Scale ad spend to $10K/week profitably: 5 tips

Any rookie can scale ad spend unprofitably. And it doesn’t take a hugely skilled marketer to spend profitably at low volume. The real challenge is to scale ad spend profitably.

I recently chatted with Lukas Szanto, who runs All The Way UA after managing lead gen and UA at several other companies, where he scaled 2 mobile games to $50/month each. Recently, he went from $0 to $10,000 per week for a subscription app, and we chatted about how.

It takes more than you might think.

“It’s not enough to find a creative that will allow you to have a 10% profit or break-even on your $100/day spend and just crank it up,” Szanto says. “You’re going to lose profitability 100% guaranteed.”

So what do you do? 

Hit play:

5 tips to scale ad spend profitably

You can’t just scale and hope for the best. And you can’t just hope that the super-smart algorithms and AI wizardry at all the ad networks today will magically guarantee your success.

Those algorithms are designed to help you grow — sure. But their primary purpose is to ensure that the company that owns them makes money.

So you need a strategy, and you need a plan.

1. Split creative testing into a launch phase and a scale phase

What you need from creative testing before and after scaling are very different things. 

Before scaling, you need to find a unicorn. You need a 10X creative that will significantly overperform.

Profitability declines with scaling, so you need a home run in the launch phase before you add fuel to the fire in the scaling phase.

In the launch phase:

• Spend $300/day
• Start with simple, scrappy, CHEAP ads
• Reserve the UGC and influencer marketer for later
• Test 30-40 different creative angles

2. Hit the scale phase when you 2X your profitability goals

Most advertisers scale too soon.

You cannot be happy with 10% better or 20% better. Performance will decline when you scale spend, so you need at least 200% better. Better yet, keep hunting until you find your 10X creative that vastly outperforms everything else.

Why?

“For every double of your budget, you’re gonna lose around 10 to 20% of your results. So if you’re at 160% and then you double your budget, you’re gonna lose like 16- 32% of net profitability.”

Your #1 goal: find that unicorn creative that will take you to twice your needed profitability metric, whatever that is. 

Don’t scale ad spend until you find it. 

3. Build a smart campaign structure during the scale phase

Every ad account is unique: there is no 1-size-fits-all for success. 

But what you must do is continue to test. Every creative, including your unicorn creative, wears out over time. You need a strong stable of 10X creatives to take its place when needed.

If, however, you try to test new creative in the same adset as your proven unicorn creative, your new creative will get slaughtered every time: it won’t get a fair shot. That’s simply because the ad networks’ algorithms are optimized for what it knows will work. It’s going to show your proven creative over your new creative almost every time, and unless your new creative has some insane antigravity-cold-fusion-antimatter-reactor magic, it’ll lose and lose and lose.

(One reason: social proof matters, and on social platforms where likes or views are visible, people will pay more attention to anything simply because they see that it’s earned other people’s attention as well.)

So give new creative angles separate adsets with fixed budgets to get good data. You can only do this with manual intervention.

When things are going well with strong creative, shift towards automated tools: they’ll manage it just fine.

4. Be innovative with tracking and tools when you scale ad spend

Of course Singular as your MMP will help you understand where your best traffic comes from and what your most converting campaigns are. 

Still, make a point of asking your users/players/customers where they came from. You can add it to your onboarding flow and it gives you first-hand first-party directional data on which channels are working. 

I’ve heard this advice from multiple marketers, by the way: even the most sophisticated digital campaigns can be improved with this super old-school tactic.

If you use Apple Search Ads, custom product pages will give you better data tracking and conversion measurement because you know which adsets from which ad networks are directing traffic to which custom product pages, and you can use rough cohorts in App Store Connect to analyze long-term conversion trends.

5. Be ready for the challenges

Stuff is going to happen. It always does.

In Szanto’s case, an ad network removed a key in-app event data point without notice, and he lost event tracking. In other cases, your unicorn creative might just run out of steam. Or a competitor releases something stunning.

Something is going to happen.

Scaling isn’t linear, and it takes time. Expect to spend at least 3 months before consistently hitting your target CAC. Some publishers and advertisers expect instant profitability, but most launches are at 50% or less.

Once you do hit profitability, stay in the zone with ongoing optimization.

Scale ad spend: much more in the full podcast

Yeah, you really need to listen to or watch the whole thing. It’s that good.

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds here.

The key idea:

Scaling any app’s ad spend from zero to $10K/week is a process, not an event. Especially if you want to do it profitably. The key is finding the right creative, optimizing your structure, tracking performance accurately, and being patient while building a sustainable acquisition model.

I know patience is a bad word for most of us … but it is critical.

Here’s what’s in the full podcast:

• 00:00 Introduction to Scaling Ad Spend
• 01:49 Creative Testing Strategies
• 03:56 Building a Strong Foundation
• 05:08 Iterating and Testing Angles
• 12:54 Campaign Structure Essentials
• 18:21 Isolating Strong Ads for Better Performance
• 19:09 Understanding Meta’s Algorithm and Risk
• 19:40 The Correlation Between Risk and Reward
• 20:17 Creative Testing and Patience for Unicorn Ads
• 20:28 Tracking and Tools for Campaign Success
• 21:08 The Impact of iOS Changes on Attribution
• 22:22 Survey Strategies for Indirect Attribution
• 24:48 Using Custom Product Pages for Better Attribution
• 29:14 Challenges in Mobile Marketing
• 31:50 Realistic Expectations in Paid Ads
• 36:35 Concluding Thoughts and Final Insights