Meta Ads Campaign results dropping with increased budget

Ask Me Anything Q&A 2hmediamarketingbudget

Topic summary

A Meta Ads campaign experiencing strong performance at $2,000/day saw significantly worse results when the budget was scaled to $5,000/day. The higher spend led to lower ROAS and nearly doubled CPM, despite using the same Advantage+ shopping campaign with broad audience targeting.

Key Issue:

  • Duplicated campaign with 2.5x budget increase produced worse performance metrics
  • Meta support has not provided a satisfactory explanation

Suggested Explanation:
The campaign likely hit audience saturation at the higher budget level. When ad spend increases too rapidly, it can trigger diminishing returns as the platform exhausts the most responsive audience segments.

Recommended Solutions:

  • Segment campaigns by geographic location or specific audiences rather than relying on broad targeting
  • Consider that broad targeting may be less effective at higher budget levels
  • A detailed answer is available in the AMA recording on YouTube (timestamp 00:35:47)
Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I was running an ads campaign on Meta and getting great results with a budget of $2,000 per day. I duplicated the campaign and set the new budget to $5,000 per day. The higher budget yielded a much lower ROAS and almost doubled our CPM. I have gone back and forth with Meta over this for several days now, and they still have not given me an explanation that makes sense. Can you offer any ideas as to why increasing ad spend would yield poorer results? The audience target is broad, and we are using Advantage + shopping campaigns.

(Note, I asked this question in the live broadcast chat, and you started to answer it, but then the video stopped working for me and I have been trying to get back in to it, but the link just takes me to a page with a recording of the video and it gets cut off at exactly where I lost the feed, so maybe you are having technical issues on your end..?) Thank you!

2

Hi @BrittneyElliott

Thanks for coming to the AMA.

Increasing your budget too much can lead to diminishing returns and increased costs. You might be hitting saturation. Consider segmenting your campaigns by geographic location or audience. Broad targeting can be less effective. If you’d like to see our full answer, check out the stream recording which we have uploaded to YouTube. We start answering your question at around 00:35:47