How Much Should You Increase Budget?

For once, this isn’t a question about scaling without restarting the learning phase. This is in response to a specific recommendation that Meta is making.

Meta is rolling out Opportunity Score, which is a way of gamifying their delivery recommendations. One of my opportunities was to scale my high-performing ad set.

My Opportunity

Meta says:

This ad set has stable delivery and a lower cost per result compared to your ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More with the same goals. Consider increasing the budgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More to scale the results further.

Great! This could be a very helpful recommendation to get the most out of my advertising. It says the potential outcome is 29% more conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More, based on modeling.

But, How Much?

So, wait. I can get 29% more conversions, but how much do I need to increase my budget?

There doesn’t seem to be an answer. When I click to review the budget, there’s no indication of how much I should increase it.

But there’s got to be more info. There’s a tooltip that explains this 29% projection a bit more:

This percentage is based on a machine learning model of data from real advertisers who took this recommendation. These advertisers have the same optimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More for ad delivery. The model considers performance over 28 days.

Actual performance depends on many factors including market dynamics. This percentage is provided to give you an idea of possible performance, but isn’t guaranteed.

Still no clarity. So, that 29% number isn’t particularly helpful.

Clarity is Needed

Do I need to double my budget? Or is this simply saying that if I increase my budget (regardless of what that increase is), the average increase in conversions will be 29%? Needless to say, the amount of that increase is a critical element of this equation.

I’ve actually heard of some people getting specific recommended budget increases in Ads Manager. Maybe it was a test. But, that would be helpful here. Otherwise, that 29% number is pointless.

Have you seen this, too?