How Top 1% Affiliates Build Profitable Lead Gen Campaigns on Meta Ads

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: . 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. Stop wasting money: Add this stop-loss rule » 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. Grow faster: Add this budget scaling rule » 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. Clone winners: Add this campaign cloning rule » 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 […]

If you are currently running or aim to run paid campaigns on Meta Ads at scale, it means that you are or will soon be managing multiple campaigns simultaneously. Spread across multiple ad accounts, testing multiple hooks, angles, creative elements, etc. Imagine having like 30-50 campaigns running at the same time, having to review their ad performance every day, work on new creatives, new angles, not to consider everything else you need to optimize down your campaign funnel. These X automatic rules will help you get rid of babysitting your campaigns, especially if you are managing considerable daily budgets. Automatically Stop Low-Performing Campaigns Not every campaign or ad set you launch is guaranteed to succeed. Only a small percentage of all launched campaigns or ad sets become winners. As such, shutting down low-performing campaigns or ad sets on time is crucial to save ad spend waste. The following rule will shut down a low-performing campaign after its 3rd day of running in case it doesn’t deliver the aimed results. As you can see from the screenshot below, the rule analyzes the total ad spend of the campaign, its daily performance over the last 3 days. Then on midnight of the specified time zone, it pauses the campaign automatically. This approach ensures each newly launched campaign or ad set gets enough time and budget. An alternative way of setting up this automatic rule is by replacing the CPA with the ROI (tracker), which is calculated based on the ad spend reported from Meta Ads and the revenue reported by your analytics platform. This is one of the unique capabilities of TheOptimizer, which allows you to optimize based on accurate combined statistics from more than one information source. Both of the above rules are set to execute actions at the campaign level. Using the same logic, you can easily set up rules at the ad set level. Automatically Scale Budgets on Good-Performing Campaigns Once you land on a good-performing campaign, your next optimization step is scaling it. However, this is something you shouldn’t do on gut feelings (like most media buyers do). Instead, you should take a data-driven approach that you can replicate and scale confidently. This is what the following rule does. It looks at the total spend of the campaign, the number of collected results over the last 7 days, as well as the actual day-to-day CPA over the last 3 days. Once everything meets the thresholds, the rule will increase the daily budget of the campaign 2x a week by 20%. This rule executes budget changes at the beginning of the day according to the selected time zone (usually ad account time zone) to ensure a smooth budget pacing throughout the day. Also, the frequency of budget changes ensures smooth, consistent scaling while accounting for CPA fluctuations that can occur after a budget increase. Alternatively, you can change budgets 3x a week or even more frequently by adding one more day in the execution schedule. Automatically Drop Budgets on Increased CPA Campaigns Quite often, when you increase budgets too aggressively, the CPA tends to go a bit higher than your CPA goal. When this happens, it’s best to drop back the budget to levels when your CPA was within your CPA goal. It’s a form of telling Meta that you don’t like the results you’re getting. This rule drops the bid specifically for when your campaign or ad set has been running with a good CPA (below a specific threshold), then in the last couple of days the CPA has increased (above a specific threshold). If the CPA is higher than your threshold for two consecutive days, then the rule will drop the daily budget of the campaign or ad set by 20% at the beginning of the day, according to the ad account time zone. You can create a similar rule using ROI or ROAS as a metric. Just make sure your conditions properly qualify which campaigns or ad sets the rule is going to adjust budgets too. Automatically Pause Degrading Campaigns or Ad Sets Sooner or later, campaigns come to a dead end where they don’t perform that good anymore. Especially those that used to be good performers and generate good profits. When that moment comes, it’s best to turn off the campaign to prevent wasting the profits it generated. This rule looks at campaign performance over the past 7 days. It first checks whether the campaign has generated at least 50 conversions during that period. If it meets that threshold, it then compares the ROI from days 6 to 4. If ROI during that window was higher than 20%, the rule proceeds to evaluate the ROI over the most recent 3 days, one day at a time. If it detects a consistent decline and sees that the ROI on the most recent day has dropped below -20%, it pauses the campaign or ad set. The goal of this rule is to cut wasted ad spend as early as possible when performance starts to decline. If you prefer a less aggressive approach, you can expand the time frame and allow more than one day of negative performance before triggering a pause. You can also adapt the rule to use ROAS or CPA instead of ROI, depending on how you track performance. Update Saturated Ads – Alert Rule This rule constantly monitors the performance of your ads and sends you an email, slack, or telegram alert to notify you it’s time to refresh your ads. This way you don’t let a good-performing campaign degrade to a point of no recovery; instead, you keep on feeding it with fresh creatives. The rule first checks if the ad has spent at least $5 over the last 6 days. If it meets that condition, it then looks at the CPA for the most recent 3 days and confirms whether performance has been consistently good across all three. Finally, it checks the ad frequency between days 3 and 1. If frequency is 3 or higher, the rule sends a notification prompting you to refresh the creatives. Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign. Automatically Pause Saturated Low-Performing Ads While you keep on feeding your campaigns with fresh ads to keep up the performance of your campaigns, it is best to kill any saturated ads that are generating results above your KPI goals. This rule checks if your ad has spent $5 or more over the last 7 days. It reviews the CPA for each day to see if it consistently exceeds a specific threshold. It also checks if the ad’s frequency is higher than 3. If all these conditions are true, the rule automatically pauses the ad. Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign. Automatically Clone Winning Campaigns – Same Ad Account As part of your scaling strategy, apart from increasing campaign budgets, you should also clone winning campaigns. This not only allows you to scale up the ad spend, but also gives the opportunity to land on a broader audience pool that will allow you to further scale your winners. On top of it, the cloned campaign will carry on part of the learnings from the original one. This rule checks if the campaign has spent at least $150 over the last 5 days. It also verifies that the campaign has generated 50 or more results in the last 7 days. If those conditions are met and the CPA has stayed below your set threshold for the last 4 days—indicating stable performance—the rule triggers the creation of 3 clones of the original campaign. The cloning process runs every Tuesday at midnight (PST), and each clone starts with a reset budget of $100/day. Cloning at midnight (based on the ad account’s time zone) prevents issues where campaigns are cloned mid-day and end up spending their full daily budget in just a few hours. The rule creates 3 clones instead of just one because not every new campaign will perform well. By launching multiple versions, you increase your chances of finding at least one that continues to deliver results. Since performance isn’t guaranteed right away, starting with a $100 daily budget helps reduce […]

In this live training, we dived deep into the exact strategies top media buyers use to automate campaign launches, test keywords, and scale effortlessly—so you can focus on what really matters: driving results. Training Agenda Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll learn from this training: Tracking Setup : Learn how to set up tracking efficiently to better track and analyze the performance of your campaigns. Keyword & Domain A/B Testing : How to split-test domains and keywords to maximize your margins. Tested Stop-Loss Rules : The only stop-loss rules you need to safeguard your budgets. Campaign Auto-Scaling : Take the guesswork out of scaling by automating your growth and maintaining control. Bulk Campaign Launching : Streamline your process to launch multiple campaigns at once, effortlessly. Campaign Analysis : What to look for and how to quickly analyze the performance of your campaigns. Fine-Tuning Rules :  The data-driven approach on how to fine-tune your existing rules or create new ones. Q&A  and Key Takeaways