Why did increasing my boosted Reel budget cause my new follower growth to slow down significantly

​Hey everyone,

​I run a small independent handmade jewelry brand based in Canada (about 95% of my sales are within Canada).

​For the past few months, I consistently had great results running two boosted Reels at $11/day and $12/day. I used Meta’s Automatic Audience (Canada) and the "More Profile Visits" goal.

It worked fantastically: it brought in a steady, reliable stream of new Canadian followers, led to high engagement (lots of comments, DMs, and post interactions), and consistently converted into sales when I launched new designs.

​As Christmas gets closer, I plan to create some new Reels, but in the meantime, I decided to re-boost these winning Reels since they had done so well.

Assuming a higher daily spend would show the ads to a larger audience and potentially yield even more followers, I increased the budget on my top-performing Reel to $30/day, and raised the second one from $12/day to $22/day.

​I left them running for a few days, but I noticed my steady stream of new followers slowed down significantly instead of increasing or at least staying at the same rate.

​Looking at my account insights, I decided to tweak the targeting to narrow it down to the exact age group that seemed most receptive (Canada, Ages 25–55). However, even after narrowing the demographic, my rate of new follower growth remained very slow compared to my original lower-budget setup.

I was getting views and impressions, but far fewer profile visits and new followers per dollar spent.

​

My Question:

Has anyone else running Instagram boosted Reels noticed that keeping a lower daily budget ($11–$12/day) with broad Automatic targeting produces a faster, more consistent stream of high-engagement followers than raising the budget to $22–$30/day with narrower targeting?

​I am rather new to all of this. I have found that my best results so far have been when I let IG pick my audience based on people who already follow me and I have had less success creating ads in the meta ad manager vs directly through the IG app.

For reference when I started promoting some reels a few months ago I had about 5,700 followers and I currently have around 9300 followers.