Solved: Scaling Facebook Bidcap Campaigns Vertically

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out about scaling your bid cap campaigns on Facebook.

It's a great question and a very common challenge. A lot of people find a winning campaign and are then, quite rightly, terrified to touch it in case they break it. The platform has been all over the place this year, so I don't blame you. Happy to give you some of my thoughts on this, it goes a bit deeper than just tweaking the budget up and down.

Let's first address your immediate question: The 20% rule...

Alright, let's tackle the question you actually asked first. The standard advice you've heard – increasing the budget by 10-20% every 24-48 hours – is the textbook 'safe' way to scale vertically. It's designed to give the algorithm enough time to adjust to the new budget without completely resetting the learning phase. For a campaign with over 100 conversions, it's stable enough to handle these small bumps.

So, yes, you can do that. And you might see some initial success. But I'm going to be brutally honest: it's a plaster on a wound. It's a tactic, not a strategy. It's what people do when they don't understand the underlying mechanics of why their campaign is stuck. The fact that duplicating the campaign (horizontal scaling) caused it to crash is a massive clue. When you did that, you essentially created two identical campaigns that were forced to compete against each other in the auction for the exact same pocket of users. This drives up auction costs for both, tanks performance, and is a classic sign of audience saturation.

Simply pushing more money into the existing ad set will eventually lead to the same result, just more slowly. You'll see your cost per conversion start to creep up, your frequency will rise, and eventually, the campaign's performance will degrade. You're trying to squeeze more juice from a lemon that's already been squeezed pretty hard. The real question isn't 'how do I increase the budget?', it's 'how do I find more lemons?'

The real problem isn't the budget, it's your audience saturation...

Think of it like this. Your successful campaign has found a small, highly profitable fishing spot in a massive lake. It's catching a specific type of fish that loves your bait (your creative and offer). When you increase the budget, you're telling the algorithm "catch more fish, now!". The algorithm, under pressure, starts casting its net wider in that same spot. It starts catching less desirable fish, or it has to work much harder (spend more) to find the good ones. This is what's known as audience saturation.

You've likely exhausted the most engaged, lowest-hanging-fruit segment of your current audience. These are the people who were most likely to convert quickly and cheaply. To scale meaningfully, you can't just keep hammering the same small group of people. You need a strategy to expand your reach and find *new* pockets of high-intent customers. Your fear of touching the campaign is valid, but inaction is just a slower way to fail. The campaign's performance will inevitably decline as creative fatigue sets in and your audience stops responding. True scaling requires a more fundamental shift in thinking.

Before we can even think about finding new audiences, we need to get your numbers straight. Without knowing how much a customer is truly worth to you, any decision about ad spend is just guesswork. This brings us to the most important metric that most advertisers ignore.

You need to stop thinking about CPA and start thinking about LTV...

The question "What should my Cost Per Acquisition be?" is the wrong question. It leads to a scarcity mindset where you're constantly trying to minimise costs, which strangles growth. The real question is, "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV tells you the total profit your business makes from any given customer over the entire time they remain a customer. Once you know this number, you can make intelligent, data-driven decisions about how much you're willing to pay to get them in the door. It's the key that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads that don't convert.

Here’s the basic maths behind it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let’s run an example. Say you run a software business. ARPA is £100/month, Gross Margin is 80%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (5% churn).
LTV = (£100 * 0.80) / 0.05 = £80 / 0.05 = £1,600.

Each customer is worth £1,600 in gross margin to you. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is at least 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £533 (£1600 / 3) to acquire a single customer. Suddenly, that £50 CPA you were getting nervous about looks like an absolute bargain, doesn't it? It means you have a massive amount of headroom to scale your ad spend before you become unprofitable.

I've built a simple calculator for you below. Play around with your own numbers. This isn't just a theoretical exercise; it is the foundational piece of maths for any scalable advertising campaign. Knowing your LTV changes everything.

We'll need to look at your funnel before we touch the ads again...

Armed with your LTV and acceptable CAC, we can now look at the next bottleneck: your website and offer. This is almost always a bigger lever for scaling than the ad account itself. If you can increase your website's conversion rate, every single click you buy from Facebook becomes more valuable. A 2% conversion rate means 2 in 100 visitors convert. A 4% rate means 4 in 100 convert. You've just doubled the output of your ad spend without even touching the campaign.

I've seen so many businesses burn cash on ads, trying to scale, while sending traffic to a slow, confusing, untrustworthy website. It's like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Before you spend another pound scaling up, you need to plug the leaks.

Here’s a typical journey and where it breaks:

Your job is to fix the biggest leaks first. Is your landing page slow to load? Is the message on the page disconnected from the message in the ad? Is your offer compelling? For B2B, a "Request a Demo" button is often a conversion killer. It’s high friction and low value. Instead, can you offer a free tool, a valuable report, or a free trial? For eCommerce, are your product photos professional? Do you have social proof like reviews and testimonials? You need to make your offer a complete no-brainer for your ideal customer.

I remember one client, a medical job matching software company, who was struggling to scale past a £100 cost per acquisition. By shifting the focus from just tweaking ads to optimising their entire funnel, we were able to systematically bring that cost down. Eventually, we reduced their CPA to just £7. That's the power of fixing the funnel.

I'd say you need a better creative testing system...

Once your funnel is optimised, the next lever is creative. Your winning ad won't be a winner forever. Creative fatigue is real. People get sick of seeing the same ad, and it stops working. The only way to combat this is with a relentless, systematic approach to creative testing.

Scaling isn't just about spending more on what works; it's about constantly finding the *next* thing that works. You should always have a portion of your budget dedicated to testing new ad copy, new images, new videos, and new angles.

Don't just test different button colours. Test entirely different psychological hooks:

• Problem-Agitate-Solve: Call out their biggest frustration. Twist the knife a bit by describing the consequences. Then present your product as the perfect solution. (e.g., "Hate volatile ad performance? Worried one wrong move will kill your best campaign? Our system stabilises your scaling...")
• Before-After-Bridge: Paint a picture of their current, frustrating reality (Before). Then show them the ideal future state (After). Position your product as the thing that gets them there (Bridge).
• Social Proof: Use testimonials, case studies, and user-generated content (UGC). We've had several SaaS clients see incredible results with simple, authentic-looking UGC videos. They often outperform slick, high-production ads because they feel more real and trustworthy.

A single new winning creative can unlock a whole new level of scale. It can re-engage a tired audience or resonate with a new segment you hadn't reached before. The impact is massive, as you can see below. Finding just one ad that reduces your CPA by 30-40% means you can acquire 30-40% more customers for the same budget.

You'll need a new campaign structure for scale...

Finally, let's talk about how to structure your account to actually facilitate all of this. The single campaign that's working for you right now has served its purpose. It's time to build a proper, scalable structure.

Stop thinking in terms of single campaigns and start thinking in terms of a full-funnel strategy. This typically means having separate, ongoing campaigns for each stage of the customer journey:

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting: This is where you find new customers. You'll use Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) and have multiple ad sets inside testing different cold audiences. This is where you test your Lookalikes (of purchasers, of high-value customers) and your interest/behaviour-based targeting. This campaign's job is to feed the funnel.
2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Engagement/Retargeting: This campaign targets people who have shown some interest but haven't converted yet. This could be people who have watched your videos, engaged with your page, or visited your website but didn't add to cart. The goal here is to build trust and move them towards a decision.
3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Conversion/Retargeting: This is your highest-intent audience. People who have added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited a key page. The messaging here is direct and aims to close the sale. Think scarcity, social proof, and overcoming final objections.

By splitting your campaigns this way, you can control your budget allocation more effectively and tailor your messaging to where the user is in their journey. It also provides a structured environment for testing. Your ToFu campaign becomes your creative and audience testing ground. When you find a winner, you let it run. When it fatigues, you swap it out for a new test.

This structure moves you away from the fragile, one-campaign-to-rule-them-all setup to a robust, anti-fragile system that is built for continuous testing and scaling. It’s how you go from being scared to touch your account to confidently managing a growing ad spend. This systematic approach is key to scaling. For instance, we worked with a client selling online courses on Meta. By implementing a robust testing and optimisation strategy, they generated $115k in revenue in just six weeks.

Here is a summary of my main recommendations for you to implement.

As you can see, scaling is so much more than just nudging a budget slider. It requires a holistic approach that looks at your business's economics, your customer's journey, and your creative strategy. It's a complex process, and it can be daunting to implement on your own, especialy when you're worried about disrupting what's already working.

If you'd like a second pair of expert eyes to review your campaigns and help you build a proper scaling strategy, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can walk through your account together and identify the biggest opportunities for growth. It often helps to have someone with experience point you in the right direction.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh