Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! I saw your question about scaling your Meta ads and thought I'd share some detailed thoughts. It’s a common problem, and you're right to be cautious. Just cranking up the budget is often the fastest way to see your cost per purchase shoot up, and it's a trap a lot of people fall into.
The short answer is that duplicating the campaign isn't the best move, and there's a more stable, predictable way to grow. Below, I've outlined the exact strategy we use for our eCommerce clients to scale their spend without trashing their results. It's a bit more involved than just changing a number, but it's how you build a campaign that can actually grow with your business.
TLDR;
- Stop! Don't just increase the budget on your Advantage+ campaign by a large amount. This will almost certainly reset the learning phase and increase your costs.
- Duplicating the campaign is also not the ideal solution. It creates two campaigns competing against each other and forces both into the learning phase again.
- The most important piece of advice is to shift your mindset from 'how do I spend more?' to 'how do I build a structure that can handle more spend?'. This involves separating your prospecting (cold traffic) and retargeting (warm traffic).
- Before you spend another pound, you need to understand what a customer is actually worth to you. I've included an interactive Lifetime Value (LTV) calculator below to help you figure out the maximum you can afford to pay for a sale.
- The real key to scaling is testing more ad creatives, not just increasing the budget on one winning ad. More variety gives the algorithm more to work with and helps prevent ad fatigue.
Why your plan will likely backfire (and what to do instead)
I get the logic. You've found something that works, and the natural next step is to pour more fuel on the fire. The problem is, Meta's algorithm is like a finely-tuned engine. If you suddenly redline it by doubling the budget, it panics. It has to rapidly find a whole new pocket of buyers, and in its rush, it often starts showing your ads to lower-quality people who are less likely to buy. The result? Your frequency goes up, your relevance score drops, and your cost per purchase skyrockets.
Duplicating the campaign feels safer, but it creates its own set of problems. You now have two campaigns, likely with very similar settings, fighting for the same audience. This is called audience overlap, and it means you end up bidding against yourself, driving up costs for both campaigns. Plus, the new campaign starts from scratch, with no data, and has to go through the dreaded 'learning phase' all over again, which is often expensive and volatile.
So, what's the alternative? A structured approach. Instead of treating your advertising as one single block, you need to think of it like a proper sales funnel. This is how we consistently scale accounts for our clients, taking them from a few sales a day to a predictable, profitable machine.
We'll need to look at building a proper funnel structure...
Even though you're using an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (ASC), which automates a lot, the principles of a funnel still apply and give you far more control when you want to scale. Relying solely on ASC is like trying to race a car that's stuck in automatic. It works fine for cruising, but when you want to really perform, you need to learn how to shift gears yourself. This means splitting your activity into at least two distinct campaigns: one for Prospecting (finding new customers) and one for Retargeting (bringing back people who've shown interest).
This structure does two powerful things:
- It lets you control your messaging. You can speak to brand new customers (who've never heard of you) differently than you speak to someone who abandoned their shopping cart an hour ago. The cold audience needs to be introduced to your brand and value, while the cart abandoner just needs a little nudge (maybe a reminder or a small discount) to get them over the line.
- It lets you control your budget. You can allocate spend much more intelligently. You might find that you can spend a lot on cheap top-of-funnel traffic, and then use a smaller, more focused budget to convert the high-intent people in your retargeting audiences. This is far more efficient than lumping everyone into one campaign.
Here’s a visual representation of what that structure looks like in practice. You move people from being completely unaware of you to becoming loyal customers.
Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting
Goal: Find new customers.
Audiences: Broad targeting, Interest-based audiences, Lookalikes of your best customers.
Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Consideration
Goal: Re-engage interested people.
Audiences: Website visitors, Video viewers (50%+), Social media page engagers.
Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Conversion
Goal: Close the sale.
Audiences: Added to Cart, Initiated Checkout (excluding purchasers).
I'd say you need to know your numbers first...
Before you even think about funnels and campaigns, there's a more fundamental question you need to answer: How much can you actually afford to spend to acquire a customer? Most people focus obsessively on the Cost Per Purchase (CPP), trying to get it as low as possible. This is a mistake. The real question is, what is your maximum allowable CPP?
The answer lies in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire time they shop with you. If you know that every new customer you acquire will, on average, generate £500 in profit for your business, then paying £50 for that customer suddenly looks very, very cheap. If you only make £20 profit per customer, then a £50 CPP is a disaster.
Knowing your LTV is the single most empowering metric in paid advertising. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap leads and allows you to confidently outbid your competitors for the best customers. I remember one campaign we worked on for a subscription box company where we achieved a 1000% return on ad spend, purely because we understood their LTV and could afford to bid aggressively to acquire subscribers who would pay them back many times over.
Here’s a simple calculator to help you get a rough idea of your LTV. Play around with the numbers and see how much a single customer is really worth to you.
You'll need a relentless creative testing engine...
Once you have your structure and you know your numbers, the final piece of the scaling puzzle is creative. You cannot scale an account with just one or two ads. They will eventually burn out, performance will drop, and you'll be back to square one. The businesses that win on Meta are the ones that treat creative production like a factory. They are constantly testing new images, new videos, new headlines, and new angles.
This doesn't mean you need a Hollywood production budget. Some of the best performing ads we've seen have been simple User-Generated Content (UGC) videos shot on an iPhone. The key is variety. You need to give the algorithm options. When you launch a campaign with 5-10 different ad creatives, Meta can test them all and automatically put the budget behind the ones that are resonating most with your audience.
The impact of a winning creative is huge. It’s not uncommon to see one ad perform 2-3x better than another, meaning it gets sales for half or even a third of the cost. That's the difference between a profitable campaign and a failing one. You should aim to be testing new creatives every single week.
This is the main advice I have for you:
Putting it all together, here is a clear, actionable plan you can follow to start scaling your campaigns the right way. This isn't a quick fix, but it's a sustainable strategy that will serve your business for the long term.
| Step | Action | Why It's Important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Stabilise | Do NOT make any drastic changes to your existing Advantage+ campaign. If you want to increase its budget, only do so by a maximum of 20% every 48-72 hours. | This avoids shocking the algorithm and resetting the learning phase, preserving the performance you've already achieved. |
| 2. Calculate | Use the LTV calculator (or your own business data) to determine your maximum allowable Cost Per Purchase (CPP). | This gives you a clear target and helps you make unemotional, data-driven decisions about which campaigns and ads are truly profitable. |
| 3. Structure | Create two new campaigns: one for Prospecting (ToFu) and one for Retargeting (MoFu/BoFu). Start with a small budget in each. | This gives you control over your messaging and budget allocation, allowing you to scale more efficiently and intelligently. |
| 4. Test | In your new Prospecting campaign, launch at least 3-5 completely different ad creatives. Test different formats (image, video, carousel) and different messaging angles. | Creative is your biggest lever for performance. Constant testing is the only way to find new winners and prevent ad fatigue from killing your results. |
| 5. Scale | Once you find winning ads and audiences in your new structured campaigns, apply the same gradual 20% budget increase rule to scale them up. | This methodical approach allows you to grow your ad spend predictably without sacrificing profitability. |
I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a world away from just bumping up the budget on a single campaign. The truth is, scaling paid ads effectively is a complex specialism. It requires a deep understanding of the platform, a solid strategic framework, and a constant process of testing and optimisation. For many business owners, trying to manage all of this while also running their actual business is simply impossible.
If you'd like to have an expert pair of eyes on your account and get a strategy tailored specifically to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation. We can walk through your current setup together and identify the biggest opportunities for growth. It's often the quickest way to get clarity and see what's truly possible.
Hope this helps give you a clearer path forward!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
