Scaling Meta Ads (Facebook Ads) sounds like a simple thing for most media buyers. Just increase budgets and keep adding new creatives, right? Well, you know that the very moment you touch a profitable campaign, it tanks!
The challenge isn’t getting a winning campaign at low scale. It’s keeping winners profitable while you scale them. And when you’re spending serious money, every move counts.
In this guide, I’ll break down the exact decisions that make or break your scaling strategy.
- When to start scaling a campaign and by how much?
- How do you know it’s the right time to clone?
- What should you clone: campaigns or ad sets?
- When does it make sense to clone across multiple ad accounts?
- After cloning, do you keep duplicating or scaling budgets?
Let’s break it all down so you can scale more reliably.
When Should I Start Scaling a Campaign and by How Much?
Most media buyers either fail to scale a profitable campaign properly or make the mistake of scaling it too early. For example, even though you might be getting a good CPA within the first couple of days of your ad set or campaign running, it doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough to be scaled unless you have collected enough conversion data.
According to Meta’s official documentation, ad sets and campaigns need to go through at least a full 7-day learning period and collect a minimum of 50 conversions. However, real-world results show something slightly different.
If your campaign generates around 8-10 or more conversions a day consistently, you don’t necessarily need to wait a full week before starting to scale your campaign. Here’s why:
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As you can see from the above graph, during the first couple of days, CPAs are fluctuating in the high range, sort of like 2x-5x your CPA goal or even higher. During this period, Meta seems to be testing different audience pools in order to find the best audience able to deliver the highest number of results for the allocated budget.
By day 3, the CPA has the tendency to come closer to the desired CPA. By day 4, you might hit your desired goal, which will then continue delivering results at a similar CPA or lower.
With these patterns in mind, you should give Meta at least 3-4 days with a consistent amount of generated conversions before starting to scale your campaign or ad set budget. If you do it earlier, or you have generated less than 8 conversions a day, then you’re likely playing russian roulette, and what you scaled might tank the next day.
Besides the number of days running and the generated amount of conversions, how much and how often you increase your campaign or ad set budgets is quite important.
Years ago, Meta used to recommend increasing the daily budget by not more than 30% at a time. This was the safe mark that helped you scale smoothly without shaking the algorithm’s learnings.
These days, Meta’s official documentation is quite vague and refers to extreme budget changes like 10x the current budget without giving any percentage references.
However, when looking at hundreds of thousands of campaigns and their scaling dynamics, we can confidently say that the safest approach would be to stay within the 20%-30% range for medium to high CPA campaigns. For lower CPA campaigns, you can also push it to 50% or even 100% budget increases at a time. Just make sure you have enough conversions and you don’t do it way too often.
How Often Should You Change Budgets?
Budget change frequency is quite important too! In fact, exaggerated budget changes are counted as “significant edits” for Meta, which leads to resetting the learnings the campaign has collected so far. Too frequent budget changes continuously impact your ad set or campaign learnings, which later might lead to a fluctuating CPA that never settles.
Check out the following graph:
In this graph, you may notice how the CPA increases every time a budget change is applied to an ad set or campaign. In fact, every time a significant budget change is applied, the CPA tends to increase for 1-2 days, then settle back down to its optimal range.
Of course, the CPA is highly influenced by the ad strength and competition, however, it’s important to consider how significant budget changes impact the stability of the ad set or campaign.
As such, for more stable campaigns, it’s best to scale your budgets once every two to three days. If your CPA is low enough and you have enough margin, you can also change it more frequently in exchange for a slightly higher CPA, lower margin, but higher net profit.
When Should I Clone Ad Sets or Campaigns?
Another way of scaling campaigns is to clone your best performers multiple times. This not only allows you to have more campaigns using the same winning set of creatives and funnels. It also allows you to reach a much larger audience than you couldn’t have reached through a single campaign with a limited budget.
Interestingly enough, when you clone ad sets or campaigns, your likelihood of reaching a different audience pool is pretty high. For this very reason, you might notice an important performance difference between the original ad set or campaign, even after you’ve run the new one past the initial learning period.
Getting back to when it’s the right time to clone… once you find a winning ad, ad set, or campaign, it’s best to start scaling it not only vertically (by increasing budgets), but horizontally too (cloning it).
In a nutshell, if the ad set or campaign generates 8-10 conversions a day consistently on optimal CPA or ROI and has exited the learning phase by day 5, you are good to go.
If it takes longer for the ad set or campaign to exit the learning phase, then give it enough time to collect at least 50 conversions/week on a good CPA or ROI, then go for it.
What Should I Clone: Campaigns or Ad Sets?
The short answer to this is both. However, there are some nuances and situations when you’d want to clone campaigns over ad sets, ad sets over campaigns, or even just ads from one campaign to another.
If you are running CBO (campaign budget optimization) campaigns (currently labeled as Advantage Campaign Budget), it makes more sense to clone campaigns. Cloning ad sets inside such campaigns won’t make much sense unless you plan on changing the audience targeting, since Meta will try to focus the campaign budget on the best-performing ad set. In other words, you won’t be scaling your spend.
If you are running ABO (ad set budget optimization) campaigns (meaning you’re setting the budget on the ad set level), it makes sense to clone ad sets within the same campaign. By doing so, you are leveraging campaign-level learnings that have been collected so far and utilizing them on the newly cloned ad sets to exit the learning phase faster and potentially perform very similarly to the original one.
On top of it, for ABO you can also clone campaigns, and that will very quickly scale the ad spend multiple times from the current one.
Pro tip: When cloning ABO campaigns, make sure you reset your scaled ad set budgets to a reasonable amount, otherwise your newly created campaign and ad sets will start spending on hefty budgets and that might not make much sense.
Does it Make Sense to Clone Across Ad Accounts?
Most new Meta ad accounts have a default spending limit that progressively increases as you build up some spending history with them. This often may prevent you from scaling winners fast and taking advantage of the momentum to generate more profits.
Besides that, depending on the type of campaigns that you’re running or how aggressive your ads are, ad accounts might be at risk of getting restricted from advertising.
Both these cases prevent you from scaling or squeezing any potential profits from your winning campaigns. As such, cloning campaigns across multiple ad accounts is the next level of scaling your winning campaigns.
This not only allows you to multiply your current scale faster, but also helps you mitigate any potential ad account restrictions that might turn your whole activity to zero.
Should I Keep Duplicating and Scaling Budgets?
Once you’ve cloned your winning campaigns, you restart your campaign optimization cycle.
- New clones need to be cloned on lower budgets in case the original ones have already been scaled. So, consider resetting their budgets when you clone them.
- New clones will undergo their learning period. So, after 3-4 days of running, you may want to start turning off any low performers while keeping winners on. Keep present that there’s no guarantee new clones will be winners. Some of them will tank and some will survive.
- Just like with new campaigns, you will have to start scaling budgets up. From initial budget to scaled ad set or campaign budgets.
- Cloning is continuously applied to both original campaigns and their clones, allowing you to scale exponentially by multiplying the number of winning campaigns, ad sets, or ads, while also systematically increasing their budgets.
- Cross-account campaign cloning continues as well. For as long as you have a winning campaign, cloning it across as many ad accounts as you can helps.
Scaling profitably requires patience, strategic budget increments, and systematic cloning. Respect Meta’s learning dynamics, clone intelligently based on campaign structure, and leverage multiple accounts to scale and minimize restriction risks. Master these steps, and you’ll convert winners into scalable revenue engines.
