Kill / Scale
Kill/scale is the fork in campaign management: kill means stopping a losing ad set, creative, or funnel once its ROI is negative or below target with enough data behind it, and scale means raising budget or duplicating whatever is working. Both calls rest on thresholds set in advance, not on gut feel.
Setting the criteria
Buyers typically fix thresholds beforehand — target ROI or CPA, minimum spend, or a minimum number of conversions for statistical confidence — before judging a campaign, so the kill/scale call stays consistent instead of an emotional reaction to the first few numbers.
Kill/scale in a PWA funnel
Because a PWA funnel adds stages beyond a plain lander — install, push opt-in, in-app actions — it's worth checking exactly where a losing funnel is leaking, a low install rate versus a low post-install deposit rate, before killing it outright. Sometimes swapping the creative or lander fixes it without touching the offer or geo. APEX's built-in sticky split-tests let buyers compare PWA variants cleanly before applying kill/scale to the whole campaign, which helps separate a funnel problem from a traffic-source problem.
FAQ
- How much data is needed before a kill/scale call?
- There's no fixed number — the goal is statistical confidence, usually from several dozen conversions or enough spend, not a verdict off the first few clicks.
- Is it safe to scale aggressively, several times over at once?
- It's risky — a sharp budget jump often throws off the ad platform's own optimization algorithm and raises the odds of moderation trouble, so scaling in steps is usually the safer path.
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