Hello experiMENTAList, it’s Sundar 👋

I’m a former Head of Marketing Science at Uber where I optimized $1Bn+ in spend across Brand, Performance, and Lifecycle.

Now, I’m sharing the same playbooks top Consumer Techs use to prove, optimize, and scale Marketing ROI with you!

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Now let’s step into the lab!

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Whenever someone responds to my welcome email, I ask them if there’s anything within Consumer Tech Marketing (Strategy or Science) they’re interested in reading more about.

Here was a recent ask:

And if the question is in my wheelhouse then I write an article about it (which is why I encourage all of you to tell me what you’d like to see!).

So today we’re going to discuss what you need to do to scale Meta Ads.

We’ll cover:

Let’s go scale!

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Before, we dive into how to scale on Meta, there are 2 fundamental questions we need to answer.

I’ve scoured the internet and the general consensus is that “knowing you have a scaling problem” is truly more subjective than you might think, but it boils down to does more budget = more performance.

So, simply, you have a scaling problem when increasing budgets results in a linear increase in CAC or decrease in ROAS.

For example, if you increase budgets by 20% and your CAC goes up by 20% (or ROAS down by 20%) then you effectively do not have the right environment to scale.

This is easy to answer but hard to actually assess (no one said this would be easy).

You need to keep pushing your budget until cost per marginal incremental acquisition = marginal LTV.

That sounds like a lot of words so let me break it down a bit.

The cost per marginal incremental acquisition looks at how much you additionally have to spend to get that last incremental acquisition.

Example

In this example, the cost per marginal incremental acquisition of going from $100 → $200 in spend is $4. Why?

($200 - $100) / (75 - 50) = $4

For an additional $100, you get 25 more incremental acquisitions at a cost per marginal incremental acquisition of $4.

Now, let’s look at the LTV side. At $100 in spend, you generated $500 in LTV. At $200 in spend, you generated $675. This means that the incremental 25 users generated an incremental LTV of $7. Why?

($675 - $500) / (75 - 50) = $7.

In this situation, the incremental users you acquire have a marginal LTV of $7 while your cost per marginal incremental acquisition = $4. Keep scaling baby!

Remember, attributed ≠ incremental so only incrementality tests can help here, but if you’re still early in the scaling journey, you might not have to worry about this yet.

Now let’s look at what else we have to do to scale Meta!

The biggest news in the Meta world is the launch of Meta’s Andromeda which is their AI (what isn’t at Meta) based ad distribution engine. Essentially, it takes their Advantage+ (aka ASC+) campaigns and is now using that engine to power all ads.

The beautiful thing is that it simplifies a lot of complex account and campaign structure challenges that many people had. The consensus is that Andromeda is insanely powerful and that there’s no point fighting Meta’s ability to serve the best ads (much like experts feel about Google too) so luckily you have one thing less on your plate.

So what do you need to focus on instead?

Meta is now doubling down on the power of creatives. Half assed creatives will no longer suffice and the real advantage Marketers have is in building high quality creatives . Yes, quantity matters because you need to test different concepts but the true differentiator is now quality.

So, if you’re hitting a scaling wall, here’s a few things you must do on the creatives side:

Like I mentioned, Andromeda seems to be rewriting the rules of campaign structures and set up as we speak so there’s still a lot of learning left here, but one thing is clear:

If you are using Meta for your acquisition campaigns, then you should be damn sure that the campaigns are primarily driving new user acquisition and not existing users. Targeting existing users is the #1 reason platforms show incredible ROAS making your ads look more incremental than they truly are.

Now, retargeting in itself is not bad but most companies are really bad at accounting for that when calculating LTV or even identifying users as existing users, so a clear way to prevent this is by ensuring you’re not targeting existing users.

However, when you shift from targeting existing → not targeting existing what might happen is that your ROAS will drop BUT your scalability improves because now it forces Meta to go after new audiences and reallocates budget to more incremental users.

As part of this broader “don’t target existing users” tactic, you should also scale budgets up on campaigns / creatives that are driving the most amount of New Users by looking at the breakdown by audience.

Otherwise, there’s doesn’t seem to be other major account structure changes you should use to scale on Meta, but give me feedback if I’m wrong and I’ll update the post.

There is, however, one campaign structure change you should implement if scaling is an issue for you.

Paid subscribers can proceed to continue reading about how to scale Meta: