The BEST Method to Scale Meta Ads in 2026

Key Takeaways

In this video, I'll share with you a method of scaling meta ads that I wish I had learned sooner. And when I started Meta Ads, I had a big issue with a lot of clients and also the first job that I had. And that was the issue that occurs when you start to increase your daily budget. Essentially, the issue we would always face and in many cases would face it quite early is when we want to scale and we want to increase the volume of sales, we start to increase the daily ad spend. But as soon as we start to increase it, we do see quite big drop in results and the profitability of the campaign is no longer sustainable. So we have to shut down the campaign or scale it back down to the level it was before. Now this method that I'm going to share with you in this video is the answer or the solution to this exact issue and it's very straightforward to use. And I'll show you exactly the steps you need to take to be able to use this for your own business. And I'll also share with you in the end of the video some things you can expect when you start using it. It might seem very simple in theory, but in practicality and actually applying it, you will probably run into some new issues. And I'll also talk you through how we've dealt with those and how you can do the same. So, as you can see on my screen here, this is the issue that I again ran into so many times over my career. And it's the issue that starts to occur when you start increasing your daily ad spend. The diminishing returns you have when you start to scale is different for most businesses. And that just depends on where your current scaling cap is. And there's many factors that play into that, but every business has a current scaling cap. It's the maximum daily ad spend you can use or the maximum daily budget you can have on your campaign before you start to see a lot of diminishing returns. So, profitability drops. As you can see on my screen here, we have the graph which is the yellow one for the span and the results is in the orange graph. And in the beginning, you'll probably see more parallel results. As soon as you increase a little bit, you also see similar increase in your results or sales or conversions. But at some point, you will start to see less increase in results compared to the increase in spend. And that's where you start to have the diminishing returns. And as you can see, the gap between results and spend increases over time unless you use the method that I will share with you in this video. Now, the main issues that occurs when this happens and you reach your scaling gap is number one, you'll have diminishing returns. Your profitability will drop off. This can lead into cash flow issues. You don't get enough income to your business to actually make up for the consistent increase in daily spend and that can make it hard to continue to run your business if you continue to scale that way. And you're also not able to reach the desired volume. So if you have a lot of fixed cost in your business or you really want to take it to a certain level in terms of volume of sales, then this problem right here is just not going to make that possible for you. Now, with the solution that I will share with you in this video, you'll have profitable scaling. Number one, there will be very unlikely that you will actually increase your budget without also seeing a parallel increase in results. This leads to consistent cash flow. You're not running into any cash flow issues because as soon as you increase the ad spend, you also increase the results. It's a parallel increase. There's no way that you can have any cash flow issues there. And you'll also reach your desired volume profitably. So you will reach that volume of sales conversions that you want to reach without sacrificing the short-term profitability of your campaign. And this is the whole way we run ads for our clients. This is not long-term marketing where you put in a bunch of money and you hope to see a return in six months or one year. This is performance marketing we're doing here. So when we increase the budget, we really want to see, you know, in the next week or maybe just the next few days, we want to see a return on that increase in budget. So, as you can see now, I'm inside my ads manager, and I'll just set up an example campaign for you to show you how to use the scaling method. So, the first thing I'm going to do is just click create. And then, in this case, we're going to do a sales campaign. Now, depending on your objective, you will obviously choose the campaign objective that makes sense for you. But just note that this is not really possible for the awareness, engagement, and also, I wouldn't recommend doing the traffic objective. I would only do sales and leads for this strategy. In this case, we're going to do sales. And then I'm going to choose the manual sales campaign setting. I like to set everything up manually. And that's how we're going to do it in this video. I'm not going to give it a name, but of course, in your case, you will give a relevant name to your campaign. And then what we're going to do now is we're going to put on the advantage campaign budget because in this case, we're only going to have one adset. If you were going to test out multiple different targeting options, which I rarely do anymore because with the ad accounts that have historic data, the targeting will usually figure itself out if you just give it a broad option to go really broad. But if you're going to, you know, have multiple different adsets, uh, and you want to control the span per adset, then you wouldn't take this one on, of course. But in this case, I'm going to use the advantage campaign budget, previously known as CBO. Then we're going to set a daily budget. Let's go with 500 just as an example here. Now, the next thing you want to look out for, and this is super important because this is the whole main part of the strategy, and that is the campaign bid strategy. As you can see, by default, it's now set to highest volume. When you use highest volume, you're basically telling Meta, "This is my daily budget. Try to spend it every day, and just give me the most amount of conversions or sales that you can possibly get me." So you're just optimizing for spending your budget and getting the maximum amount of results for that budget. Now the key word here is that you're optimizing for spending your money. You're not optimizing for spending your money profitably. So this is why we're going to edit this one. And this is extremely important and I would unless you really just want to get the product into the market and you don't have any historic data, you have no clue what your expectations for the cost per result is going to be or the CPA, then you could start off with highest volume. But at some point I recommend for every business to switch over to either cost per result goal which is the one I'm now going to use or the rorowaz goal. I'm going to get a little bit into the difference between the two and why it's could be really really important for you. But just to keep it simple in the beginning let's just select cost per result call. When you select this you're going to aim to hit a certain cost per the results. So per sale or per conversion or per lead. But you're also trying to maximize the volume of those results. So, it's the highest volume, but you're also telling Meta, hey, I want to have this cost per result. So, we're going to select this one. Now, we're going to go to the adset level. So, in my case, I'm going to optimize for complete registration as the objective. Okay? I want people to go to my calendar and book in a strategy call with me. And then after the call, they might become a client. That's my funnel. Of course, optimize for the ultimate objective you have for your funnel. if that is a sale, if that is a booked registration, whatever that is, make sure that's what you have in here as the conversion event because meta always optimizes for what you tell it to optimize for. It's been a lot of back and forth on in the past is for example, if you're not getting enough conversion events, enough purchases, some e-commerce businesses would then optimize for add to cart. The problem is you're now optimizing to get people that adds to cart, not people that purchases. And there's actually a little bit of a difference there. Even though there's a strong correlation between the two conversion events, the ultimate objective, what you actually want is always going to yield you better results, a better return on your ad spend over time because it's just the most valuable conversion event for your business. Now, once we now scroll down to, as you can see here, cost per result goal, this is where you actually tell Meta what you're willing to or what your goal cost per result is going to be. So, if my calculations of the maximum I'm willing to pay to get a complete registration, to get somebody to book in a call with me, let's say that's 100. I haven't done this calculation recently, so I couldn't tell you specifically, but of course, in your case, you want to stay on top of your numbers. If you're doing e-commerce, you want to know your average gross margin, and you want to compare that to your average order value in your store. And once you know that, that's how you would choose your cost that you want to put that to your goal. But I'm also going to get into specifically for e-commerce and businesses with multiple different SKs why you should actually be using the raw as goal. Regarding the attribution setting, as you can see under here, if you show more options, I'm not going to do anything with that in this video, but make sure that you watch my other video right here. You can click on the left side here because you want to make sure you have the correct attribution setting for your campaign. Now, under audio controls, as you can see, I have the location set in my country and I have minimum age 18. But other than that, everything is open. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I have a lot of historic data in my ad account. I've been running ads in the past. So, by leaving the audience definition, as you can see over here, by leaving this one pretty broad, over time, the campaign will get smarter and I will not limit the ability for the algorithm to optimize on my behalf. I've set the ultimate objective that I want. I've also told Meta what profitability I can get that at. So what cost per result I can afford and now I will not specify any more targeting because based on that meta will figure that out itself. Now if you don't have any historic data in your ad account and you're just starting out then you might want to go down here and switch to original audience options. Use original audience and by doing that you will now have the ability to add in interests depending on your business. I'm running an advertising agency. So, in my case, I would obviously then optimize for e-commerce as an interest, right? Because I help a lot of e-commerce businesses. Make sure you always look at the interest and not the employment or or something like or jobs cuz that's very different and that can limit your audience size a lot. So, just keep that in mind. Then I would select a lot more like relevant interests based on this and that way the algorithm would optimize over time. But because I do have my pixel on my website and I have historic data, I don't need to do this. All this being said, I'm not going to get too deep into the targeting settings and how to target on meta ads. I will make another separate video on that. So, make sure you subscribe and turn on the notification bell so that you see uh when I upload that video. Now, the next thing we're going to do is obviously set up the actual ad creative. And this is extremely important because this is the main lever you can pull to get good results for your ads. But I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about how to make effective creatives because I have a bunch of videos on that. What I want to focus on in this video is going back to the bid strategy. So in this case now we use the cost per sold goal. Now let's talk a little bit about what you can expect when you now launch the campaign. So let's say we set up the targeting or we say stay broad as I've done in this example and you have between four to six different ads that you think are going to be really effective for you. Now, when you start publishing this campaign and you start to get data on it, you will probably see that some days the results are not going to hit your goal at all. So, I'm going to show you now an example of one client ad account where we actually use the cost per result goal and how that actually looks in the ads manager when you start using it. So, as you can see on this campaign, the prospecting campaign that we have for one of our e-commerce clients, you can see we're using the rorowaz goal as a bid strategy. And that's essentially the same thing. It's a cost control bit strategy, but instead of optimizing for a specific cost per conversion, we're here optimizing for row as target. Now, the only difference is when you use a row as goal, you will optimize for an average ratio between the span and the conversion value or revenue that you get from that spend. So, what that means is some orders are probably having a higher value. And if you're only optimizing for cost per conversion, that's not being taken into consideration in terms of the rorowass that your campaign is getting. So let's talk about an example. Let's say you're getting a conversion for say 50 bucks per conversion. Now, if one of those or multiple of those conversions have a much higher order value, so the customer spent a lot more in your store, that's not going to help you get the campaign to spend more. So let's say your target is actually, let's say, 45 bucks per conversion. and that's what you set as the cost goal. But on average, your cost is 50. So you're not hitting the goal. And when you're not hitting that goal that you set in the bid strategy, it's very likely your campaign will not spend as much money as you want. So you're not hitting that volume that you want. You're protecting your profitability based on the goal that you set, but you're not getting the volume of spend and volume of conversions that you want. But let's say we're using a rorowaz goal and we set the goal of rorowass to a 2.0 ras. So two rorowass. So for every dollar we spend on ads, the goal is to get $2 back in revenue. So we have a two rows as a goal. And in the same example, if this is the bid strategy that we use, the rorowas goal, and some of those conversions that came in, even though the cost per for the conversion in total was 50 bucks on average, some of those conversions were a lot more valuable than the others. So they helped increasing the overall rorowass. And in that case, the average rorowaz for the campaign can become a lot better. So let's say we got a 2.5 rorowass. Now we're 0.5 rorowaz above our target of two. In that case, we will spend all of the daily ad spend. And in some cases, this will allow us to even increase the ad spend and continue to increase the volume. So if you have a lot of different products and there is differences between the order value that you get in your store or on your website, then I would highly recommend using the rorowes call because it gives you more flexibility when you have different price points and different margins on the products and offers that you have. and it makes it a little bit easier to scale. But if you're like me, in my case, I just have one objective that I'm optimizing for and I just have one cost number that is associated with that objective. In that case, you might as well just use the cost per result cuz you don't have any differences in value for your conversions. So, to actually show you an example of what it looks like when you start to use this bid strategy in your campaigns inside Ads Manager, I'm going to show you one of our clients ad accounts here and show you what it looks like in results when you start using this. So this is the campaign and as you can see we set the cost per result goal to 300 Norwegian croners per result which is around 30 bucks and that is based off of the break even calculator which you will get if you click the link in the description. So you can basically just use your average gross margin across all SKs. So by using this Google sheet you will find the goal that you should put in your campaign and that's what we did here. And based on their average gross margin we put in 300. So if you look at the history of this campaign, as you can see, we started it off at the highest volume bid strategy. And again, the reason why we did that is because we wanted to find the average cost per result and using that to see where we can set the goal to avoid the campaign stop spending the ad spend. And that's usually one of the issues that happen when you start using this bid strategy is that you're not able to spend your daily budget, not able to hit the desired volume you need. So we started off at the highest volume to build the momentum, get in data to the campaign and also see what the average cost per result is going to be with the highest volume. And as you can see after running it for a bit, we switched it from highest volume to cost per result goal. Now we started it a little bit higher at 350 and then over time we lowered it to 300. The reason why we started it at 350 was because we wanted to be a little bit conservative, make sure that the campaign wasn't going to stop spend. And we saw that based off of the average cost up till that point, setting it at 300 would be too drastic and we'll probably made the campaign stop spending budget totally. So we started it off at 350 and then we lowered it to 300 after we got more consistent data and the results got better. Now as you can see on the results here, this is showing you the time period where we started the campaign and then you can see that we have a lot of days where the cost per result is quite a lot higher than what we can afford for it to be profitable. But we have these spikes here 200 August 12 we had 532 which is way above what we can afford and we had some other days where it was way way too high. So as you can see after we start applying the cost per sold goal it stabilized quite a lot. So around here September 11th that's why we applied it and as you can see the following days it stabilized and we were hitting our goal. At the same time during that time period we were able to increase the volume quite a bit. As you can see here over time, the volume of conversions did increase and the amount of spend also did increase after we did apply this. And the reason for that is because when we applied this bid strategy, we felt more secure that okay, let's apply this bid strategy to protect our profitability, but let's also increase our daily budget so that if the campaign is able to hit this call, we will allow it to spend more money. And that's one big benefit of using a cost control bid strategy. You can allocate your spend across a time period that creates a more efficient ad spend, more profitable results. You probably see already in your business that you have some periods and some days throughout the week where you usually see better results than others. And if you then can allow your campaign to spend a lot more on the good days. So let's say for example, you have one Saturday where the results are really really good and the algorithm sees a lot of potential for you, but your daily spend is limited to let's say 200 bucks. Then the campaign can actually even now by default it can stretch above that but it's still limited. It can stretch that far above the 200 that you have set as your daily budget. But if you do use cost control bid strategy so cost per sold goal or ROS goal, you can essentially just set your daily ad spend way higher. Instead of 200, you can set it to 600 or maybe even 1,000. And you can allow yourself to do that because the cost control bid strategy will make sure you're that you're not spending that money unless you're hitting your goal. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that on some days, you probably will not hit your goal at all. And even on consecutive days, you'll probably sometimes see that you're not hitting your profitability goal. You're not getting the rorowass or the cost per sold call that you need. Now, keep in mind that when you apply this bid strategy, the rorowas call and cost per sold call will try to average you over 7-day period. So, if you can see on my screen here, you see some days here, we are quite a lot above the goal. So, some days it spikes. This one 335 on this day we're way above and we have some days where it really really spikes high. Now this is some glitches in the algorithm, right? Sometimes it's just not able to figure out the probability of like getting you an impression for an ad and it can't really calculate exactly if that's going to turn into conversion at the cost that you have set. So it will try to average you out. It will find some cheaper conversions for you to average you out over a 7-day period. 7-day period because that's the 7-day attribution window. Your campaign can still get credit for conversions throughout the seven days. So on a 7-day period, that's how you should look at your results, not on a day-to-day period because then you might panic. Some days it's just not going to hit your goal. So keep that in mind when you start using this bid strategy. So to summarize what I've been talking about in this video, make sure that you use the highest volume bid strategy only if you're optimizing for spend. And if you're starting a brand new campaign with a quite a fresh ad account, then it might make sense for you to actually start with highest volume. But for a lot of businesses, and I would say 99% of businesses, at some point, you should definitely consider switching to a cost control bid strategy. It's either a cost per sold call or a rorowass call. And one thing that I haven't talked about in this video that I have talked about in another video, and I'll leave the link in the description if you want to check that out, is another cost control bit strategy that's called bid cap. And that one is rarely working. We've only had one client where we really got that to work. And the reason being, it's very hard to get campaigns to spend when using the bid cap. But on the positive note, using a bid cap is forcing you to on a almost like a day-to-day basis never go over the cap that you set per conversion. So with the royals goal or the cost per sold goal, it will try to average you out over a 7-day period. But with the bitcap, you will on a day-to-day basis always stay at your cap. But again, it's very very difficult to get it to span. You need a lot of volume of a lot of data to get that bit strategy to work. But again, I have another video, so check that out. I talk you through how we got it to work really well for one of our clients. Now, keep in mind again when you start using this a bit strategy, you need to understand your numbers. If you put your cost per result goal or your row target too conservatively, a big mistake a lot of people do and turns into that the campaign is just not spending enough money to hit the volume that you need to get the sales to cover all the other cost in your business, the fixed cost. So what you can do is as I show you in the example that we did for our client, we switch from highest volume to cost per sold call, but we set the cost goal a little bit higher in the beginning and then we over time slowly put it down to make sure that we're hitting our results that we need first and then we lower it to maintain the volume that we need. And also make sure that you set a much higher daily budget with this bid strategy than you would with a highest volume bid strategy to make sure that you capitalize on the good days and allocate your spend across a time period that allows you to capitalize more on the good periods for your business. So that's how you use this bid strategy. Make sure you test it out and let me know in the comments below if you have any experience using cost control bid strategies, what you have experienced when using it. And if you have any questions to anything that I talked about in this video, make sure you leave it in the comments below and I'll go in and answer you. If you want to see future videos like this and learn more about meta ads and just see more of the lessons and learnings that I share along the way as I help my clients with meta ads, make sure you click the subscribe button below and leave a like as well if you want to see future videos like this. So, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next