Stop Scaling With a Broken Funnel: How to Know When You're Ready to Increase Your Ad Spend

Scaling without fixing your funnel is like filling a bathtub with the drain open. You can pour all the water you want, but you'll never fill that tub.

As a coach or course creator, you've probably experienced this frustration firsthand. You're spending thousands on Facebook and Instagram ads, getting leads, but the conversions feel completely unpredictable. Some months you're celebrating, others you're wondering where all your ad budget went.

The problem isn't your offer. It's not even your audience. The problem is scaling before your funnel is ready to handle the traffic.

How to Assess If Your Funnel Can Handle More Traffic

Before you increase your ad spend, you need to evaluate two critical factors: technical capacity and conversion performance.

Technical Capacity: Your page speed matters more than you think. If you're sending 100+ people per day to a landing page that loads slowly, you're losing leads before they even see your offer. A slow-loading page can cost you 20-30% of your traffic instantly. That's not a conversion problem—that's a technical problem that will eat your budget alive.

Conversion Performance: Look at your data from the past 7-30 days. For evergreen funnels, you want to see conversion rates above 30%. For live events, anything above 20% shows potential. These aren't just nice-to-have numbers—they're the minimum thresholds that separate profitable campaigns from expensive experiments.

The Metrics That Actually Matter

Cost Per Lead Benchmarks: After working with hundreds of accounts, I've seen cost per lead vary dramatically. But here are the benchmarks you should aim for:

• Free resources (guides, checklists): Under $5 for website forms, under $2 for Facebook lead forms

• Live webinars: $8-12 average, with under $5 being exceptional

• Evergreen offers: Under $5 is the magic number for maximum ROI

Why $5? When we run projections across different conversion rates and price points, $5 and under consistently delivers the highest return on ad spend. Under $4 is better, under $3 is even better, but $5 is your target zone.

Conversion Rate Reality Check: A 100% conversion rate is mythical. I've seen it happen for a few days here and there, but it's not sustainable. Here's what good actually looks like:

• Live events: 30%+ conversion rate is excellent, 20%+ is acceptable

• Evergreen funnels: 60-70% is exceptional, 40-60% is good, 30%+ is your minimum

If you're hitting these numbers, your funnel can handle more traffic. If you're not, you need to pause and optimize before you scale.

Calculate Your Earnings Per Lead

This is the metric most people ignore, but it's crucial for scaling decisions. Your Earnings Per Lead (EPL) is simple: total revenue divided by total leads.

If you've earned $10,000 from 1,000 leads, your EPL is $10. Now, if you're generating leads for $2, you're looking at a 5x return on ad spend. That's scalable.

The rule of thumb: your cost per lead should be 50% or less of your EPL. If your EPL is $10, you want to generate leads for $5 or less. If your EPL is $250, you can afford higher costs per lead, but the same principle applies.

When to Pause Instead of Scale

Sometimes the best decision is to pause your campaigns. I've worked with clients who had to pause profitable funnels for two weeks to fix backend issues. The ads were converting, hitting their cost per lead targets, but there was a gap in the email sequences that was killing conversions on the backend.

After fixing those technical issues and rebuilding that part of the funnel, the backend metrics improved dramatically when we turned the ads back on.

Remember, Facebook's Ad Manager only shows you 7 days of data on campaigns. If someone converts 10, 15, or 21 days later, you won't see it in your ads dashboard. This is why you need proper tracking systems and why you can't make scaling decisions based solely on what you see in Ad Manager.