Solved: Expensive Facebook Ad Impressions

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your campaign. It sounds like you're running into some pretty common issues when you're just starting out with Facebook Ads. The good news is that what you're seeing is fixable, but it'll require a bit of a shift in how you're thinking about your ads and what metrics you're focusing on.

You're worried about the cost of impressions, but honestly, that's probably the last thing you should be looking at. We'll get into why that is and what you should be focusing on instead to actually start making sales. Let's get this sorted.

You're Paying Facebook to Find Non-Customers

Right, let's get straight to the biggest issue. You said you're getting 600 impressions for €9. This works out to a €15 CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions). You asked if this is expensive. The answer is... it doesn't matter. It's the wrong question to be asking.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: when you run a campaign focused on impressions or reach, you're giving Facebook a very clear instruction: "Find me the cheapest eyeballs possible, I don't care who they belong to." And the algorithm is brilliant at doing exactly what you tell it to do. It goes out and finds the people inside your massive 25-65+ audience who are the least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively, never going to buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. Nobody else is bidding for them. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

I'd bet you've set your campaign objective to "Awareness" or "Traffic". This is a catastophic mistake for a small eCommerce business. You need sales, not just views. You must change your campaign objective to Sales and your optimisation event to Purchase. From this moment on, you are telling Facebook, "I don't care about cheap impressions. I will pay you a premium to find me people who actually buy stuff like this." Your CPM will likely go up. Your Cost Per Click (CPC) might go up too. But you will start getting the one thing that matters: customers. Forget every other metric for now. The only thing you should care about is your Cost Per Purchase.

We see this all the time. A client comes to us with a campaign that's getting tons of cheap clicks but no sales. The first thing we do is switch the objective to Sales. The costs per click might double, but suddenly they start making money because the *quality* of the traffic is a million times better. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales and having a great product, not a prerequisite for it.

Your Customer Isn't a Demographic, They're a Problem State

The second big problem is your targeting. "25-65+ and no demographic" is basically shouting into the void and hoping someone who owns a Nespresso machine hears you. Broad targeting can work, but only for accounts with thousands of pounds in spend and heaps of pixel data for the algorithm to learn from. You're not there yet. You need to give the algorithm a map.

Forget demographics for a second. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't an age bracket; it's a person with a specific problem. Who buys reusable Nespresso caps? It's likely one of two people:

1. The Eco-Conscious Saver: They feel guilty every time they throw away a plastic and aluminium pod. They're also annoyed at paying 50p for a tiny bit of coffee. Their pain is waste and cost.
2. The Coffee Snob: They love their Nespresso machine for its convenience but hate being locked into Nespresso's coffee selection. They want to use their own fancy, single-origin beans. Their pain is lack of choice and quality.

Your job isn't to target "everyone". It's to find these people on Facebook. This is how you start building audiences that actually work:

• -> Start with Obvious Interests: Target people who have an interest in "Nespresso". This is your baseline.
• -> Layer for Intent: This is where the magic happens. Create audiences that combine interests. For example:
  • Audience 1 (Eco-Savers): People who like "Nespresso" AND ALSO like "Sustainability" OR "Eco-friendly living" OR "Zero waste".
  • Audience 2 (Coffee Snobs): People who like "Nespresso" AND ALSO like "Single-origin coffee" OR "Speciality coffee" OR famous coffee roasters like "James Hoffmann".
• -> Competitor Audiences: Target people who like competing brands of coffee machines or pods.

You need to test these in seperate ad sets. Run one ad set for the 'Eco-Savers' audience and another for the 'Coffee Snobs'. Let them run for a few days (with a Sales objective!) and see which one starts delivering purchases at a lower cost. This is how you stop guessing and start using data to find your customers.

I'd say you need to stop thinking about Clicks and start thinking about Profit

You mentioned a 1.5% "conversion rate from seeing the ads to clicking". That's your Click-Through Rate (CTR), and 1.5% is actually not bad at all. But just like CPM, it's largely a vanity metric. A high CTR means nothing if those clicks don't turn into sales. I'd rather have a 0.5% CTR from an audience of buyers than a 5% CTR from an audience of window shoppers.

To run ads profitably, you need to understand your numbers. The most important calculation you can make is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and from that, your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC or CPA).

Let's do some rough maths. How much is a customer worth to you?

• Let's say a pack of your reusable capsules costs €20.
• Your gross margin (after the cost of the goods) is, say, 70% (€14 profit).
• Maybe a customer buys from you twice on average over their lifetime. So LTV = €20 * 2 = €40. Gross LTV = €14 * 2 = €28.

A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. This means for every €3 of lifetime profit a customer brings you, you can spend €1 to acquire them. In this example, your maximum allowable CAC would be €28 / 3 = ~€9.33.

This is your new magic number. Your entire goal is to get your Cost Per Purchase on Facebook to be below €9.33. Suddenly, paying €1 for a click doesn't seem so bad if 1 in every 8 clicks results in a sale (a 12.5% conversion rate on your website), right? Your CPA would be €8. This is the maths that unlocks scale. You stop worrying about 'expensive' ads and start focusing on profitable ad campaigns.

Play around with the calculator below. See how changing your average order value or your customer retention affects how much you can afford to spend on ads. This is how professional advertisers think.

You'll need an Ad They Can't Ignore

You admitted your ad is "ok but not really good". This is likely a huge reason for your poor performance. An average ad shown to a perfect audience will still fail. You need to create an ad that speaks directly to the pains we identified earlier.

Stop talking about the features of your caps. Nobody cares that they're made of "grade 5 silicone". They care about what it does for them. Use the Problem-Agitate-Solve formula:

• Problem: Headline: "Tired of Overpriced Nespresso Pods?"
• Agitate: Body: "That morning coffee habit adds up. Plus, billions of those little plastic pods end up in landfill every year. There has to be a better way."
• Solve: Body: "Our reusable pods let you use any coffee you want, saving you up to 80% on pod costs and saving the planet one cup at a time. Works with all Nespresso OriginalLine machines. Shop Now for 10% Off Your First Order."

For creative, ditch the polished stock photos. Get your phone out and film a simple, 15-second video showing how easy it is to fill the pod, pop it in the machine, and brew a coffee with perfect crema. User-generated content (UGC) style creative feels authentic and builds trust, which is massive for a small brand. We've seen this approach outperform slick, expensive studio productions time and time again for our eCommerce clients. For instance, we worked with a company selling cleaning products that saw a fantastic 633% return on their Meta Ads.

Your offer matters too. A small discount, a "buy 2 get 1 free" offer, or bundling the caps with a small bag of speciality coffee can significantly increase your website's conversion rate, which in turn lowers your Cost Per Purchase on Facebook.

We'll need to look at your Expectations

Finally, a word on budget. €15 a day is a very small budget to start with for a Sales campaign. The Facebook algorithm needs about 50 conversions per ad set per week to properly learn and optimise (the "learning phase"). At a target CPA of, say, €8, you'd need a budget of (€8 * 50) / 7 days = ~€57 per day *per ad set* to exit the learning phase quickly.

Now, you absolutely do not need that much to get started. But you do need patience. On €15 a day, you might only get one or two sales every few days. It could take weeks to gather enough data to know if an audience is working or not. Don't be tempted to switch things off after two days because you haven't made a sale. You need to give the algorithm time to work with the small budget it has.

Below is a rough idea of the kind of costs you might see. For eCommerce sales in developed countries, a CPA anywhere from €10 to €75 is possible, depending entirely on your product price, website conversion rate, and audience quality. Your goal is to get this number below your max allowable CPA from the calculator above.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap up, here's a clear, actionable plan. Don't try to do everything at once. Work through this list step-by-step. This is the foundation of a profitable advertising strategy.

I know this is a lot to take in. Getting paid ads right involves a lot more than just boosting a post. It requires a proper strategy covering everything from audience psychology and financial modeling to creative direction and data analysis. It's a specialism for a reason.

You can absolutely figure this out on your own through trial and error, but it will likely cost you a fair bit of time and money in wasted ad spend. Working with an expert can shortcut that process dramatically. We do this day in, day out for eCommerce businesses and have learnt the hard lessons so our clients don't have to.

If you'd like to go through your setup and build a more detailed, bespoke strategy, we offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation. We can have a look at your account together and give you a solid plan to move forward with. Feel free to book one in if that sounds helpful.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh