You increase your ad spend.
Your ROAS drops.
So you reduce the budget again.
Then, a few months later, you try exactly the same thing and get exactly the same result.
In this episode, Mark and Ian Hammersley break down what they call the Ecommerce Scaling Test, a way of understanding what actually happens inside your business when you try to spend more on advertising.
The important question is not simple:
Why did ROAS drop?
It is:
Where did the model break?
Mark and Ian compare scaling an ecommerce business to opening a second physical store.
Your first store might work brilliantly. But when you open the next one, you are dealing with different customers, different competition, and a different environment.
Increasing your advertising budget works in much the same way.
You are moving into a new layer of traffic.
Those customers may cost more to reach, know less about your brand, convert differently and require more convincing before they buy.
Instead of looking at ROAS alone, Mark and Ian explain how to break the scaling attempt apart and look at what actually changed.
They discuss:
•Why does ROAS often drop when you increase ad spend?
•The Hammersley Brothers Scaling Test
•Why scaling is like opening another retail store
•What happens to the cost per click as you spend more?
•How Meta frequency can reveal wasted spend
•How Google brand traffic can distort scaling
•Why add-to-basket rate matters
•Why average order value can fall as you scale
•How email should support new customer acquisition
•Why stocks can become the hidden scaling bottleneck
•How to find the part of your funnel that breaks first
•Why some products scale even when the overall account does not
•When to move budget between Google and Meta
•How to prepare your ecommerce business before attempting to scale
The goal is not to increase spending and hope it works.
It is to increase spending, understand what breaks, fix it, and test again.
That is how businesses gradually move through new layers of customers and build something that can genuinely scale.
Subscribe for more practical ecommerce strategy, Google Ads, Meta Ads, Shopify, and business growth discussions from the Hammersley Brothers.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways Ian and I can help you grow your ecommerce business:
1. Talk to us. Book a call with us and let’s talk about accelerating your growth – https://go.hammersleybrothers.com/apply-now/
2. Grab a copy of our book – https://gohigh.hammersleybrothers.com/get-the-book
3. Follow the Hammersley Brothers on Instagram and connect with e-commerce owners who are scaling too –
https://www.instagram.com/hammersleybrothers
