When do I decide to scale a campaign? When do I decide to kill a campaign?
Here are some benchmarks I look at.
Start with your break-even CPA
Everything flows from cost per acquisition. Before a campaign goes live, I want to know the number I can't exceed — the point where I'm acquiring customers at exactly zero profit. The formula is simple: average order value multiplied by your gross margin. If your product sells for $60 and your margin is 50%, your break-even CPA is $30.
That number becomes your compass. A CPA below break-even means things are working and you can start thinking about scaling. A CPA that's 10–20% above it isn't a failure — it's what I'd call an optimization window. The campaign is generating purchases, but you're leaving money on the table with weak creative or a landing page that isn't converting as well as it could. That's fixable. A CPA that's dramatically above break-even — spending $50 or $60 to acquire a $30 customer — is a different story. Kill it and start over.
Don't make decisions too early
The other mistake is judging a campaign on $20 of spend. That's not data, it's noise. I don't form any real opinions until I've spent at least 1.5 times my target CPA. Using the same example above — if my target CPA is $30 — I'm not drawing any conclusions until I've put $45 behind it. Before that point, you're just reacting emotionally to a dataset that's too small to mean anything.
The metrics that tell you why
CPA tells you the outcome. The video metrics tell you where the problem is — or isn't.
The 2-second view rate shows whether your hook is doing its job. Roughly 70% of viewers should stick around for at least the first two seconds. If you're falling short of that, the opening of your video isn't compelling enough to stop the scroll.
The hold rate — average watch time as a percentage of total video length — tells you whether the middle of your video is holding attention. 33% is a reasonable benchmark. If your ad is 30 seconds and people are watching an average of 10 seconds, that's actually solid. It means the creative itself isn't the problem, and if your CPA is struggling, you're probably losing people somewhere else — on your offer or your landing page.
CTR, or click-through rate, tells you whether people are interested enough to actually leave TikTok and go to your site. 1% is the floor — you can work with it, but you're fighting. 2% and above is where things get efficient.
Scaling slowly matters more than you'd think
Once a campaign is hitting at or below break-even consistently over a 24–72 hour window, it makes sense to scale up. But I'd push back hard on the instinct to double or triple your budget overnight. I increase by 20–30% every day or two. The TikTok pixel needs time to learn who your buyers are, and if you flood it with spend before it has enough data, your CPA tends to spike.
There's also a version of scaling called horizontal scaling — duplicating winning ad groups rather than just increasing budget on the same one. Both approaches work, and I'll typically use them in combination once a campaign has proven itself.
When nothing seems to work
If you've spent the time, run the numbers, and still can't get close to break-even, the problem is usually one of three things: the creative isn't connecting, the offer isn't compelling enough to make someone click, or the landing page is losing people after they arrive. In my experience, it's the creative most often. Different angles, different customer scenarios, more footage. As I've talked about before on the site, creative is king.