How To Scale Paid Ads Effectively

Earlier this year, we were scaling aggressively at Whop.

We went from spending a few hundred bucks per day on ads to hundreds of thousands per month.

Inbound leads? Skyrocketing. Booked calls? Flooded. Ad spend? Through the roof.

And from the outside, everything looked perfect. (I'm sure you saw some of those ads dominating your feed.)

But on the inside? We were breaking.

The cost per call started spiking like a rocket ship. 

Our feedback loop began decaying faster than roadkill in July. 

We couldn't tell who was booking anymore. 

Our closers were getting overwhelmed, and we could barely fit in time for quality feedback meetings because their brains were completely fried.

And then the negative propaganda started popping up everywhere.

At one point I thought: "How are we spending this much, generating this many calls... and we have no clue what the fuck we're doing?"*

And that’s when I came to the realization that scaling doesn’t just stress your funnel, but it stresses your entire feedback loop.

Here are the 5 problems that almost killed our growth (and how we solved each one):

PROBLEM 1: THE FEEDBACK LOOP BREAKS

When you're spending $5K/month? You can run clean tests.

Creative goes live Monday. Calls come on Tuesday. By Wednesday you know what's working.

But at $100K/month?

You're spending $3K a day across 10 ad sets — and by the time you've reviewed Monday's performance, you're already $15K deep into new traffic.

And the real problem?

You're getting different people on every call, your sales team is losing congruency, and the feedback loop decays fast.

At this point you have multiple reps, and it's nearly impossible to stay in contact with them all. When you do talk to them, it's often poor feedback contaminated with confirmation bias.

(Note: Without high volume, feedback from your sales team is often useless because their opinions aren't necessarily rooted in truth.)

You lose clarity. Fast.

So what did we do?

We built a full AI feedback pipeline.

Every call transcript got automatically fed into an AI model that sorted calls by avatar, objections, close speed, deal size, and traffic source.

It told us exactly who was converting at the highest rates, why they were converting, and what messaging resonated most.

That became our new source of truth.

From there, we reallocated 80% of our ad spend to the winning customer avatar and used AI to write ads in their exact language, addressing their specific objections.

Result?

• Shorter feedback loops

• Higher ROI

• Better CAC

• 8-figures per month in revenue

Shameless plug: We’ve now turned this into a software and we have some of the biggest accounts in info onboard. If you’re running paid traffic to a call funnel, reply to this email for a beta demo.

PROBLEM 2: AVATAR DRIFT

At scale, you don't just get more leads.

You get more types of leads.

Students. Creators. Agency owners. Single moms with 4 kids and broke baby daddies. Real buyers. Tire kickers.

All showing up to the same calendar.

Suddenly your closers are confused. The pitch isn't landing. They lose morale, and it spreads through your entire team like a virus.

Conversion drops, and you can't figure out why.

We call this avatar drift — you lose alignment between marketing and sales.

Solution?

We used the transcript data to isolate the ONE avatar who closed fast, paid the most, and had the highest lifetime value.

Then we rebuilt the entire ad funnel for only that persona and adjusted our sales script specifically for that avatar.

We sacrificed volume for precision — and our closing percentage skyrocketed.

PROBLEM 3: COST PER CALL SPIKES (AND YOU PANIC)

Most people freak out about this, but it's actually normal.

Just chill.

You scale spend... and suddenly your cost per booked call goes from $80 → $240.

Your first instinct? Pause everything. Kill the funnel. Change the offer.

But this hurts you more than it helps.

In fact, it tells Meta's algorithm that it's doing a terrible job when it could actually be doing amazing work.

Here's what we discovered:

A higher cost per call isn't always bad. Sometimes it means your filtering is working. You're paying for quality, not noise.

We analyzed our high-cost calls and realized they were:

• Showing up more consistently

• Closing faster

• Better long-term buyers

So instead of judging performance by call cost, we judged it by LTV to CAC ratio.

Example: $1,000 CAC with $10,000 LTV within 2 months = 10X ROI with a 2-month payback period.

Don't panic at high cost per lead.

Instead, zoom out and ask: "Are these calls making me more money?"

But we still needed creative solutions for rising costs...

So we built an AI-powered creative workflow that refreshed ad variants every 7 days.

Every week we'd have 50 new ad creatives ready to launch, creating diversity in the ad account, finding new winners, beating ad fatigue, and keeping campaigns fresh.

ADVANCED INSIGHT: AWARENESS LEVEL EXPANSION

Here's something almost no one talks about...

Sometimes when your cost per call rises, it's not a creative issue. It's not a targeting problem either.

It's a signal that you've saturated one awareness level and need to tap into another.

Let me explain:

We were initially targeting solution-aware prospects (coaches who knew they needed financing but didn't know about our specific offer).

When that audience got saturated, instead of panicking, we expanded to problem-aware prospects.

Original messaging (Solution-aware): "Get financing for your coaching offer"

Expanded messaging (Problem-aware): "You're a coach making $50K/month but you know you should be making more. You see others crushing 7-figure months and you can't figure out what they're doing, and it's making you pull your hair out. Well, what if I told you what they're doing has nothing to do with their funnel, their product, or their offer? Instead, it's something much simpler. Financing..."

And boom — a new pools of buyers opened up.

We increased our total addressable market (TAM) and decreased our CAC by default.

The key: You need to adjust your messaging end-to-end when you expand awareness levels. Same broad market, different entry point.

PROBLEM 4: SHOW RATES DROP

You book 50 calls. 30 show up.

At scale, no-shows bleed the business dry.

Why? Because people don't know you, trust you, or believe in your solution. (When you raise spend, you naturally reach colder audiences.)

So we stopped thinking of booked calls as "qualified leads" and started treating them as a second funnel.

We ran retargeting sequences for all booked calls with 30+ ad creatives before the sales call that:

• Answered frequently asked questions

• Handled common objections

• Provided proof and built belief

Result? Show rate climbed from 33% → 94% on cold traffic.

More opportunities. More revenue. More profit.

PROBLEM 5: PUBLIC PERCEPTION

The more you scale, the more people talk.

We started getting Reddit threads. And not all of them were flattering.

Some were fake. Some were real. Some were half-truths.

Here's the thing: Buyers read that sh*t, and they almost always believe it.

If the first page of Google shows a Reddit post saying "this company's a scam," there's virtually nothing you can do to save that deal.

So here's what we did:

We created our own narrative.

• Seeded Reddit threads from happy clients

• Added one or two "skeptical but fair" takes to build realism

• Used comment stacking to shape the conversation tone

The goal wasn't to lie. It was to create balance.

Because if you don't control the narrative, someone else will.

To Summarize…

Scaling from $5K to $100K+ per month in ad spend will break things you didn't even know could break.

But if you understand these 5 problems (plus the awareness level expansion) and have systems to solve them, you can scale aggressively without losing your mind.

Talk soon,

Malcolm

P.S. - Propaganda Inc is sooo insane. I’ve helped more operators and copywriters start 6 and 7 figure businesses than any “guru” I know - however the students are saying this is my best product yet. Maybe tomorrow I’ll drop a free module for you guys. Just reply and let me know if I should.