Solved: Scaling Meta Ads in Portsmouth (Easy Campaign Structure)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Meta ads structure for scalability. It sounds like you're stuck in that frustrating place where you're putting in a lot of effort but not seeing the returns or growth you want. A lot of people think scaling means more complexity and more tinkering, but tbh it's usually the opposite. The trick is to build a solid foundation that lets Meta's machine learning do the heavy lifting for you.

I'll walk you through how I'd approach this, from the ground up. It's not just about which buttons to click, but about the whole philosophy behind building a campaign that can grow without falling apart.

We'll need to look at your foundations first: Who are you really talking to?

Before we even touch campaign structure, we have to talk about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I see this trip so many businesses up. They come up with these vague, demographic-based profiles like "Women aged 25-45 in Portsmouth who like fitness". Tbh, that tells you almost nothing useful and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

You have to get way deeper than that. You need to stop thinking about who your customer is and start thinking about what nightmare they're living through that you can solve. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. What's the specific, urgent, expensive problem that keeps them awake at night? What are they secretly terrified of?

I remember one client with a B2B SaaS product. Their old ICP was "Heads of Engineering at tech companies with 50-200 employees". So what? Their ads were generic and their cost per lead was through the roof. We helped them redefine their ICP around a nightmare: 'The Head of Engineering who is terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow.' Suddenly, everything changed. We weren't selling software anymore; we were selling a way to retain top talent and stop the bleeding.

You need to do this for your business. Once you've figured out that core pain point, you can find where these people hang out online. What specific podcasts do they listen to? What industry newsletters do they actually read? What specific Facebook groups are they members of? This intelligence is the absolute foundation of your targeting. If you get this wrong, no amount of structural finessing will save your campaigns. You'll just be showing the perfect ad to the wrong people, which is like whispering a secret in an empty room.

This work is hard, and it's not as exciting as launching a new campaign, but you gotta do it. It's the difference between burning cash and building a predictable engine for growth.

I'd say you need to stop paying Facebook to find non-customers...

This might sound obvious, but you'd be shocked how many people get this wrong. There's a dangerous myth out there about "brand awareness". People run campaigns with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness" because they think they need to "warm up" the market before asking for a sale.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: when you do that, you are giving Meta's algorithm a very clear command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." And the algorithm, being very good at its job, does exactly that. It goes out and finds all the users in your target audience who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those people aren't in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are literally paying Facebook to find the worst possible audience for your product.

For a growing business, awareness is a byproduct of sales, not a prerequisite for them. The best awareness you can get is a new customer telling their friends how great you are. That only happens if you focus on conversions from day one. So, for every single campaign you run—ToFu, MoFu, BoFu—your campaign objective should be set to what you actually want: sales, leads, signups. Whatever your main conversion event is. This single change tells the algorithm to hunt for people who have a history of taking that action, which is a far, far better use of your money. It pre-qualifies your audience from the very beginning.

You probably should build a simple, powerful campaign structure...

Right, let's get into the nuts and bolts. The structure I'm about to outline is designed for clarity, control, and scalability. It's based on the classic marketing funnel, which you can see in the flowchart above. You'll have three separate, always-on campaigns.

Campaign 1: Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting

This is where you find new people. The goal here is to introduce your business to cold audiences who have never heard of you but fit your ICP. The only audiences you should be testing in here are your prospecting audiences.

Here's how I'd prioritise them:

1. Lookalike Audiences: This is your number one priority. If you have enough data (you need at least 100 people in a source audience, but tbh more is better), you should create lookalikes based on your most valuable customers. Start with a 1% Lookalike of your customer list. Then you can test lookalikes of people who've filled out a lead form, initiated checkout, or even high-value website visitors. These audiences are gold because you're telling Meta "go find me more people who look exactly like the ones who already give me money."
2. Detailed Targeting (Interests/Behaviours): This is where your ICP research pays off. You're not going to target broad interests like "Business". You're going to target the specific software they use, the niche industry leaders they follow, the specific magazines they read. You can stack these interests to narrow down the audience. For example, people who are interested in 'Shopify' AND are 'Admins of a Facebook business page'. Test these in separate ad sets so you can clearly see what's working. One campaign we worked on for an eCom client, a women's apparel brand, saw a 691% return by focusing on very niche fashion blogger interests instead of broad 'clothing' interests.
3. Broad Targeting: This is something to test only when your pixel is very mature and has thousands of conversion events. Here you would literally target an entire country with just age and gender filters and let the algorithm find your customers. It can work shockingly well, but don't start here.

Inside this ToFu campaign, each of these audience types (e.g., 1% LAL of Purchasers, Interest Stack A, Interest Stack B) would be in its own ad set. This allows you to control the budget and see performance clearly.

Campaign 2: Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Nurturing

This campaign is for warming people up. These are users who have shown some interest but aren't ready to buy yet. They've visited your website, watched one of your videos, or engaged with your social media posts. You're trying to build trust and stay top of mind. Your ads here should be different—maybe showing testimonials, case studies, or overcoming common objections. Don't show them the same ad they saw in the ToFu campaign.

Audiences for your MoFu campaign:

• -> All website visitors (last 30-90 days)
• -> People who watched 50% or more of your video ads (last 90 days)
• -> People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page (last 90 days)

It's crucial to exclude anyone who has already converted or reached the BoFu stage from this campaign. You don't want to waste money showing nurturing ads to someone who's already in the checkout process.

Campaign 3: Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing

This is your highest ROI campaign. These are people who are on the verge of converting. They've added a product to their cart, started the checkout process, or viewed a key page multiple times. Your job here is to give them that final nudge. The ads should be direct and compelling, maybe with an offer like free shipping or a small discount to overcome any last-minute hesitation.

Audiences for your BoFu campaign:

• -> Added to Cart (last 7-14 days)
• -> Initiated Checkout (last 14 days)
• -> Viewed Content / Key Product Pages (last 14 days)

Again, you must exclude anyone who has already purchased. The BoFu audience is small but incredibly valuable. Even a small budget here can bring in fantastic returns. For one of our clients, a cleaning products company, we saw their revenue increase by 190% mainly by implementing a proper BoFu retargeting campaign to capture all those abandoned carts.

You'll need to understand your numbers to scale confidently...

Now, this structure is great, but you can't scale it if you don't know your numbers. The most important question isn't "how low can my cost per lead go?" but "how high a cost per lead can I afford to acquire a great customer?". The answer to that is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most businesses don't know their LTV, and it holds them back massively. They panic when they see a £50 cost per lead, even if that lead turns into a £10,000 customer. You need to do the maths.

It's calculated like this:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Customer Per Month * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate %

Once you know your LTV, you can determine your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy ratio is usually 3:1 (LTV:CAC). So if your LTV is £9,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,000 to acquire a new customer. This single number frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to invest in growth confidently.

Here's a little calculator to help you figure this out for your own business. Play around with the numbers and see how much you could actually afford to spend.

You'll need to let the algorithm do the heavy lifting...

Finally, let's talk about how to manage this structure in a way that aligns with your goal of "without constant manual adjustments". The answer is Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO).

Instead of setting individual budgets for each ad set inside your campaign, you set one single budget at the campaign level. You then let Meta's algorithm automatically distribute that budget to the best-performing ad sets in real time. This is exactly what you want for scalability.

If your Lookalike audience is suddenly getting amazing results, CBO will pour more money into it. If one of your interest audiences starts to fatigue, CBO will pull budget away from it. It makes decisions faster and more efficiently than a human ever could. It stops you from making emotional decisions, like turning off an ad set too early because it had one bad day.

By using a CBO campaign for ToFu, one for MoFu, and one for BoFu, you create a simple, powerful system. Your main job then becomes managing the overall budget between these three campaigns and, most importantly, testing new creatives. Your campaign structure should be stable; the real variable for scaling becomes your ad creative. You should constantly be testing new images, videos, and ad copy to find new winners that can beat your current controls. We've had several SaaS clients see really good results with UGC videos—it's just one of many angles you can test.

So, your weekly work isn't about fiddling with bids and budgets anymore. It's about analysing performance, turning off losing audiences or creatives, and introducing new tests into your evergreen structure. That's how you scale without driving yourself mad.

I know this is a lot to take in, but hopefully, it provides a clearer path forward. The goal is to build a logical, simple system that you can trust, so you can focus your energy on the things that really move the needle, like your offer and your creative.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you in a table below to give you a clear, actionable overview.

As you can see, getting this right involves more than just a technical setup; it's a strategic process. It requires a deep understanding of your customer, the platform's algorithm, and how to interpret the data to make smart decisions. It's often where businesses find they can benefit from working with someone with expertise in scaling these types of campaigns.

We do this day in and day out, and we've helped many businesses move from a state of frustration to one of predictable, scalable growth. If you feel you'd benefit from a second pair of eyes on your account, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy consultation where we can review your current setup together and identify the biggest opportunities for you.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh