Where do these people go to solve their problems? What do they read? Who do they listen to?

• -> Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'The Diary of a CEO' or 'Secret Leaders'.
• -> Find the industry newsletters they actually open, like Benedict Evans's tech newsletter or a specific trade publication.
• -> What software do they already pay for? HubSpot, Xero, Salesforce? These can all be targeted as interests.
• -> Are they members of specific Facebook groups like 'SaaS Growth Hacks' or 'eCommerce Entrepreneurs UK'?
• -> Who do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? People like Steven Bartlett or a key opinion leader in their specific niche?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You stop targeting 'Business' and start targeting 'followers of Alex Hormozi', 'users of Shopify Plus', and 'people who read the Financial Times'. The audience is smaller, yes, but it's a thousand times more relevant. Do this work first, or you have no business spending another pound on ads. This is the bedrock of a scalable campaign.

You probably should calculate what you can *really* afford to pay

The next part of the puzzle is shifting your mindset from cost to value. Most advertisers are obsessed with a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Purchase (CPA). They're constantly asking, "How low can my CPA go?". This is the wrong question. It leads you to optimise for cheap clicks and low-quality leads that never turn into real money.

The real question is, "How high a CPA can I *afford* to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).

Before you can scale, you need to know this number cold. Here's the basic maths:

Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Don't forget to factor in cost of goods/service delivery).
Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple but powerful:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's run an example. Say you run a subscription box service in the UK.

• -> ARPA = £30/month
• -> Gross Margin = 60% (after box contents, packaging, shipping)
• -> Monthly Churn = 5% (you lose 5 out of every 100 subscribers each month)

LTV = (£30 * 0.60) / 0.05
LTV = £18 / 0.05 = £360

In this example, each customer is worth £360 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £120 (£360 / 3) to acquire a single customer and still have a very profitable business.

Suddenly, that £60 CPA on Facebook that you were panicking about doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It allows you to confidently bid higher than your competitors, win the best ad placements, and attract the best customers, all while they are stuck trying to get a £10 CPA from a low-quality audience.

You'll need a message they can't ignore

Right, so you know who you're targeting based on their nightmare problem, and you know what you can afford to pay to reach them. Now, what do you actually say to them?

As you scale and move from targeting warm audiences to colder audiences who've never heard of you, your creative and messaging has to work much, much harder. A simple ad showing your product and a "Buy Now" button isn't going to cut it. Your ad needs to stop them scrolling, hook them in, and speak directly to the pain you identified earlier.

There are a few classic copywriting frameworks that work wonders here. You don't sell the product; you sell the solution to their nightmare.

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge. You don't sell a "project management platform"; you sell the feeling of control and calm.

• -> Before: "Another Monday morning, another 50 emails chasing project updates. Your team is swamped, deadlines are slipping, and you have no clear view of who's doing what. It's chaos."
• -> After: "Imagine opening your dashboard and seeing every project, every task, and every deadline in one place. Your team is collaborating seamlessly, and you're hitting your targets ahead of schedule. You feel completely in control."
• -> Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Get your team out of the email chaos and into a state of flow. Start a free trial today."

For a high-touch service business, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell "marketing services"; you sell a predictable stream of new customers.

• -> Problem: "Are your sales leads drying up? One month is a feast, the next is a famine."
• -> Agitate: "You're worried about making payroll, you're losing sleep over where the next customer will come from, and you see your competitors growing while you're stuck."
• -> Solve: "We build lead generation systems that deliver a predictable flow of qualified appointments to your calendar every single month. Stop guessing and start growing. Let's have a chat."

Notice how none of these ads talk about features. They talk about feelings, problems, and transformations. This is what connects with a cold audience and earns you the click. When you scale, you're no longer just harvesting existing demand; you are creating it by making people aware of a problem they might not have even been able to put a name to.

We'll need to look at restructuring your audience strategy for scale

Your current campaign structure is probably holding you back. Shoving all your audiences into one or two campaigns is fine for small budgets, but it's a disaster for scaling. You need to segment your audiences based on their temperature – cold, warm, and hot – and talk to them differently.

This is commonly known as a Top-of-Funnel (ToFu), Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) structure. Here's how I would usually prioritise the audiences within this structure. The further along in the funnel an audience (or a lookalike of it) is, the better it will usually perform.

ToFu (Prospecting Campaign): The goal here is to find new people who have never heard of you but fit your ICP. This is where you spend the majority of your budget (maybe 70-80%). You'll test your best-performing pain-point interests and, most importantly, high-quality Lookalike audiences. Don't just make a lookalike of "all website visitors". That's too broad. Create a 1% Lookalike audience in the UK based on your actual customer list, or even better, a list of your *highest value* customers. This gives the algorithm a much stronger signal to work with.

MoFu (Retargeting Campaign): These people have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They've visited your website, watched your video ad, or engaged with your Instagram page. Here, you're not introducing yourself; you're building trust and overcoming objections. Show them testimonials, case studies, or answer common questions in your ads. Your budget here is smaller (maybe 15-20%). You need to exclude anyone who has already purchased or reached the checkout page.

BoFu (Retargeting Campaign): This is your smallest but often most profitable campaign. These people are on the verge of buying. They've added a product to their cart or started the checkout process but didn't finish. Your ads here should be direct and create urgency. A reminder of what they left behind, perhaps a small incentive like free shipping to get them over the line. Budget is minimal here (5%), and the audience window is short (e.g., last 7-14 days).

By splitting your campaigns like this, you can tailor your message perfectly to each stage of the customer journey and allocate budget much more intelligently. This structure is built for scale because it creates a consistent system for turning cold traffic into paying customers.

I'd also say you should ignore 'awareness' campaigns

Here is an uncomfortable truth about advertising on platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being very good at its job, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. No other advertiser wants them. Their attention is cheap. By choosing these objectives, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the absolute worst possible audience for your product. It's madness.

The best form of brand awareness for any growing business is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it online. That only happens through *conversion*. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. That is why, to find customers that will actually buy from you, your ToFu, prospecting campaigns should still use a conversion objective, like Sales or Leads. You're telling Meta, "Go find me new people, but only show my ad to the ones within that group who have a history of actually buying things". This is how you build brand and make money at the same time.

You probably should fix your offer first

Now we arrive at what might be the most common failure point in all of B2B or high-ticket advertising: the offer. Even with perfect targeting, LTV calculations, and campaign structure, your ads will fail to scale if the thing you're asking people to do is wrong.

The "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us for a Quote" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, who is a busy person, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor. It will absolutely kill your conversion rates with cold traffic.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for a price.

What does this look like in practice?

• -> For a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. The product itself becomes your best salesperson. I've seen B2B SaaS clients get registrations for as little as $2.38 each with a strong free trial offer.
• -> For a marketing agency: A free, automated "5-Minute SEO Audit" that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities.
• -> For an accountancy firm: A free "VAT Health Check" calculator that flags common errors for businesses in their industry.
• -> For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on "How to Handle Difficult Conversations" for new managers.
• -> For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: It's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge.

This low-friction offer is the missing link. It's what allows you to convert colder traffic at a high enough rate to make your scaling economics work. If you're asking cold traffic to marry you on the first date (i.e., "Request a Demo"), you'll be rejected 99.9% of the time. Instead, offer them a free coffee (a valuable lead magnet) and start a conversation.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Okay, that was a lot of information. Scaling is a multi-faceted challenge, and it requires you to work on several parts of your advertising machine at once. To make it more concrete, here is a table summarising the step-by-step action plan I've outlined for you.

Implementing this isn't a one-day job. It's a process of testing, learning, and optimising. But this strategic framework is the difference between the businesses that successfully scale with paid ads and those that hit a wall and give up.

It can feel like a lot to take on, especialy when you're also trying to run your business. This is why many companies decide to work with an expert or an agency. It's not just about saving time; it's about leveraging years of experience from someone who has navigated these exact scaling challenges before for dozens of other businesses. We can help you implement this entire process, from deep diving into your customer research to building out the campaigns and writing the copy.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can review your current strategy and ad account together and give you a clearer picture of your growth potential.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh