How fast should you scale Google Ads? (and what happens when you scale too fast)

In my emails and content, I share a lot of strategies to help ecom brands scale their ad spend.

However, there’s a critical distinction I need to make here.

Spending more isn’t the goal with Google Ads.

The goal is to do so efficiently and profitably.

I’ve seen too many brands rush to scale and wreck their accounts in the process.

As a result, a big chunk of the budget goes to waste.

And they usually have to tear down and rebuild campaigns just to undo the damage.

This happens a lot with brands already doing 8 figures a year. They think they have the cash, so let’s just scale.

Case in point:

A while ago, we audited a brand that scaled their ad spend from $75K to $260K in just 30 days.

It looked like a success story.

But when we reviewed the account, we found these problems:

ONE 

Their repeat rate over the last 30 days showed 1.14, which signals duplicated conversions or tracking issues..

TWO

20% of spend and 45% of conversions in their pMax campaigns came from branded terms.

The average CPC for those is $2.59, with some hitting $10.

On top of that…

They were using smart bidding and broad match for their branded Search campaigns.

So they had to pay anywhere from $2 to $30 per click on their own brand name.

That’s absurd.

Branded traffic is the lowest-hanging fruit in the account. In most cases, it should not cost more than $0.30 per click.

Which means… they were overpaying 5-100x for customers who were already looking for them.

THREE

Only 17.4% of their pMax budget went toward Shopping.

This is a major underinvestment.

For ecom brands, Shopping is the most valuable placement inside Google Ads. It should take up a big part of your pMax spend.

But instead, their budget was flowing into other places.

FOUR

They didn’t have a lot of dedicated landing pages for Demand Gen.

As a result, some of those pages spent heavily and generated zero sales.

And even though their overall spend increased significantly…

Performance over the last 30 days had already started to decline.

Now, those were just a few areas where their ad budget was leaking. Some of them were delivering negative ROI.

Beyond that, we’ve got a long list of optimizations they could do to improve performance.

Look…

I’m not here to trash on the brand and their setup.

And also, I’m not saying you shouldn’t increase spend quickly.

Ssome brands are able to scale faster than others depending on the advantages they have.

Things like strong brand awareness, products that naturally perform on Google, or a strong ad creative system.

But the problem appears when you scale your budget without control.

Because scaling is when you find out how solid your account’s foundation really is.

For some brands, it’s the leap that takes them to the next level.

For others, it’s when hidden problems finally break the surface.

You want to take a methodical approach, so that every added dollar generates positive returns.

Take this brand as an example.

We onboarded them in December 2024, when they were doing $133K/mo in revenue.

Last month, we helped them make $991K.

If you look at the graph, both ad spend and revenue climbed steadily month after month.

There’s no huge spike or big drop. The pace matched what the account could sustain.

And that’s what they need to reach that level of scale.

On Google Ads, the best way to scale isn’t trying to increase spend as fast as you can.

It’s about scaling the right things, in the right way

Jackson

Founder and CEO of Echelonn

How we can help:

Get a free Google ads audit: For brands spending more than $20k/mo. or making over 1 million annually, we’ll identify the key bottlenecks in your account, and turn it into a free 90-day scaling plan. Click here.

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