Solved: Too many Facebook ads impacting optimization?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your campaign structure and the issues you're seeing. It's a really common problem, especially when you start to scale your budget. You're right to suspect that the structure might be the culprit for the performance drop.

The short answer is yes, 10 adsets with 60 ads is almost certainly too fragmented for a $300 daily budget. You're likely spreading the budget too thin, preventing any single adset from properly exiting the learning phase, and forcing CBO to make premature decisions based on very little data. But the problem runs a bit deeper than just the numbers. It's really about the *strategy* behind that structure, or lack thereof. Simply adding more adsets is like adding more fishing lines into the same small pond hoping to catch more fish – you just end up tangling your lines.

What you need is a more methodical approach. We need to stop thinking about campaigns as just a collection of adsets and start thinking of them as a system—a funnel—designed to move people from being unaware of your brand to becoming profitable customers. I've laid out my full thinking on this below. It's a bit of a read, but I reckon it'll give you a completely new way of looking at how to build and scale your Meta ads.

We'll need to look at why your current structure is failing...

Right, let's get straight to it. Your setup – one Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) campaign with 10 adsets all targeting 'broad' in different countries – is a classic symptom of what I call 'testing for testing's sake'. You've got the right idea about needing to test, but the execution is flawed, and it's probably costing you a fair bit of cash.

Here’s the thing about CBO: it's an optimising tool, not a magic wand. Its job is to find the most efficient path to conversions at the lowest cost. When you feed it 10 adsets that are all essentially the same (broad targeting), it doesn't have any meaningful variables to test. It's like asking a chef to create ten unique dishes using only salt. What happens is that the algorithm gets a lucky early conversion in one or two adsets, maybe due to random chance, and decides, "Right, these are the winners." It then pours the majority of the $300 budget into those, starving the other eight. You observed this yourself when you said only 3 adsets are getting spend. This isn't optimisation; it's just the algorithm making a snap judgment based on a tiny amount of data. You're not actually learning which audience is better because the audiences are all the same.

The other big issue here is the infamous 'learning phase'. Every time you create a new adset, Meta's algorithm has to figure out who to show your ads to. It needs about 50 conversions per adset per week to exit this phase and achieve stable performance. With a $300 daily budget ($2100/week) spread across 10 adsets, each adset gets an average of just $30 per day. Let's say your cost per conversion is $30 – that means each adset is getting one conversion per day, or seven per week. That's nowhere near the 50 it needs. So, all 10 of your adsets are permanently stuck in the 'learning limited' phase, where performance is volatile, costs are higher, and CBO can't do its job properly. It's a cycle of inefficiency.

The solution isn't to just reduce the number of adsets, though that is part of it. The real solution is to build a structure that has a purpose. A structure that reflects how people actually buy things. We need to move away from this flat, chaotic structure and towards a tiered, strategic funnel. But before we can even build that, we have to go back to the absolute foundation of all marketing, something that most advertisers skip over because it's hard work...

I'd say your Ideal Customer Profile is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic...

This is probably the most important part of this whole letter. Forget the adsets, the budgets, the CBO for a minute. Your targeting is "broad" across the "top 5 countries". This tells me you're thinking about your customer in the most generic terms possible. And that is a recipe for burning cash.

The kind of marketing advice you see everywhere tells you to define your customer by demographics. "We're targeting men aged 25-45 who live in London and earn over £50k." That's utterly useless. It describes millions of people, 99.9% of whom will never buy from you. It leads to the kind of generic, wallpaper ads that everyone ignores because they speak to no one.

You need to stop defining your customer by who they *are* and start defining them by the *problem they have*. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a *problem state*.

Let me give you a concrete example. I remember working with a legal tech SaaS client. Their old ICP was "law firms with 10-50 lawyers in the UK". Their ads were generic, talking about "streamlining document management". Performance was rubbish. We spent a week doing the hard work. We discovered their best customers weren't just any law firm; they were firms where a junior partner was terrified of missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit because their current system was a mess of shared drives and emails. That's the nightmare. That's the pain.

Once you know that, everything changes. Your targeting is no longer "lawyers". It's targeting people with interests in 'legal compliance software', members of specific legal tech Facebook groups, people who follow influencers in the 'legal operations' space. Your ad copy changes from "Streamline your documents" to "Is your firm one missed deadline away from a malpractice nightmare? Secure your filings, protect your reputation." See the difference? One is a bland feature; the other is a direct solution to a burning pain.

Your homework is to do this for your business. Who are you *really* selling to? What keeps them awake at 3 AM?

• What are the exact words they use to describe their frustration on forums or in reviews of your competitors' products?
• What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? (e.g., 'Acquired' for tech founders)
• What industry newsletters do they actually open and read? (e.g., 'Stratechery' for tech strategists)
• What SaaS tools do they already pay for? (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce, Xero)
• What specific Facebook groups are they members of? What influencers do they follow on Twitter or LinkedIn?

This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending another pound on ads. It's the difference between precision bombing and just dropping bombs in the ocean and hoping for a fish.

You'll need to rethink your offer before you touch your ads...

Now we've got the foundation for targeting, let's talk about the next most common failure point in advertising: the offer. I'd wager that 90% of failing ad campaigns aren't failing because of the ads themselves, but because what they're offering is weak, unappealing, or asks for too much, too soon.

The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, who is likely a busy, important person, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a junior sales rep. It's high-friction and low-value. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. Unless they are already at the absolute final stage of their buying journey and are actively comparing vendors (which is rare to catch with a social media ad), they will simply scroll past.

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. It has to solve a small part of their big problem, for free, right now.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. I remember one of our SaaS clients, a medical job matching platform, had a CPA of over £100. By fundamentally rethinking their offer to provide more upfront value, we were able to reduce their CPA to just £7. You're not generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value.

• For a marketing agency: A free, automated SEO audit that shows a prospect their top 3 keyword opportunities.
• For a data analytics platform: A free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top 5 issues.
• For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers.
• For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: A free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their whole problem for money. A powerful offer doesn't just lower your cost per lead; it dramatically increases the quality of those leads. People who have experienced a moment of value from you are far more likely to become paying customers. Your current structure is just pushing traffic; a better structure combined with a killer offer will pull customers in.

We'll need to calculate what you can actually afford to pay...

This is a topic that most advertisers completely ignore. They get obsessed with lowering their Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) as much as possible. "My CPL is £10, how can I get it to £5?" That's the wrong question. The real question is, "How high a CPL can I afford to pay to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Once you know what a customer is truly worth to your business over their lifetime, it liberates your advertising strategy. You can stop chasing cheap, low-quality leads and start confidently investing in acquiring high-value customers, even if they cost more upfront. It's the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

Let's break it down. You need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of service?
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's take an example. Say you run a subscription box service. ARPA is £50/month. Your gross margin is 60% (after the cost of the products and shipping). And you lose 5% of your customers each month.
LTV = (£50 * 0.60) / 0.05
LTV = £30 / 0.05 = £600

Each customer is worth £600 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £200 to acquire a single customer and still run a very healthy business. Suddenly, that £50 CPA from your Meta ads doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This calculation is the key to scaling. It tells you your absolute ceiling for ad spend per customer. To make this real for you, I've built an interactive calculator below. Play around with the sliders and plug in your own numbers to find your LTV and what you can afford to pay for a customer.

You'll need a proper campaign structure based on the funnel...

Okay, with the foundational strategy in place – a pain-based ICP, a killer offer, and a clear understanding of our target CAC – we can finally build a campaign structure that actually works. We're going to ditch the 10 flat adsets and build a proper funnel with three distinct stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

Each stage will have its own campaign, its own objective, and its own specific audiences. This gives us control and clarity. With your $300/day budget, a good starting point for the split would be 70% ToFu, 20% MoFu, and 10% BoFu. This might change as your audiences build up, but it's a solid place to start.

1. ToFu Campaign: Prospecting (£210/day)

This is where we find new people who have never heard of you before. This is the only place where we will spend the majority of our budget. The goal here is to drive traffic to your high-value offer and get them into your ecosystem. We are not going to use 10 adsets. We'll start with 3-4 adsets, each testing a distinct audience hypothesis based on our ICP research.

• Adset 1: Lookalike Audience (LAL). If you have at least 100-1000 past customers, this is your goldmine. Create a 1% Lookalike audience of your past purchasers. This is often the highest-performing cold audience you can build, because you're asking Meta to find more people who look exactly like your best customers. If you don't have enough purchasers, you can create a lookalike of leads or even all website visitors, but purchasers are the best.
• Adset 2: ICP Interest Stack A. Based on your ICP research, bundle together 5-10 highly relevant interests. For the legal tech SaaS example, this could be interests like 'Legal Tech', 'Clio', 'LexisNexis', combined with behaviours like 'Business page admins'. This adset tests the core interests of your ICP.
• Adset 3: Competitor/Tool Interest Stack B. This adset targets people interested in your direct competitors or the complimentary tools your ICP uses. For an e-commerce analytics tool, this might be interests like 'Shopify', 'Klaviyo', 'Triple Whale'. You're targeting people who are already in a buying mindset for similar solutions.

We'll let these 3 adsets run under CBO. Because they are testing genuinely different audiences, CBO can now do its job properly and tell us which targeting angle is most effective. We're getting real, actionable data.

2. MoFu Campaign: Consideration/Retargeting (£60/day)

This campaign is for people who have shown some interest but haven't converted yet. They've visited your website or engaged with an ad, but they're not ready to buy. The goal here is not to hard-sell, but to build trust, educate, and stay top of mind. The audiences are simple:

• Adset 1: Website Visitors & Engagers (30-day window). This adset will target anyone who has visited your website, watched 50% of one of your video ads, or engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page in the last 30 days. Crucially, you must *exclude* anyone who has already become a customer or lead (your BoFu audience).

The ads in this campaign should be different. You might show them case studies, customer testimonials, or a blog post that addresses a common objection. You're nurturing the relationship.

3. BoFu Campaign: Conversion/Retargeting (£30/day)

This is your highest-intent audience. These are people who were on the verge of converting but got distracted. The goal here is to get them over the finish line.

• Adset 1: Checkout/Cart Abandoners (7-14 day window). This adset targets anyone who has added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited your pricing page but didn't complete the purchase. Again, you must *exclude* people who have already purchased.

The ads here can be more direct. You might remind them of what they left in their cart, offer a small discount or free shipping, or use copy that creates a sense of urgency. I remember one eCom client we worked with, a women's apparel brand, achieved a 691% return. A significant part of that success comes from effectively converting high-intent audiences, like those who have abandoned their cart. It's often the cheapest revenue you can generate.

This structured approach transforms your ad account from a messy, confusing black box into a predictable customer generation machine. I've put together a simple table below to summarise this structure.

I'd say you need a message they can't ignore...

Even with the perfect structure, targeting, and offer, your campaigns will fall flat if your creative and copy are generic. Your ad needs to grab your ICP by the collar and speak directly to the 'nightmare' we defined earlier.

Most ads are just a list of features. "Our software has AI-powered analytics." So what? Who cares? You need to translate that feature into a benefit that solves their pain. You don't sell the drill; you sell the hole. Here are a couple of powerful copywriting frameworks you can use immediately.

For a B2B SaaS product, use the Before-After-Bridge framework. You paint a picture of their current painful reality (the Before), show them the dream scenario (the After), and present your product as the vehicle to get them there (the Bridge).

• Before: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: "Our FinOps platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

For a high-touch service business, use Problem-Agitate-Solve. You state the problem, poke the bruise to make the pain more acute, and then offer your service as the relief.

• Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
• Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
• Solve: "Get expert fractional CFO strategy. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

Notice how both of these examples are built on the 'nightmare' ICP. They don't talk about themselves; they talk about the customer's problems. This is what stops the scroll. This is what gets the click. You have 6 ads per adset, which is a good number for testing. Make sure each of those ads is testing a different angle, a different pain point, or a different "After" state. That's how you find winning creatives, not by just changing the button colour.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this has been a lot to take in, and it represents a significant shift from how you're currently running things. To make it easier, I've distilled everything down into a final table of actionable recommendations. This is your roadmap to fixing your campaigns and building a scalable advertising system.

Implementing all of this is a significant undertaking, I won't lie. It takes time, effort, and a methodical approach to testing. It's a shift from being a button-pusher in Ads Manager to being a genuine marketer who understands their customer deeply. However, the reward is a predictable system for growth, not just a campaign that's profitable one day and in the red the next.

If you'd like to chat through how this could apply specifically to your business in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at your account together. It can often help to have an experienced pair of eyes on things to spot the biggest opportunities for quick wins.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh