Solved: Facebook Ads are not performing as expected

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your Facebook ads. I've had a look through the details you sent over, and honestly, it's a classic situation. A lot of people fall into the same traps when they're starting out. The good news is that it's all fixable, but you're going to need to change your entire approach. Right now, you're not just "missing something", you're building your whole strategy on a foundation of myths and bad advice that's costing you a fortune. Forget what you've heard, we need to get back to basics.

Let's get into it.

The Real Problem Isn't Just Your ROAS... It's Your Assumptions

First off, you're right to be obsessed with ROAS. It's the only metric that actually pays the bills. Seeing a return of less than 1 means every dollar you spend is a dollar you're losing, plus the cost of the goods. You've spent $10k to learn a very expensive lesson: your current method is fundamentally broken. You feel like you're lighting money on fire because, well, you are.

You mentioned you're pretty good with site layout and you've got a "super optimized" landing page with celeb endorsements. I hear this a lot. But the data tells a different story. A $2 CPC and a 1% CTR isn't terrible, but it's not great either. It means for every 100 people who see your ad, only one is clicking. And for every click, you're paying $2. The most damning part is that these clicks aren't turning into sales. This tells me the problem is two-fold: a disconnect between your ad and your landing page, and a serious issue on the page itself.

Let's be brutally honest. A "clean site" and a "celeb endorsement" dont automatically equal trust or sales. Trust is earned, not bought. When a visitor lands on your site from an ad, they're asking a few simple questions in a split second: Is this site legit? Can I trust them with my credit card details? Is this product actually what I want? Is the price right? Your page is failing to answer 'yes' to these questions.

Think about it from the customer's perspective. They've clicked an ad, they land on a page. What do they see? You've got 250 different products. Is the one they clicked on front and center? Or are they dumped onto a cluttered homepage? Is the value proposition immediate and obvious? A celeb endorsement can sometimes feel cheap or fake if it's not from someone who genuinely aligns with the brand. It can even reduce trust if it looks like a low-effort paid gig.

Your visitors are dropping off between the click and the purchase. This is the leaky bucket. Here’s where I'd start looking:

-> Product Presentation: Are your product photos professional? Are there multiple angles? Videos of the product in use? For $50 products, people expect to see quality. Grainy photos or bad lighting will kill sales instantly.

-> Product Descriptions: Do you have them? Are they persuasive? Do they solve a problem or appeal to an emotion, or do they just list specs? You need copy that sells the benefit, not just the feature.

-> Trust Signals: Beyond a celeb, where are the real trust signals? I'm talking about genuine customer reviews with photos. Clear shipping and return policies. An 'About Us' page that tells a story. A physical address or phone number. Badges for secure payment. Without these, your site feels risky.

-> The Offer: Free shipping is standard now, not a bonus. What else are you offering? Is the price competitive? A first-time buyer discount? A bundle deal? With a $50 price point, you're in a very competitive space. You need to give people a compelling reason to buy *now* and from *you*.

Your site might be "optimised" in your eyes, but it's not optimised for your customer. The lack of sales is the only feedback that matters, and it's telling you the on-site experience isn't working.

We'll need to look at your flawed campaign strategy...

This is where the real damage is being done. Your entire approach to how you're using the Facebook ads platform is based on some of the worst advice floating around the internet. Let's dismantle these myths one by one, because they are the primary reason you're burning through cash.

Myth #1: Run Engagement Campaigns for Awareness

This is probably your single most expensive mistake. You said you run an engagement campaign to get awareness, then retarget with a lookalike. I need you to understand this: When you tell Facebook's algorithm to optimise for 'Engagement' or 'Video Views', you are giving it a very specific, and for you, a very wrong, command. You're telling it: "Please go and find me the people inside this audience who are most likely to click 'Like', watch a video for a few seconds, or leave a comment. And please, find them as cheaply as possible."

The algorithm is incredibly good at its job. It will do exactly what you asked. It will seek out the users who have a long history of liking and commenting on things. These are not the people who have a history of buying things. Why? Because the users who actually buy things are more valuable. Their attention is more expensive. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to build you an audience of non-customers. You're building a list of people who like to browse, not buy.

Then, you take this audience of window shoppers and you tell Facebook to create a 1% Lookalike. So now you've asked the algorithm to find another 2 million people in the US who behave *exactly like* the people who don't buy things. You have perfected a system for finding people who will never convert. It's no wonder your sales campaigns are failing. You're serving them to the worst possible audience.

Forget 'awareness' as a campaign objective for now. That's a luxury for massive brands with millions to spend. For a business like yours, the best form of brand awareness is a sale. It's a customer having a great experience and telling their friends. Your one and only campaign objective, from day one, should have been 'Sales' (or 'Conversions'). This tells the algorithm to find people who are likely to make a purchase, and it will learn and get better over time. You need to be optimising for the final action you want someone to take.

Myth #2: Pause Ads Overnight and on Weekends

I understand the logic here. You saw bad results at night and on weekends, so you turned the ads off to save money. But you've confused the symptom with the cause. The reason your ads performed badly during those times wasn't because people don't shop at night. It's because your flawed targeting (see Myth #1) was running 24/7. You were showing ads to the wrong people, all the time.

When you manually pause your campaigns every single day, you are completely wrecking the algorithm's ability to learn and optimise. The 'Learning Phase' is a real and important part of the process. During this phase, the algorithm is spending your budget to figure out who responds to your ads, when they respond, and where to show them. It needs a continuous flow of data to do this effectively. By turning it off and on, you're essentially resetting it, or at least severely handicapping it, every 24 hours. It never gets a chance to get smart.

Real customers buy at all hours. Someone might be browsing on their phone in bed at 11pm. Someone else might be doing their shopping on a Sunday morning. You want the algorithm to be out there, finding these people for you. Once you fix your targeting and start feeding it the right data (i.e., actual purchases), it will figure out the best times to show your ads all by itself, far better than you ever could manually. So, set your budget and let it run. Trust the machine, but only once you've given it the right instructions.

You probably should build a proper account structure...

Okay, so we've established that your campaign objective and scheduling are wrong. Now let's talk about the core of any good ad account: structure and audience prioritisation. You've been using one big, flawed audience. We need to replace that with a strategic, multi-layered approach that targets people at different stages of their buying journey.

Think of it like a funnel. At the top, you have people who've never heard of you (cold traffic). In the middle, you have people who've shown some interest (warm traffic). At the bottom, you have people who are close to buying (hot traffic). You need to speak to each of these groups differently.

Here’s how I would prioritise your audiences, moving from the highest quality to the lowest. You should test these in order.

META ADS AUDIENCE PRIORITISATION (for an eCommerce Store)

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Traffic (Your Highest Priority)
These are people who are on the verge of buying. Your goal here is to get them over the line. These audiences are small but incredibly valuable.

-> Added to Cart (e.g., last 7-14 days) - but haven't purchased
-> Initiated Checkout (e.g., last 7-14 days) - but haven't purchased
-> Viewed specific high-value Products (e.g., last 14-30 days)

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Traffic
These people know who you are but aren't ready to buy yet. Your goal is to build more trust and remind them of your products.

-> All Website Visitors (e.g., last 30-60 days) - excluding purchasers
-> Engaged with your Facebook Page (e.g., last 90 days)
-> Engaged with your Instagram Profile (e.g., last 90 days)
-> Watched 50% or more of your Video Ads (e.g., last 90 days)

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Cold Traffic
This is where you find new customers. This is where you'll spend most of your budget once your retargeting is working. The key is to build these audiences from *high-quality* sources, not engagement.

-> Lookalike Audience (1%) of your Previous Customers.
-> Lookalike Audience (1%) of people who Added to Cart.
-> Lookalike Audience (1%) of people who Initiated Checkout.
-> Lookalike Audience (1%) of your highest value customers (if you can upload a list).
-> Detailed Targeting (Interests, Behaviours) - but done intelligently.

For your detailed targeting, dont just target broad interests like "shopping". Be specific. What magazines do your ideal customers read? What competing or complementary brands do they buy from? What influencers do they follow? Layer these interests to narrow down the audience. For example, people who like "Handmade Jewelry" AND also like "Etsy". This is far more powerful than just one broad interest.

To implement this, you need a proper campaign structure. Stop running one-off, confusing campaigns. Here is a simple, effective, and scalable structure I would recommend you start with. Every single campaign's objective should be SALES.

You run these campaigns continuously. You allocate maybe 70-80% of your budget to the Prospecting campaign and 20-30% to Retargeting. You test different creatives (images/videos) inside each ad set. After a few days (once an ad set has spent maybe 2x your target cost-per-purchase), you analyse the performance. You turn off the losing ad sets and reallocate budget to the winners. This is how you systematically find what works and scale it, instead of just guessing.

Let's talk about what success could look like...

It's easy to get discouraged when you've had a bad run, but your business is not a lost cause. eCommerce advertising works, and it works incredibly well when done right. We've had numerous eCommerce clients we've worked with achieve fantastic returns. I remember one subscription box client that hit a 1000% Return On Ad Spend. We've also seen a 691% return for a women's apparel brand and a 633% return for a cleaning products company. This isn't to brag, but to show you what is possible when you have a solid strategy, the right targeting, and persuasive creative. Your goal of a positive ROAS is not just achievable; you should be aiming much higher.

But let's be realistic and do the maths. Your products are in the $50 range. Your CPC is currently $2. A typical eCommerce conversion rate is somewhere between 2-5% for cold traffic if the site and offer are decent.

Let's look at the numbers with your current CPC:

-> If your site converts at 2%: For every 100 clicks ($200 spent), you get 2 sales ($100 revenue). Your CPA is $100. Your ROAS is 0.5. This is likely where you are now, or even worse.

-> If your site converts at 5%: For every 100 clicks ($200 spent), you get 5 sales ($250 revenue). Your CPA is $40. Your ROAS is 1.25. You're making a bit of money, but after product costs, you're probably still losing.

This tells us two things. You absolutely *must* improve your website's conversion rate. And you must improve your ads to get a lower CPC. The strategy I've outlined above is designed to do both. By targeting higher-quality audiences (Lookalikes of Purchasers, hot retargeting), you send more qualified traffic to your site, which naturally increases the conversion rate. These audiences are also more likely to engage with your ads in a meaningful way, which improves your ad quality score and can lower your CPC over time.

The goal isn't just to get to a 1 ROAS. A truly healthy eCommerce business should be aiming for a 3.0 ROAS or higher from their paid advertising. At a $50 product price, that means you need your Cost Per Purchase (CPA) to be around $16.67. Getting there is a process of constant testing and optimisation, but it starts with the solid foundation we've discussed.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. So here is a table summarising the main strategic shifts you need to make right now. This is your action plan.

Implementing this is a complete overhaul of your current process. It will take time and discipline. You need to stop looking for quick fixes and silver bullets and commit to building a proper, sustainable advertising system. The reason agencies like ours exist is because this stuff is complicated, and getting it wrong is incredibly expensive, as you've seen.

You've got the raw materials of a business, but your advertising engine is built all wrong. By fixing your objectives, audiences, and structure, you give yourself a genuine chance at success.

If you'd like to walk through your ad account together and have us map out this new structure for you in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation call. It might be helpful to have a second pair of expert eyes on it to make sure you're starting this new phase on the right foot.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh