Solved: Facebook Ads Too Broad for Small Budget?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Facebook ads setup. The short answer to your question is yes, it is absolutely possible to go too broad, especially with a budget of $100 a day. Going super broad can work wonders, but usually only once your pixel is really seasoned with thousands of conversion events. Right now, by targeting 138 million people, you're asking Meta to find a needle in a continent-sized haystack, and you're paying them for every bit of hay they search through.

For a newer account, you're likely just burning cash. The algorithm needs direction. Without it, it will default to finding the cheapest, easiest-to-reach people, who are almost never the ones ready to buy premium baby clothes. You'd be far better off giving it a much smaller, more qualified pond to fish in first.

Your ICP is a Moment of Need, Not a Demographic

Before we even get into the Ads Manager, we need to completely reframe how you think about your customer. "Females in the USA" is a demographic. It tells you nothing. It's the reason your ads probably feel generic and get ignored.

You need to get into their heads. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state, a deep desire, a moment of need. Who are you actually selling to?

• -> Is it the first-time mum, awake at 3 AM, scrolling her phone with her newborn sleeping on her chest? She’s worried about everything. Is the fabric organic? Is it soft enough? Will it cause a rash? She isn't looking for cheap; she's looking for peace of mind.
• -> Is it the experienced, affluent grandma who wants to buy a baby shower gift that gets a genuine "wow" from the room? She doesn't want to buy the same mass-produced outfit from Target that five other people bought. She wants something unique, high-quality, and memorable.
• -> Is it the trendy friend of the new parents? She follows specific mummy bloggers on Instagram and wants to buy a gift that reflects her own stylish taste. She's looking for something that looks great in an Instagram photo.

Each of these people is in a different mindset. They have different pains and different desires. A generic ad that just shows a cute baby in a onesie speaks to none of them specifically. When you define your customer by their specific, urgent need, you can stop shouting into the void and start whispering the exact solution they've been looking for. This is the foundation of good targeting. You don't find these people by targeting an audience of 138 million; you find them by targeting the niche signals they give off online.

We'll need to look at a proper audience structure...

Okay, so let's ditch the single, massive ad set and build something that actually works. The best way to do this is with a funnel-based approach. We're going to split your efforts into at least two campaigns: one for finding new customers (Top of Funnel, or ToFu) and one for bringing back people who've shown interest (Bottom of Funnel, or BoFu). This is non-negotiable for an e-commerce brand.

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Finding New People

This is your prospecting campaign. Its only job is to introduce your brand to fresh eyes that have never heard of you before. This is where your $100/day budget will initially be focused. You will NOT use broad targeting here yet. Instead, you're going to test small, highly specific audiences.

The key mistake people make is choosing interests that are too broad. Targeting "Parenting" or "Baby" is useless. Of course parents are interested in parenting! But so are millions of other people who aren't your customer. It's like trying to sell steak by targeting people who are interested in "Food". You need to be more specific.

I usually group interests into themes and test them against each other in different ad sets. Here are some ideas for you:

• Competitor Brands: Target people who like pages of similar or aspirational baby clothing brands. Think Hanna Andersson, Kyte Baby, Mori, L'ovedbaby, etc. These people are already proven buyers of premium baby clothing. This is your lowest hanging fruit.
• High-End Retailers: Target people who like high-end department stores or baby boutiques known for quality. Think Nordstrom, Pottery Barn Kids, or smaller independent boutiques. This targets people with disposable income and a taste for quality.
• Parenting Publications & Blogs: Don't just target "Parents Magazine." Get specific. Are there influential mummy bloggers or Instagrammers whose followers match your aesthetic? Target followers of Babble, The Bump, or specific, stylish influencers.
• Related Product Interests: What else do your customers buy? Maybe they're interested in eco-friendly diapers (The Honest Company), high-end strollers (UPPAbaby, Bugaboo), or specific nursery furniture brands. This is a way to find your audience through adjacent interests.

You should create 3-4 ad sets within your ToFu campaign, each with a budget of around $20-$25/day. Each ad set will target a different one of these interest "themes." Let them run for at least 3-4 days. This structure allows you to clearly see which type of targeting is actually bringing you customers, rather than just guessing.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing the Deal

This is your retargeting campaign. It’s arguably the most profitable part of any e-commerce advertising setup. This campaign targets people who have already visited your website but haven't bought anything. You should dedicate a small portion of your budget here to start, maybe $10-$20/day. This audience is small but highly qualified.

Your BoFu ad sets could include:

• -> All website visitors in the last 30 days (excluding purchasers).
• -> People who viewed a product in the last 14 days (excluding purchasers).
• -> People who added a product to their cart in the last 7 days (excluding purchasers). This is your hottest audience. You can even show them a dynamic ad of the exact product they left in their cart.

The messaging in these ads should be different. It's not an introduction anymore. It's a reminder. You can talk about your quality, showcase customer reviews, or even offer a small first-time purchase discount to get them over the line. Many brands see their best return on ad spend from these simple retargeting campaigns.

You'll need to build your audiences with data...

Once you start getting some sales through your targeted interest campaigns, you can unlock the real power of Meta's algorithm: Lookalike Audiences (LALs). A Lookalike Audience is when you give Facebook a list of your existing customers (your "source audience"), and it goes and finds millions of other people in the USA who share similar characteristics.

However, the quality of your Lookalike depends entirely on the quality of your source. This is why just starting with them is a bad idea. You need data first. You should aim for at least 100-200 purchases before you even think about creating your first Lookalike.

There's a clear hierarchy for which Lookalikes to build and test. I've seen so many accounts get this wrong. They build a Lookalike of all their website visitors and wonder why it performs poorly. Of course it does! Most website visitors don't buy. You want to build Lookalikes based on your *best* people first.

Here’s the order you should prioritise them in:

1. Lookalike of Purchasers: This is your gold standard. These are people who have already given you money. Finding more people like them is your top priority. Start with a 1% Lookalike in the USA, which will give you an audience of about 2.5 million highly relevant people. This should be the first LAL you test.
2. Lookalike of Initiated Checkouts: The next best thing to a purchaser. These people were *this close* to buying. A Lookalike based on them will also be very high quality.
3. Lookalike of Added to Cart: Slightly broader, but still a very strong signal of intent.
4. Lookalike of Website Visitors: This is the broadest and lowest quality. I would only test this after you've exhausted the ones above.

Once you have a winning Lookalike audience (e.g., your 1% Purchaser LAL is getting you sales at a good cost), you can then expand it. Test a 1-2% Lookalike, then a 2-5% Lookalike. This is how you scale methodically, rather than just jumping back to an audience of 138 million and hoping for the best.

I'd say you need a solid testing framework...

This all comes down to testing. There are no magic audiences that work for every brand. The process is about having a logical structure to test, measure, and iterate. I've worked with numerous e-commerce clients, from apparel to subscription boxes, and the ones who succeed are the ones who embrace disciplined testing. For instance, one campaign we managed for a women's apparel client achieved a 691% return on ad spend using Meta Ads.

Your job isn't to guess the perfect audience on day one. Your job is to build a machine that finds it for you. Your initial ToFu campaign with 3-4 themed ad sets is the start of that machine. After a few days, you'll see that maybe the "Competitor Brands" ad set is getting you purchases for $20 each, while the "Parenting Magazines" ad set is costing you $80 per purchase. The decision is simple: you turn off the expensive one and give its budget to the winner.

Then you create a new ad set to test another theme, maybe "High-End Retailers," against your current champion. You are always testing, always trying to beat your best-performing audience. It's a relentless process of optimisation, but it's how you turn a breakeven campaign into a wildly profitable one.

This is my main advice for you:

This is a starting point. It's a much more intelligent use of your $100/day budget than what you're currently doing. It gives the algorithm direction, allows you to find pockets of profitable customers, and builds a foundation of data you can use to scale later on.

There's obviously a lot more to it—the creatives you use, the copy in your ads, the quality of your product pages—but getting the audience structure right is the first and most critical step. Without that, even the world's best ad creative won't work because it's being shown to the wrong people.

Running this kind of structured account takes time and expertise. Continuously analysing the data, making decisions on which audiences to scale or cut, and testing new creatives is a full-time job. Many founders find they get much faster results and avoid costly mistakes by working with an expert who has built and scaled these kinds of systems many times before.

We offer a free, no-obligation consultation where we can take a deeper look at your account and map out a more detailed growth strategy for you. It might be worth a chat if you'd like to accelerate your progress.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh