POD Memorial Ads Scaling Problem – Need Insights from Pros !!!!

Hey guys,

I’m running POD memorial products and hit a weird wall in scaling. Here’s the breakdown:

Phase 1 – Testing:

• Ran Advantage+ campaign for 1 neutral page only.
• Tested multiple creatives.
• Got a few winners with solid metrics (CTR, CPA looked good).

Phase 2 – Scaling attempts:

• Whenever I duplicated those winning creatives (new campaign, higher budget) → performance dropped hard.
• Tried different scaling methods (duplication, moving to new campaigns, raising budgets aggressively) → none worked.
• Only thing that keeps working is increasing the budget ~20% on the original winning ads… but that’s just keeping the ROAS afloat, not really scaling big.

Setup details:

• Audience: broad targeting.
• Pixel/CAPI: clean tracking, enough conversion data.
• Testing budget was small, scaling budget significantly higher.

Problem:

• Any “reset” (new campaign, duplication, big budget jump) kills performance.
• Even when creatives were proven winners in testing, scaling in a new setup didn’t carry over results.
• Looks like algo loses its optimization whenever I change structure.

Question:
Why is this happening? Is it purely a learning phase reset thing, audience overlap, budget shock, or something else?
Any tested scaling approach that works for POD memorial without tanking the metrics?

Appreciate any insights from those who’ve been in the POD game.