1: Horizontal

Horizontal scaling entails making carbon copies of entire campaigns (if using CBO) or ad sets (if using ad set budgeting) to scale your ads across multiple campaigns or ad sets. This was critical when using ad set style budgeting, because vertically scaling the old ad sets was a harrowing experience of will-it or won’t-it break. Even small increases such as $12 to $40 could send the ad set’s performance swerving into the gutter. Thus, vertically scaling was a slow and painstaking process that was impractical for time-sensitive situations like launches or promos.

The solution was horizontal scaling, where you could make exact copies of the ad sets – ten, twenty, thirty – to instantly scale up to your needs in hours, rather than potentially weeks. You would then remove the ad sets that performed poorly (each new ad set goes through its own learning phase and data sampling journey, which means that their performance will not be the same).

This process has been made obsolete by CBO, which responds smoothly to vertical scaling. Large jumps rarely cause performance stutters. The whole course is built around CBO, and the ease of scaling is one of the reasons why: you can just increase the budget (if it’s a very large jump, you might want to make it over the course of a couple days so as not to introduce rare performance gremlins). This is easy from a management perspective and takes far less time.

If using horizontal scaling, I would not recommend it for CBO unless it’s a last-ditch effort; it tends to work very poorly with CBO. If you are using the old ad set budgeting, then this is how you will scale rapidly without performance massively degrading. But I would recommend switching to CBO ASAP – it works better, overall, and streamlines a lot of the ads management.