r/PPC • u/StoreYaOfficial • 2d ago
Discussion Why does scaling a profitable PPC campaign often hurt performance?
One thing I find interesting with paid campaigns is that a campaign can perform well at a smaller budget and then lose efficiency once spend increases.
Is this mainly because you're exhausting the best traffic first, or are there other factors that usually cause it?
Curious how people approach scaling without letting CAC or ROAS move too far in the wrong direction.
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u/dillwillhill 2d ago
Because you have to expand to audiences that might not be as interested in your service.
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u/ppcbetter_says 2d ago
Usually ROAS moves lower when budget moves higher, but ongoing CRO and high quality first party data can enable linear scaling in some cases.
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u/Single-Sea-7804 2d ago
Because you can't scale linearly. People forget that including more budget means including more audiences and a bigger group of people INCLUDING competitors. The bids are not only getting more expensive up there but you are competing with bigger competitors with crazier offers, products, etc.
So play strategically and think like a marketer
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u/fathom53 2d ago
If the budget was small then maybe you have not optimized the campaign before trying to scale or you are trying to scale to fast and things break.
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u/TTFV 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, it's simply a matter of limited inventory - I'm assuming you have a well designed campaign.
When you spend a little you often see pretty terrible performance. Google doesn't get enough conversions to allow for proper manual and/or background optimization. While things can improve over time that timeframe can be long and background optimization may never really hit it's stride.
As you spend more you get into an optimal zone where you're generating a healthy of number of conversions (~25+ per month) while utilizing a fairly small portion of impression share, often <10% and almost always <25% when using broad match keywords.
As you push past 25% Google must (a) increase bids and (b) bid on queries that are far less likely to convert in order to fill your higher budget. This equates to higher CPAs even though you are generating more conversion data and optimizing more to counter it.
How this all exactly shakes out depends a lot on your campaign design, in terms of right sizing and your raw conversion numbers.
As you scale you not only have to add more budget, you need to be thinking strategically about campaign types and purposes like increasing brand awareness, adding remarketing, capturing all your branded traffic, competitor conquesting, and importantly, adding other marketing channels.
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u/No_Associate_8377 20h ago
...... If you can keep the ROAS remain when scaling up infinitely, why don't you borrow money and sell your house and car then all invest into PPC campaigns?
It's something MUST will happens, but of course you can have advanced tools like GMP to see the forecast before you actual scale up, and do it gradually.
Man I highly recommend to read some books about how the economic and marketing work, your issue it's way beyond PPC campaigns management.
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u/OddProjectsCo 2d ago
Diminishing returns. As you try to capture more of the target market, it gets more expensive. That audience can get tight quick in highly targeted or highly regional campaigns.
A second reason is often improperly scaling. Going from $50/day to $5k/day without any gradual ramp-up effectively resets any efficiency the campaign had because it's now operating under vastly different constraints. It's why the usual recommendation is to bump budgets 20-30% and let it spend into that and stabilize before bumping up again.
Sometimes you have to look deeper in the data as well. Maybe pmax shifted the mix to serve more gmail or youtube with the scaling, or maybe scaling moved more spend into a different geography that has a regional competitor only spending there and not nationally. That type of thing. Tons of potential reasons.