What is scaling?
In paid search, scaling means increasing ad budgets, and therefore ad visibility, in order to achieve a higher volume of results.
The goal varies depending on the acquisition channel. In paid social (Meta Ads), the aim is to reach new users and audiences, while in Google Ads, scaling allows you to bid on more keywords.
There are two main types of scaling:
- Vertical scaling: commonly used in paid social. It simply means increasing the budget on your best-performing campaigns. The focus here is on deepening and optimizing your current ad strategy.
- Horizontal scaling: this means increasing the budget to launch new campaigns and reach different audiences. The goal here is to diversify your ad strategy.
Is the account ready to scale?
Before entering a scaling phase and unlocking additional budget, it's essential to make sure the account is actually ready to be scaled. This starts with clearly defining your objectives.
When scaling, the volume of results (leads or conversions) can increase significantly. You need to make sure you can handle the increase in leads or that you have enough inventory.
According to Facebook, it's recommended to keep your structure as simple as possible:
- A maximum of 3 to 4 campaigns to give the algorithm flexibility.
- Analyze campaign overlap to avoid wasting budget.
- Pause or stop underperforming campaigns.
- Group your best-performing audiences and gradually expand them based on budget.
Finally, check that the campaign hasn't hit a ceiling. Depending on the objective and niche, a campaign may have already reached its entire target audience at a low budget. In that case, horizontal scaling will be needed to diversify the strategy and avoid audience saturation.
Increasing budgets
Across acquisition channels, any change in settings, whether budget, audience, or keywords, triggers a new learning phase. This can impact performance, so it's critical to analyze result volatility and avoid increasing budgets when results are fluctuating significantly.
To minimize risk, budgets should be increased gradually to avoid disrupting the learning phase. Except in special cases, the recommended approach is to adjust the budget by a maximum of 20% every 48 to 72 hours.
What are the potential consequences?
When optimizing campaigns, increasing the budget doesn't automatically mean better performance or profitability. The steps outlined above must be followed, otherwise scaling can produce the opposite effect and lead to a decline in results.
In general, scaling an account delivers a higher volume of results, but it lowers ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and therefore profitability. If your primary goal is to maximize profitability, scaling is not the right solution.
In paid social, higher budgets can also lead to ad fatigue. You'll need to plan ahead and have enough creative assets to avoid excessive repetition. Those creatives should be developed thoughtfully, by analyzing which types of visuals perform best and building variations from them.
Key best practices to remember
- Simplify your account structure and only scale your best-performing campaigns.
- Increase budget gradually by 20% every 2 to 3 days.
- Develop diverse creative assets to prevent ad fatigue.
Want guidance on your digital marketing strategy? Don't hesitate to reach out!
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