You can spend hours planning a campaign, scripting ads, and getting your UGC just right, only to find out half of your creatives barely make it out of the dugout.

Sound familiar?

That’s why at Alpha Inbound, we focus less on chasing home runs and more on improving your batting average. Because the brands that scale efficiently aren’t the ones swinging for the fences every time, they’re the ones consistently getting on base.

Let’s talk about hit rate, the metric that actually matters if you want to scale creative the right way.

What Is Hit Rate (and Why Should You Care)?

In performance marketing, your hit rate is the percentage of creatives that meet your KPI goals, whether that’s CPA, ROAS, CTR, or another performance target, after a reasonable test spend.

Let’s say you test 10 ads, and 3 of them perform well enough to scale. Your hit rate is 30%.

Why does that matter? Because scaling isn’t about having one winning ad and funneling $100K into it. That’s how you burn out an audience, hit diminishing returns, and lose performance overnight.

High hit rate = high confidence to scale across concepts, formats, and funnel stages.

The Baseball Analogy That Actually Works

We like to break creative down like baseball:

• Singles & Doubles: Ads that do well, maybe they hit a 2x ROAS and keep things steady.

• Triples: They outperform across the board. Solid creative, great hook, efficient spend.

• Home Runs: These are your $100K+ spenders. They crush performance and keep going.

You don’t win games with home runs alone, you win by getting on base over and over again. That’s the mindset we apply to every creative strategy we build.

How We Structure Ad Accounts Based on Hit Rate

For Brands with a Strong Hit Rate:

We use ad set budgets (ASB). Each concept gets its own ad set with a dedicated budget, so spend isn’t cannibalized by the best performer. This structure:

• Reduces risk from one ad tanking your account

• Lets us scale concepts independently

• Encourages diverse creative testing

If we’ve got a high hit rate, we go aggressive, because we trust the process.

For Brands Still Figuring It Out:

We run CBO (campaign budget optimization). The budget lives at the campaign level, and Meta allocates spend based on what it sees performing.

This gives us control over total spend while we figure out:

• Which messaging angles hit

• What hooks stop the scroll

• What formats resonate (UGC, testimonials, founder-led, etc.)

Once we start seeing traction, we siphon winners into ASB campaigns and scale from there.

What Happens When You Rely on a “Hero Ad”?

Here’s the trap a lot of brands fall into: they get one ad that crushes, and they just keep throwing spend at it.

It works… until it doesn’t.

Eventually, your audience fatigues. Performance drops. And you’ve got nothing else to fall back on.

That’s why hit rate matters. It’s not just about launching more ads, it’s about launching smarter, building frameworks, and knowing which levers to pull when things slow down.

What You Can Do Today

Tracking your hit rate doesn’t have to be complex, even a simple spreadsheet with KPIs and spend per creative can give you valuable insight. It’s also important to separate testing from scaling so that a single ad doesn’t end up consuming your entire budget. And when it comes to performance, consistency wins: one "meh" ad that hits a steady ROAS is worth more than five flashy Hail Marys that never convert.

Final Thought

Scaling a brand is hard. But it gets a lot easier when you stop swinging for the fences and start building a creative system that gets you on base, again and again.

Because that’s what great creative is: not luck, not magic, just a high-performance machine, tuned over time.