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Scaling ad spend past a plateau — testing budget, awareness levels and bridge pages

Hormozi's advice when more spend stops bringing quality leads — treat profit as an experimentation budget (e.g. burn $200–300K on keywords to find ones that 5x the business), and move up Schwartz's awareness levels with broader keywords sent to an advertorial bridge page before the sales page.

Updated 2026-10-24·1 source·ecommercegoogle-adsscalingawareness-levelsadvertorialmedia-buying

Scaling ad spend past a plateau

TL;DR

  • “More spend = worse leads” at $15–20K/month is a media-buying problem, not market saturation (Hormozi guessed the niche could take ~$2M/month).1
  • Treat profit you don’t need to live on as an experimentation budget: e.g. burn $200–300K on bad keywords to find a few that scale to $100K/month.23
  • Winning keywords “print” — find more of them; there are always more.3
  • To reach colder, bigger, cheaper traffic, climb the awareness levels (most aware → product → solution → problem → unaware).4
  • Colder traffic needs a bridge: broad keyword → advertorial → sales page. Clicks can be ~1/10 the price with “an ocean” of volume.56

Details

Who. Alex Hormozi, live Q&A (Mar 2026), answering Max of Elevate Customs (luxury custom gaming/pool tables, ~$2.5M/yr, ~20% margin ≈ $500K profit, mostly Google Ads, sales closed by phone/invoice, goal $10M). Their ~$250K/yr ad spend returns ~10:1 in revenue.13

Mindset. Wearing an investor hat, Hormozi judges everything by return on capital: if $10M is reachable, get there faster by reinvesting profit instead of protecting it. Don’t book failed tests as losses; they buy the next money-printing keyword.23

Awareness ladder in practice. Current keywords probably target product-aware buyers. Going up-market means broader terms (home projects, game-room accessories — he’d use a keyword tool), more competitors, and an advertorial that walks them back to the familiar path. Problem-aware example: “is your house boring / do you have a spare room?” — they don’t know they want a pool table yet; start where they are.56 A good media buyer should know this; either retask the current team or hire one who does.5

Side note for service businesses: reinvest in talent (better people → better work → higher prices) and brand moments (Red Bull’s space jump) rather than only direct-response ads.78

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes

  1. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 01:33 — Alex Hormozi ↩ ↩2

  2. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 02:25 — Alex Hormozi ↩ ↩2

  3. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 04:52 — Alex Hormozi ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 05:38 — Alex Hormozi ↩

  5. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 06:23 — Alex Hormozi ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 07:10 — Alex Hormozi ↩ ↩2

  7. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 03:15 — Alex Hormozi ↩

  8. Helping E-Commerce Business Owners Scale @ 04:02 — Alex Hormozi ↩