Solved: Scaling Meta Ads ROI for Portsmouth Businesses

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It’s a classic problem you've described, and honestly, it’s the one that keeps most local business owners up at night. You find a sweet spot where ads are profitable, you double the budget, and suddenly your cost per lead skyrockets and your ROI falls off a cliff. It feels like you’re being punished for trying to grow.

I’m happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this. I remember working with a home cleaning company where we achieved a cost of £5 per lead. The solution usually isn't about spending more money blindly, but about restructuring your account so the machine learning (Meta's brain) doesn't trip over itself when you feed it more budget.

Below, I’m going to walk you through exactly how I’d rebuild your campaign structure for the Portsmouth area to handle scale. I'll cover the technical setup, the "nightmare" of bad objectives, and the math you need to know to survive.

The "Local Ceiling" Phenomenon

First off, we need to address why this is happening. Portsmouth isn't London. You have a finite number of people. When you spend £10 a day, you are skimming the cream off the top—the people who are actively looking for your service right now. When you scale to £50 or £100 a day, you are forcing the algorithm to reach deeper into the bucket to find people who are less interested or harder to convert.

Most people try to fix this by narrowing their targeting. They think, "I need to be more specific to keep costs down." That is actually the opposite of what you should do. When you scale locally, you need to go broader, not narrower. I'll explain why in a bit, but first, we need to look at your objective.

Step 1: Stop Paying for "Awareness"

I see this all the time. A business wants to "dominate" Portsmouth, so they run a "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign alongside their main ads. It sounds logical, right? Get your name out there.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: 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, in its infinite wisdom, 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 in low demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

If you want to scale, every penny must go towards a Conversion objective (Leads or Sales). Even if the volume is lower, the intent is higher. Awareness is a byproduct of conversion, not the other way around.

Step 2: The "Testing vs. Scaling" Structure

To scale without wrecking your ROI, you need a structure that isolates volatility. If you just dump more money into a winning ad set, it often resets the "Learning Phase," causing performance to wobble.

Here is the structure I use for local businesses looking to scale:

Campaign A: The "Banker" (Scaling)
This campaign holds your proven winners. It uses Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO). You set the budget at the campaign level, and Meta distributes it to the best performing ad sets. You do not touch the ads in here often. You let them run. When you want to scale, you increase the budget on this campaign by 10-20% every few days. No sudden moves.

Campaign B: The "Lab" (Testing)
This is where you get your hands dirty. This uses Ad Set Budget Optimisation (ABO). You want to force a specific budget onto new creatives or new audiences to see if they work. If you find a winner here that maintains a good CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) for 3-5 days, you duplicate it into the "Banker" campaign and turn it off here.

This split protects your ROI. If a test fails in the Lab, it doesn't drag down the performance of your Banker campaign.

Visualising the Impact of Budget Scaling

It's important to understand the relationship between spend and efficiency. As you increase spend, your CPA will naturally rise because you are exhausting the "easy" wins. The trick is to keep that rise manageable. I've built a little calculator below to help you estimate this.

Step 3: Audience Prioritisation in a Local Market

In Portsmouth, your potential audience size isn't huge. If you use too many interest filters (e.g., "Homeowners" AND "Interested in Gardening" AND "Age 35-45"), you might end up with an audience of 15,000 people. Meta needs about 50 conversions a week per ad set to optimise properly. If your audience is too small, the frequency gets too high, people see your ad 10 times a week, and they get annoyed. Your costs go up.

This is where I’d flip the script. Instead of telling Facebook who to target, we go broad and let the creative do the targeting.

The "Broad" Strategy:
Target: Portsmouth + 10-15 miles (depending on your service area).
Age: 25-65+ (keep it wide unless you strictly can't serve a specific age).
Gender: All.
Detailed Targeting: EMPTY.

I know, it sounds scary. "But I'm paying to show ads to everyone!" Not quite. The algorithm looks at your ad copy and image. If your ad says "Struggling with a leaky roof in Portsmouth?", the algorithm will very quickly notice that only people with roof issues are clicking. It will then find more people like them. The creative filters the audience.

However, you should still structure your audiences logically. Here is the priority list I generally use for local businesses to ensure we aren't wasting money on cold traffic when warm traffic is available:

MoFu & BoFu (Middle & Bottom of Funnel) - The Low Hanging Fruit

You must capture these first. They are the cheapest leads.

• Retargeting: Everyone who visited your website in the last 30 days (excluding those who converted).
• Engagers: People who engaged with your Facebook/Instagram posts or ads in the last 90 days.
• Video Viewers: People who watched 50% of your videos.

In a local campaign, I often bundle all of these into one "Retargeting" ad set because individually they might be too small to run.

ToFu (Top of Funnel) - The Scale

Once retargeting is maxed out (which happens fast locally), you go here.

• Lookalikes (1% - 3%): Create a lookalike of your previous customers. This is gold. Upload your customer email list (hashed) and tell Meta "find me more people like this in Portsmouth".
• Broad: The strategy I mentioned above. This is the ultimate scalability key.

Visualising the Funnel Flow

To help you see how these audiences interact, I've sketched out the flow below. You want to move people from the top (Broad) down to the bottom (Retargeting).

Step 4: Creative Fatigue is the Enemy

I mentioned that "creative is the new targeting." When you scale budget, you burn through your audience's attention span faster. In Portsmouth, if you run the same image ad for 3 months with a high budget, everyone has seen it. They stop clicking. Your CTR (Click Through Rate) drops, and your CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) rises.

You need to build a "Creative Factory." You don't need a production studio. You just need angles.

Angle 1: The Problem/Agitation/Solution
"Tired of [Problem]? It's frustrating when [Agitation]. We fix it by [Solution]."

Angle 2: Social Proof
A video of a happy customer in Portsmouth. "I called [Your Business] and they sorted it in 2 hours."

Angle 3: The "Us vs Them"
"Other companies do X. We do Y."

Angle 4: The Offer
"Free consultation for Portsmouth residents this week only."

Ideally, you should be testing 2-3 new creatives every single week. If you aren't rotating creatives, scalability is impossible.

Step 5: Understanding Your LTV (Lifetime Value)

The biggest mistake local businesses make is judging their ads on the immediate profit of the first sale. If you break even on the first job but that customer stays with you for 5 years, you can afford to pay much more for a lead than you think. This is how you outbid your competitors. If they can only pay £20 for a lead, but you know a customer is worth £5000 over 5 years, you can happily pay £50 or £100 for that lead and crush them on volume.

Let's do the math properly. I've set up an LTV calculator below for you. Plug in your numbers.

Implementation: The "Portsmouth Protocol"

So, putting all of this together, here is the concrete action plan. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

A Final Thought on Expertise

I know this sounds like a lot of work. And tbh, it is. Managing the balance between CBO and ABO, constantly churning out new creative angles, and monitoring the LTV/CPA ratio takes time. I've seen businesses burn through budget because they forgot to exclude current customers from their "Broad" campaign. Simple mistake, expensive lesson.

In paid advertising, you can't really promise anything as it's impossible to predict how exactly the ads will perform, but having a robust structure is your best insurance policy against wasted spend.

If this feels a bit overwhelming, or if you just want a second pair of eyes to look over your current setup before you start pulling levers, we offer a free initial consultation. We can review your strategy and account together, which usually is super helpful and gives you a taste of the expertise you'll see going into your project if you decide to work with us.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh