Solved: Agency Recommendations in the Health & Wellness Space

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your situation. Scaling from a hefty spend like $150k a month on Meta is a different ball game to getting there in the first place. It's less about just upping the budget and more about getting a lot smarter and more efficient with every single part of your funnel.

From what you've described, you're at a point where small tweaks won't cut it. To hit your growth goals for 2025, you'll need a much more sophisticated approach to your account structure, your audience targeting, and your creative strategy. It's a challenge, but a common one we see with brands that have grown fast and are now hitting a plateau. Based on my experience scaling similar brands, here are my initial thoughts on where you should be focusing your efforts.

We'll need to look at your current campaign structure...

First thing I'd be looking at is how your campaigns are actually structured. When you're spending this much, a messy or overly simplistic structure can burn through cash without you even realising it. You need a rock-solid, full-funnel approach that separates your prospecting (top of funnel), your retargeting (middle/bottom of funnel), and your customer retention efforts. It sounds basic, but so many accounts we audit have this all jumbled together, which makes it impossible to properly analyse performance or scale effectively.

At your spend level, you've almost certainly got enough data for the Meta algorithm to do some heavy lifting, but only if you feed it the right signals in the right way. This is why a prioritised audience structure is so important. The further down the funnel someone is, the more valuable they are, and your campaigns should reflect that. I usually prioritise audiences in this order, from the 'coldest' traffic to your warmest repeat buyers:

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting: This is all about finding new customers. Your goal here is broad reach, but to a relevant audience.

• -> Detailed Targeting: You've probably done a lot of this already. Interests, behaviours, demographics. The trick at scale is to move away from obvious, broad interests (like just 'Health and Wellness') and get much more granular. Think about complementary brands, specific wellness publications, influencers, or even niche activities your ideal customer engages in.
• -> Lookalike Audiences: This should be your bread and butter for scaling. With your budget, you should have a mountain of data. The key is to create lookalikes from your highest-quality sources. Don't just make a lookalike of 'all website visitors'. Start with a lookalike of your 'highest value previous customers' first. Then work down the list: previous customers, people who initiated checkout, added to cart, and so on. The closer the source event is to a purchase, the better the lookalike will generally perform.
• -> Broad Targeting: This might sound scary, but once your pixel is properly seasoned (which yours definitely is), letting Meta's algorithm go broad can be incredibly powerful. You'd target just by age, gender, and location, with no interest or lookalike layers. The algorithm uses your account's conversion data to find people similar to your existing customers. This is often how you find new pockets of customers and achieve massive scale, but it only works if your pixel data is clean and plentiful.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Retargeting: These people know who you are but haven't bought yet. They've shown some interest and need another nudge.

• -> Website/Landing Page Visitors: Anyone who's hit your site but didn't go further. You need to exclude anyone who has purchased or reached the checkout pages to keep this audience clean.
• -> Video Viewers: A brilliant audience. Retargeting people who've watched a good chunk of your video ads (e.g., 50% or more) is a great way to find an engaged group that is already familiar with your product's story or benefits.
• -> Social Engagers: People who've liked, commented, or shared your posts on Facebook or Instagram. They're engaged with the brand, just not on your website yet.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Retargeting & Retention: These are your hottest prospects and existing customers. The goal here is conversion and repeat purchases.

• -> High-Intent Actions: This is your goldmine. Group people who have Added to Cart, Initiated Checkout, or Viewed the Cart page into a single ad set. These people are on the verge of buying and often just need a reminder, an offer, or a testimonial ad to get them over the line.
• -> Previous Customers: Don't forget about the people who've already bought from you. Depending on your product's lifecycle, you should be running campaigns to them to encourage repeat purchases, introduce new products, or promote a subscription model. I remember one subscription box campaign where we focused on retaining and upselling existing customers, which resulted in a 1000% Return On Ad Spend.

Structuring your campaigns this way means you can allocate budget more intelligently. You can put more spend into your best-performing prospecting audiences while ensuring you've always got budget dedicated to converting your hottest leads. It also lets you tailor your messaging. You wouldn't show a '10% off for your first order' ad to a loyal repeat customer, right? A structured approach prevents these kinds of mistakes.

Here’s a simplified look at how that structure might be organised within your ad account:

I'd say you need to get ruthless with your audience testing...

With a clean structure in place, the next step is to get really disciplined about audience testing. At $150k/mo, you can't afford to guess. Every audience needs to justify its place in your ad account. As I mentioned, lookalikes should be your primary tool for scaling prospecting, but the quality of the seed audience is everything.

You need to be testing lookalikes based on every single valuable event in your funnel. Start at the bottom and work your way up. Create separate lookalikes for purchasers, people who add payment info, initiate checkout, add to cart, and high-quality site visitors (e.g., top 25% by time spent). Test them against each other in a dedicated testing campaign. Often, you'll find that a lookalike of 'Initiate Checkout' outperforms a lookalike of 'Purchasers', or vice-versa. You won't know until you test. Also, test different percentages – 1%, 1-2%, 2-5%, etc. A 1% lookalike is most similar to your seed audience, but a 3-5% audience gives you more scale. Finding the sweet spot is vital.

When it comes to interest targeting, you have to avoid what I call 'lazy targeting'. Just chucking 'Fitness and wellness' or 'Healthy eating' into the detailed targeting box is going to get you a massive audience of low-intent people. It's too broad. Instead, you need to think like your customer. What specific brands do they follow? What magazines do they read? What influencers do they trust? Who are your competitors? Target those interests. Layering can also be powerful here. For instance, you could target people who are interested in 'Yoga' AND 'Whole Foods Market'. This instantly creates a more qualified, specific audience than just targeting 'Yoga' on its own.

Here's an example of how I'd approach brainstorming interests for a hypothetical high-end supplement brand:

The process should be relentless. Run an audience testing campaign. Give each ad set enough budget to get at least a few conversions (how much depends on your CPA, but maybe 2-3x your target CPA in spend). If an audience isn't performing after that, kill it and replace it with a new one. The winning audiences get graduated into your main scaling campaigns. This testing process should never stop; it becomes a core part of your weekly workflow.

You probably should focus on creative diversification and testing...

This is probably the single biggest lever you have for scaling, especially when you're already spending a lot. You can have the best targeting in the world, but if your ads are stale or uninspired, you'll hit a wall. Creative fatigue is a huge problem at scale. The ad that worked wonders last month will eventually stop performing as your target audience sees it over and over again.

You need to be producing and testing a constant stream of new creative. And I don't just mean changing the button colour. I mean testing fundamentally different concepts, formats, and hooks.

• -> Formats: Are you testing everything? Static images, carousels, short-form video (Reels/TikTok style), and longer-form educational video all have their place. I remember one campaign for a software client where we reduced their CPA from £100 down to £7, and a huge part of that was moving from standard image ads to a mix of different video formats, including user-generated content (UGC). For health and wellness, UGC is massive. Real customers talking about their results is infinitely more powerful and trustworthy than a polished brand ad.
• -> Angles & Hooks: You need to test different messaging angles. Are you leading with the problem? The solution? A specific ingredient? A customer testimonial? The first 3 seconds of your video or the headline of your image ad are absolutely critical. You should be testing dozens of different hooks to see what grabs attention. For example:
  • Pain Point Hook: "Tired of feeling bloated after every meal?"
  • Benefit Hook: "Imagine waking up with boundless energy every single day."
  • Social Proof Hook: "Here's why over 50,000 people trust our daily greens..."
  • Intrigue Hook: "The one wellness mistake you're probably making..."
• -> Creative System: You need a system for this. Don't just make ads randomly. Plan a list of concepts and angles you want to test each month. Have a dedicated campaign just for creative testing where you run new ads to a proven, stable audience (like a warm retargeting group or your best-performing lookalike). This isolates the variable, so you know if an ad performs well or badly, it's because of the creative itself, not the audience. The winners from this testing campaign then get rolled out across all your other prospecting campaigns.

At your level of spend, you should be aiming to test at least 5-10 new creative concepts every single week. It sounds like a lot, but it's what's required to keep performance high and prevent fatigue. It requires a proper production process, whether that's in-house or with an agency that has creative capabilities. I remember one successful eCommerce campaign we ran for a women's apparel brand that hit a 691% return, and it had a relentless creative testing engine behind it.

You'll need to think beyond the ad account...

Finally, and this is something a lot of media buyers forget, you can't scale in a vacuum. The most sophisticated ad strategy in the world will fail if the destination is weak. To aggressively scale your ad spend, your website's conversion rate (CRO) and your customer lifetime value (LTV) have to be able to support it. As you scale, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will naturally rise. You're reaching broader, less-qualified audiences. That's just a fact of advertising. The question is, can your business model handle it?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): Have you done everything you can to maximise the number of visitors who buy? Your product pages need to be flawless. That means high-quality images and video, compelling and clear copy, tons of social proof like reviews and testimonials (especially for a health product where trust is paramount), and a frictionless checkout process. Even a small lift in your conversion rate, say from 2% to 2.5%, can have a massive impact. It effectively means you get 25% more customers from the exact same ad spend, which dramatically lowers your CPA and gives you more room to scale.

Lifetime Value (LTV): How much is a customer worth to you over their entire relationship with your brand, not just the first purchase? If a customer only ever buys from you once, you have to make your profit on that first sale. But if you have a strong back-end, you can afford to break even or even lose a little money on the first acquisition, knowing you'll make it back (and more) over time. For a health and wellness brand, this is huge. Are you pushing subscriptions? Are you using email and SMS marketing to cross-sell other products? Are you creating bundles? Increasing your LTV is a superpower for scaling ad spend, because it means you can afford to pay more to acquire a customer than your competitors.

Scaling from $150k/mo is a complex task with a lot of moving parts. It requires a holistic view that connects your ad strategy, your creative production, your website experience, and your business model. Trying to manage all of that while also running the day-to-day can be incredibly difficult, which is why many brands at your stage look for an expert partner.

I hope these initial thoughts have given you some valuable things to consider. It's a lot to take in, but these are the core areas I would focus on to help a brand like yours achieve its growth targets. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

An agency with proven experience in scaling accounts in competitive niches can bring the strategic oversight and executional discipline needed to manage all this. For example, we've helped many eCommerce clients achieve significant growth and overcome their spending plateaus by implementing these systems. I've also worked with software clients, helping them scale their campaigns effectively.

If you’d like to have a more detailed chat, we’d be happy to offer a free consultation where we can take a proper look at your ad account and discuss a potential strategy for hitting your 2025 goals together.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh