Austin LeClear explains why Google Ads campaigns see rising costs when you increase spending, and recommends raising daily budgets 20% at a time, then waiting one to two weeks for the algorithm to adjust before scaling again. This stair-step approach prevents the temporary CPA spikes that come from abrupt budget jumps.
All right, so I still talk to a lot of advertisers and companies where they're like, hey, we have trouble scaling, right? We every time we try to scale, it's CPA rises. Now I did a whole video on why that happens. So the video on that will be in the description below. But I wanted to share with you today how to scale with the stair step effect. At least that's what it's called in this beautiful little visual I have for you today. But basically when I see or consult with a lot of companies is like when they try to scale, they're doing things too quickly or there are too many big swings. So the concept here is you want to work in small increments of change. And that is because the nature of Google Ads today is so much driven by the machine learning and Google's algorithm and it's very finicky. So yeah, five plus years ago when you were running skagged campaigns and manual CPC bidding, you could scale to the moon quickly if you had the budget to do it. Today, unfortunately, it's a lot harder. So you might have a campaign that's doing really well for you and then you're limited by budget on it, you start increasing that budget, but then the CPA just goes up and then you freak out. Right? Well, the concept of this stair step approach is basically budget increases will cause temporary CPA increases. That happens in most cases unless you're like very new, brand new campaign or something and you're on low spend. But as you start increasing spend, you start scaling, you're going to absolutely run into this. So what I, I try to do in these scenarios and what I see works the best as I'm scaling accounts is I limit my budget increases to 20% at a time. Then I allow one to two weeks for the algorithm to learn from the new auctions that we're now in. And then as it dials itself back to my goal, this could be cpa, this could be T roas, depending on, you know, who you are and what you're trying to sell or go after. Once I'm now re optimized at these new spin levels, then I repeat the process if I can. Right? So in this money zone, this blue zone, is your campaign today, Austin, I spend $1,000 per day. I hit a CPA goal of $100. And every time I've increased or tried, my CPA jacks up and I freak out, right? Or they try to go from like $1,000 a day spend to $2,000 a day spend and chaos happens and they bleed a lot of money quickly. Well, and what I'm teaching here and what I recommend is in that case, hey, listen, you're in your money zone right now. The algorithm kind of knows the low hanging fruit here. And this is where you're optimized. Now we're going to stair step up by 20%. So your budget would go from $1000 to, to 1200 in this case. Now we're in this new learning phase, right? New auctions, higher cpc. This red zone right here above our dotted line is kind of that learning phase of the new auction we're at. Then it's going to re optimize us back down. Here's our CPA right to that dotted line. In the perfect world when this works. And now you're re optimized after that learning phase, so you're stabilized. Then you go back to another scaling phase. This takes time to do. But these, this is normally how I work it. 20% increments, learning phase, reassess the data. If I'm re optimized and stabilize, I go right back into a learning phase. That is how you can scale campaigns and not flip out about CPA increases. Now one thing to consider, there's a difference between a campaign that's at $10 a day and a campaign that's at $1,000 a day, right? So if you're, if you have small budgets right now, like you know, under $100 per day, even really at 100, you're, you're fine in most cases, but you 20%, you don't need to live by. So I have no problem jumping a campaign from like, you know, $25 a day to 50 if it's working. So there you are still in what I would consider a discovery phase. Like you're, you're, you're getting data, you're seeing what's working. If you're at that low of daily spend on a campaign, as you approach $100 a day plus especially as you start approaching the bigger spin levels, thousand dollars per day, then there, the 20% sort of number that I use is key. If you go too high, let's say you jump from 1000 to 1500 per day, think of what this red bar looks like now, right? So this learning phase you go into, you just have tons of inefficiency going on and you may not actually stabilize back down, right? You would think, hey, the more I, the more data I give it and the more crazy I go with it with spin, I, I would have more for Google to learn from. Why can't it? I don't know. But what I have found is if I work in these smaller percent steps that I have a higher rate of success with Scaling a campaign There you go. Next time you're trying to scale your Google Ads campaigns, think of this stair step approach while you're doing it. Hey check out I talked about why CPA increases when you spend budget. I have an entire video. I break everything down there. It's a bit longer than this one but I talked about that in this video with the stair step approach during that process when you increase the budget. If you want to get into the weeds on why that's happening, I have an entire video on that. So go watch that video next. Also, if you want more direct access from me and you want one on one support with Google Ads help, I have a community called PPC Copilot. I do weekly Q and A's in there. I have my Google Ads course and ongoing training in there. So make sure you go check that out. I would love to see you inside. And again I'm there in the community active helping people with their Google Ads accounts, questions and issues. I'd love to see you in there.
Google Ads Negative Keywords: The RIGHT Way to Find and Add Negatives in 2026
