Being fairly new, I hear people talk about making changes to a landing page all the time and it stops me in my tracks. They say rip 3-5 landing pages and then switch them up. But my issue is, how much to you change them? Are you changing the headline etc or are you changing colors, buttons etc? Also, most people say don't run campaigns in the US as they are harder to scale well if I only speak english, how do I got about changing the content on these pages? I know there's translation services out there but am I doing this for every country or am I using the ripped text?
There are so many things you can change on a LP, some can have huge impact on the performance, some have usually small impact.
For example :
- Changing Ad Copy, Headline, Main image, CTA - these could be considered big changes
- Colors, optimizing images, font changes - these would be small changes
It's the best to make one big change at a time. Let's say you change the angle so the copy will change too, keep the rest the same to be able to see how big impact the new copy alone will have. If you make several changes like this at the same time, you won't be able to tell what actually worked.
In case of small changes, where the impact isn't so big, I don't mind to change several at a time, tho I know it's not ideal. But let's stay realistic, if I had to split test every minor change, I would spend a year on 1 LP 
US is not hard to scale actually, there is shitload of traffic there on all networks, the problem is the competition and marker regulations. So on one hand, you are facing high traffic prices but you cannot really be aggressive with your promotional methods because US is one of the most regulated markets when it comes to ADs. On top of that, you are fighting with Brand advertisers who literally don't give a fuck about performance. Try to beat that ...
When targeting different GEOs with languages that you cannot speak, you have basically the two options you mentioned - ripped text or translation services. I'm using both. After some time, you learn how to work with the foreign texts and it's not so hard anymore, except for GEOs like Thailand maybe
It would be a good idea to find a few freelancers on upwork or fiverr, these are usually way cheaper than services like onehourtranslations.
Matej.
Thanks man you just made my day.