Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads without Resetting Learning?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out with your question. It's a common one, and it gets right to the heart of one of the biggest myths in paid advertising.

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. The short answer is that you're focusing on the wrong thing. Worrying about the learning phase, especially at a £20/day spend, is like worrying about tyre pressure when the engine's not been built yet. The real issue isn't *how* to nudge a budget without upsetting the algorithm; it's about having a proper scaling strategy in the first place, which is something entirely different.

We'll need to look at why the 'Learning Phase' is a distraction...

Let's get this out of the way first. The obsession with avoiding a 'learning phase reset' is one of the most persistent and unhelpful bits of advice out there. It leads to timid, ineffective advertising. The learning phase is simply the period where Meta's algorithm is exploring who is most likely to convert within your target audience. It needs about 50 conversions per ad set per week to exit this phase and stabilise.

At £20 per day, unless your cost per conversion is less than £2.80, you are never going to exit the learning phase. Your ad account will permanently say "Learning Limited," and that is perfectly fine. It's not a penalty. It just means the algorithm doesn't have a huge volume of data to work with, which is expected at that spend level. Trying to 'protect' a learning phase that barely exists is a futile exercise.

Making a significant change – like a large budget increase, a new creative, or a change in targeting – tells the algorithm to go and re-learn. This is not a bad thing! It's a necessary thing. If you find a winning combination, you *want* to give it more money so the algorithm can go and find more of those people, faster. Deliberately strangling your own growth by inching up the budget by 15-20% every few days is an incredibly slow and inefficient way to grow. You'll miss opportunities and let your competitors who are more aggressive overtake you.

The real question isn't "how do I avoid resetting the learning phase?". The real question is "how do I build a system that allows me to spend more money, profitably?". And the answer to that begins not in your ads manager, but with a calculator.

I'd say you need to understand your numbers first...

Before you even think about scaling, you must know how much a customer is worth to you. Without this, you're flying blind. You have no way of knowing if your 'profitable' £20/day ad is actually profitable in the long run, or how much you can truly afford to spend to acquire a new customer.

This is where Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) comes in. This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business. Once you know this, you can determine your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Here’s the basic maths behind it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer spends with you per month (or per year, depending on your business model)?
• Gross Margin %: What is your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS)?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's run an example. Say you run a subscription box that costs £50/month. Your gross margin is 70%, and you lose about 5% of your customers each month. Your LTV would be (£50 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £700.

This £700 is the absolute maximum you could ever spend to get a customer and still break even over their lifetime. A healthy business model usually aims for an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. In this case, your target CAC would be around £233. This is your North Star. This is the number that tells you how aggressive you can be. That £20/day ad might be getting you sales for £15 each, which feels great. But knowing your target CAC is £233 tells you that you have a massive amount of room to scale before you become unprofitable. You could afford to pay £100, £150, even £200 for a customer and still be building a very healthy business.

Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers. This is the single most important exercise you can do before spending another penny on ads.

You probably should be thinking about structure, not sliders...

Once you know your numbers, you can build a structure designed for scaling. True scaling is achieved in two ways:

1. Horizontal Scaling: Finding and testing new audiences. You do this by launching new ad sets targeting different interests, lookalikes, or demographics. The goal is to find more pockets of profitable customers.
2. Vertical Scaling: Once an ad set has proven to be a consistent winner (i.e., its CPA is well below your target CAC), you increase its budget aggressively. Not by 20%, but by doubling it, or even more. For instance, I remember one campaign we worked on for an online course creator. Once we identified the winning ad sets, we scaled the budget aggressively, which helped them generate over $115,000 in revenue in about six weeks. This is how you quickly capture as much of that audience as possible before it fatigues.

You cannot do this effectively with a single ad. You need a proper campaign structure. The classic, and still most effective, is a funnel-based approach: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Prospecting): This is where you find new customers. Your campaigns here will target cold audiences – people who have never heard of you. This is where you do all your horizontal scaling, testing dozens of different audiences over time. You'd use detailed targeting (interests) and lookalike audiences.
• MoFu/BoFu (Retargeting): These campaigns target warm audiences – people who have already interacted with your brand in some way (visited your website, watched a video, engaged with a post) but haven't purchased yet. These audiences are much smaller but convert at a much higher rate.

A new account should have at least two seperate campaigns: one for prospecting and one for retargeting. Inside your prospecting campaign is where the real work happens. You shouldn't have one ad set running at £20/day. You should have multiple ad sets, perhaps 3-5, each with a small budget (£5-£10/day), each testing a completely different audience. After a few days, you see which ones are working, turn off the losers, and give more budget to the winners. This is the engine of scale. The diagram below illustrates this basic structure.

You'll need a proper testing framework...

So, how do you put this into practice? You need a systematic way to test. The goal is to always be testing new variables to find new winners that you can then scale vertically. For a new account, the priority should always be audience testing.

I usually recommend starting with detailed targeting (interests). Think about your ideal customer. What magazines do they read? What brands do they follow? What tools do they use? Group these into logical themes and test them in seperate ad sets. For instance, if you sell high-end coffee beans, one ad set might target interests like 'James Hoffmann', 'Fellow Products', and 'Specialty Coffee Association'. Another might target competing brands like 'Blue Bottle Coffee' and 'Intelligentsia Coffee'.

Once you have enough data (at least 100 purchases, but ideally more), you can start building Lookalike audiences. These are incredibly powerful. You give Facebook a source audience (like a list of your past customers), and it finds millions of other users who share similar characteristics. You should always prioritise lookalikes based on the highest-intent actions. A lookalike of people who have purchased from you will almost always perform better than a lookalike of people who just visited your website.

Here's a typical prioritisation for testing lookalike audiences:

1. Lookalike of Highest Value Customers
2. Lookalike of All Customers
3. Lookalike of People who Initiated Checkout
4. Lookalike of People who Added to Cart
5. Lookalike of Website Visitors

You'd test each of these in their own ad set. When one proves to be a winner (again, consistently hitting below your target CPA), you can either start scaling its budget vertically, or you can start testing variations (e.g., a 1-3% lookalike instead of just a 0-1% lookalike). This constant cycle of testing, killing losers, and scaling winners is the only sustainable way to grow an ad account.

It's all about data. The chart below shows a hypothetical result from an audience test. Without testing, you'd never know that the 'Competitors' interest stack was a dud, and that the 1% Purchaser Lookalike was your golden ticket, acheiving a CPA far below your target.

My main recommendations for you

To move from a £20/day ad to a scalable advertising system, you need to shift your entire mindset. Stop worrying about algorithmic quirks and start behaving like a strategic marketer. It's more work upfront, but it's the only path to sustainable growth. Here is the main advice I have for you, laid out as a step-by-step plan.

This process is a continuous loop. You are always testing, always analysing, and always scaling. It's a fundamental shift from 'running an ad' to 'managing an advertising portfolio'. This is what separates amateurs from professionals.

Implementing a system like this can feel daunting. It requires a deep understanding of the platform, strong analytical skills, and a strategic mindset. It's not just about pushing buttons; it's about building a predictable engine for customer acquisition. Many business owners find that while they can manage the basics, they lack the time or specific expertise to build and manage a true scaling system.

If you'd like to walk through how this could be applied specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can review your current setup and give you a more detailed, actionable plan. It's often the fastest way to get clarity and start seeing real results.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh