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Advertising | DV360
Scaling Display & Video 360 campaigns requires more than just...
By Vanshaj Sharma
Feb 16, 2026 | 5 Minutes | 
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Scaling Display & Video 360 campaigns feels like walking a tightrope. Push too hard on budget and watch your return on ad spend crumble. Play it too safe and leave money on the table. Most media buyers have been there, staring at dashboards wondering why performance tanked the moment they tried to grow.
The problem is that scaling is not just about increasing spend. It requires a different approach to audience targeting, creative strategy and bid management. DV360 gives you the tools, but knowing which levers to pull and when makes all the difference.
Here where most campaigns go wrong. Teams see strong performance in a campaign and immediately double the budget. What happens next? CPMs spike, auction competition intensifies and suddenly you're paying more for worse placements.
Before touching budget, look at your audience. Which segments are actually driving conversions? Break down performance by demographics, interests and behavior. You'll often find that 20% of your audience delivers 80% of your results.
Create separate line items for your highperforming segments. This allows you to scale the winners aggressively while testing new audiences at lower budgets. When you scale DV360 campaigns this way, you maintain control over who sees your ads and at what cost.
Custom affinity audiences work particularly well here. Build them using firstparty data or by analyzing the characteristics of your best converters. These audiences typically have lower competition than standard demographic targeting, which helps keep costs down as you scale.
Expanding your reach means finding new places to show ads. But not all inventory is created equal. Premium publishers charge more but often deliver better engagement. Open exchange inventory costs less but comes with quality concerns.
The smart play is to tier your inventory expansion. Start with private marketplace deals that give you transparency and control. These deals let you access quality inventory at scale without the unpredictability of open exchanges.
Test new inventory sources in separate line items first. Run them for at least a week to gather enough data. Compare their performance against your existing placements using metrics that actually matter: conversion rate, cost per acquisition and viewability.
When you find inventory that performs within 15% of your benchmarks, gradually increase allocation. Never shift more than 25% of your budget to untested inventory at once, no matter how promising it looks.
Your bidding approach needs to evolve as campaigns grow. What works at $5,000 per month falls apart at $50,000. Target CPA bidding might deliver efficiency at smaller budgets, but it often limits reach when you scale.
Consider switching to maximize conversions with a target CPA once you have enough conversion data. This gives the algorithm more flexibility to find volume while still respecting your efficiency targets. You need at least 30 conversions per week for this to work properly.
Manual bidding still has a place, especially when entering new markets or testing untested inventory. It gives you precise control when the algorithm does not have enough data to make smart decisions. Use it for the first two weeks of any new audience or inventory test.
Bid multipliers deserve more attention than they usually get. Adjusting bids by device, geography, or time of day lets you scale efficiently. Boost bids 2030% during highconverting hours. Reduce them for segments that convert poorly but still contribute to your funnel.
Audiences get tired of seeing the same ads. At small budgets, this happens slowly. At scale, creative fatigue hits fast and hard. Your clickthrough rates drop, your CPMs rise and your ROAS suffers.
Plan for creative rotation before scaling. You need at least three creative variants per format running simultaneously. Monitor frequency caps closely. If users see your ads more than five times per week, performance typically declines.
Dynamic creative optimization in DV360 helps here, but only if you feed it quality assets. Provide multiple headlines, images and calls to action. The system tests combinations and serves what works best. But garbage in, garbage out still applies.
Video creative needs even more attention at scale. Production costs more, so teams often run the same video for months. That fine at low spend. At high spend, you need new video assets every 46 weeks minimum.
Everyone watches ROAS, conversion rate and CPA. Those matter. But when scaling DV360 campaigns, secondorder metrics tell you what coming before your primary KPIs reflect it.
Watch your auction win rate. If it starts climbing above 85%, you're likely underbidding and missing volume. Below 40% means you're overpaying. The sweet spot usually sits between 5070%.
Frequency metrics deserve daily attention. Average frequency creeping above 45 per user per week signals saturation. You're hitting the same people too often, which drives up costs and annoys potential customers.
Viewability rates reveal inventory quality issues before they destroy performance. If viewability drops below 60%, investigate your inventory sources immediately. Low viewability means you're paying for impressions nobody sees.
Scaling often means expanding into new markets. This works, but not the way most people do it. Launching nationwide with the same targeting and creative that worked in one city rarely succeeds.
Test new geographies individually. Pick one new DMA or region at a time. Run it for two weeks with conservative budgets. Compare performance against your established markets using the same benchmarks.
Local competition varies wildly. CPMs in New York cost 34x what you pay in smaller markets. But conversion rates might justify the difference, or they might not. You won't know until you test with real budget.
Adjust your creative for regional differences when the budget allows. Language variations, cultural references and local concerns all affect performance. A campaign that crushes it in California might flop in Texas using identical creative.
Sometimes the best scaling decision is to stop scaling. If your ROAS drops 20% or more during expansion, pull back. Trying to optimize your way out while continuing to increase spend rarely works.
Pause, analyze what changed and fix the underlying issue. Maybe your audience expanded too broadly. Perhaps your creative fatigued faster than expected. Or you entered inventory sources with poor user intent.
The path forward involves getting back to baseline performance before attempting to scale again. Cut budget back to where metrics were healthy. Make targeted improvements to audience, creative, or bidding. Then scale again, slower this time.
Patience pays off here. Growing 20% per month sustainably beats growing 100% in one month and then crashing the next three months trying to recover.
Gut feelings have their place, but scaling requires data. Set clear benchmarks before you start. Know your minimum acceptable ROAS, maximum CPA and target conversion rate. When performance hits these thresholds, you know it time to adjust.
Build custom reports in DV360 that track your scaling metrics in one view. Include spend trends, efficiency metrics, reach data and frequency stats. Review this daily during active scaling periods.
A/B test your scaling approaches when possible. Run one campaign with aggressive audience expansion and another focusing on inventory growth. Let the data tell you which path works better for your specific situation.
The reality is that scaling DV360 campaigns successfully comes down to systematic testing, close monitoring and the discipline to pull back when needed. There no magic formula. But following these principles keeps ROAS stable while growing reach and revenue. That the whole point.