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Drowning in orders with scaled campaign that’s just above breakeven
Posted by on September 26, 2025 at 1:59 amNewish ecom store that had some success with a £20 day campaign.
I duplicated it and bumped the budget to £100 a day. Roas dropped as expected, but the campaign is still just about profitable.
Vast majority of customers are repeat buyers so I'm fairly happy to acquire new customers at breakeven.
Trouble is I'm struggling with the increased order demand and can't afford to bring in help as these orders can't fund that.
From a ppc campaign pov, do I scale the budget down? Does that need to be done in stages/percentages?
Are breakeven campaigns seen as failures?
(Upsells/cross sells just won't cut it here. Facebook ad visitors only want the product in the ad for their 1st order).
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1 Reply
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Option 1 is to update it to a tROAS / tCPR and then push that target up above breakeven slowly. Option 2 is just to drop budgets a few days at a time down to what you want.
“Are breakeven campaigns seen as failures.”
If these are new customer orders, and you have a decent LTV and decent cash flow? Absolutely not.
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The rule of thumb is – no more than 20% changes up or down. Leave it a couple of days, and if it hits your goals, then another 20%
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Only you can say if breakeven is worth it for your business. Some brands will do it because they just care about scale right now and have a quick repeat purchase rate to make them profitable within 30 – 60 days of the first purchase.
If you can not support the demand then you need to scale down the budget. When scaling budgets down, you can do it at a faster rate because you are just decreasing and that makes campaigns less sensitive to the change. As long as you still have conversion data coming in to support that lower budget.
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Increase your tROAS (if you’re using tROAS) or lower your budget… either way this will lower your order volume and increase your ROAS per order.
That will address both of your problems.
Just keep in mind that if you go too low with conversion volume that can tank your performance, i.e. don’t starve Google of conversion data.
Another consideration is to set the campaign to target new customers only, which will also lower your spend and order volume while only driving new customers, no ad spend on existing customers. You do need to upload your customer list into the account to support this function.
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Try an Ad Set with LLA of your Purchasers. Meta is getting good at doing that already, but seeding the ad set with that audience could greatly improve ROAS for that ad set which you may be able to scale more profitably. Obv, always retarget buyers and cart abandoners in other Ad Sets.
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Scale the budget down in 20–25% steps so delivery doesn’t crash breakeven campaigns aren’t failures if repeat buyers push lifetime value into profit.
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