Solved: High $5 CPC on Women's Facebook Ads Campaign

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look over the situation with your campaign. A $5 CPC right off the bat is definitely on the high side, especially for a new campaign, so I can see why you're concerned. It’s a common issue though, and it usually points to a deeper strategy problem rather than just a simple bidding issue. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance on how you might want to approach this differently. The core issue isn't really the CPC itself, but the fact that you're asking a cold audience to make a high-consideration purchase straight away, and that's a tough sell.

The Real Reason Your CPC is So High

Alright, lets get straight into it. Seeing a $5.64 CPC after just three days can feel like you're just burning cash, and to be honest, you kind of are. But it's not for the reason you might think. Your campaign objective is "Sales" and your optimisation is set to "Purchase". You've basically told Facebook's algorithm, "Go find me people who are ready to buy custom art from a brand they've never heard of, and I don't care what you have to pay to get them."

The algorithm, trying to do its job, is hunting for those very few people in your massive 60 million-person audience who show strong, recent buying signals. These users are the most in-demand and therefore the most expensive to reach. You're competing with every other advertiser who also wants to reach 'buyers'. Because your product is custom art—a considered, emotional, and often expensive purchase—the pool of people ready to buy on impulse is tiny. So, Facebook charges you a massive premium to get your ad in front of them. It's a bit like paying for a front-row seat at a concert only to find out the band is playing to an empty stadium.

You're paying for what the algorithm *thinks* is a high-quality click, but after only three days and with very little data, its guesses are wild and expensive. You're essentially paying for Facebook to learn, and that's the most expensive way to run ads. This is a classic case of what I call paying Facebook to find non-customers. You've asked it to find buyers, but it's really just finding the most expensive clicks possible while it figures things out. The problem isnt your bid strategy; it's that your'e trying to skip the entire dating process and go straight for marriage on the first date.

Your Customer Isn't a Number; They're on a Journey

Before we even think about fixing the campaign, we need to get brutally honest about what you're selling and who you're selling it to. Custom-made art is not like selling a pair of socks. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, "I urgently need to buy a piece of custom art today." It's a purchase driven by emotion, inspiration, and trust. People need to see your work, connect with your style, imagine it in their homes, and trust that you're a legitimate artist who will deliver a quality product.

Your current approach treats everyone in your 60 million audience as if they're at the final stage of this journey. They're not. They are at the very beginning. They dont know who you are, they haven't seen your art, and they certainly don't trust you yet. Asking them to "Purchase" immediately creates a huge disconnect. This is why you need to think in terms of a funnel.

This is the typical journey for a product like yours:

1. Awareness (Top of Funnel - ToFu): A potential customer first discovers your art. They might see a video of you creating a piece, or a beautiful photo of your art in a home setting. They aren't looking to buy; they are just browsing.
2. Consideration (Middle of Funnel - MoFu): They're intrigued. They've watched your video or visited your website. They might follow you on Instagram. Now they are actively thinking about your art, comparing it, and considering if it's right for them.
3. Conversion (Bottom of Funnel - BoFu): They've decided they want it. They've added a piece to their cart, they're looking at shipping info, and they're ready to pull out their credit card. This is the *only* stage where a "Purchase" objective makes sense.

Your campaign is targeting the ToFu audience with a BoFu message. It’s like putting up a "Buy Now" sign in an art gallery's entrance. You'll scare most people away and only attract the few who were, by sheer luck, already looking to buy something exactly like what you offer. To succeed, you need to build seperate campaigns that guide people through these stages gracefully.

You'll need to figure out what you can *really* afford to pay

Your comment that you need a 10% conversion rate to be profitable is a huge red flag. For a cold traffic campaign selling a considered purchase, a 10% conversion rate is, frankly, a fantasy. A good eCommerce store might see a 2-5% conversion rate from its overall traffic. From cold ads, it's often closer to 1-2%, if that.

This means we need to re-frame the question. It's not "How do I get a $0.50 click to hit my 10% conversion rate?" The real question is, "What is a customer actually worth to my business, and how can I build a system that profitably acquires them at a realistic 2% conversion rate?" The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

For a business selling one-off art pieces, we can estimate LTV by considering the Average Order Value (AOV) and the likelihood of a customer returning to buy again. Even a small percentage of repeat buyers dramatically increases the amount you can afford to spend on acquiring that first sale.

Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of what your numbers might look like. Adjust the sliders to match your own business. This will show you your LTV, a target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and what you can afford to pay per click assuming a more realistic conversion rate.

You’ll quickly see that a $5 CPC is unsustainable unless your Average Order Value is in the thousands. The goal now is to build a marketing system that acquires customers for less than your target CAC. And that brings us back to the funnel.

I'd say you need to build a proper funnel

Instead of one high-stakes campaign, you need to split your efforts into a system that matches your message to the audience's temperature. It's less about finding that one "perfect" audience and more about creating audiences at each stage. I remember one campaign we managed for a women's apparel brand; by implementing a robust, full-funnel strategy, we were able to generate a 691% return on their ad spend. This is the power of warming up an audience before asking for the sale.

Here is a visual representation of what this looks like in practice:

By using this structure, you're achieving a few critical things. First, your top-of-funnel campaign will be incredibly cheap. A video view can cost pennies, so for your $100/day budget, you can get your art in front of thousands of people, not just a handful. You're building a massive pool of people who have shown interest. Then, you only spend the more expensive CPCs on retargeting this much smaller, much more qualified group of people. This is how you bring your overall cost per acquisition down and make your campaigns profitable.

You probably should rebuild your campaign structure

So what does this look like in your Ads Manager? It means pausing your current campaign and building a new, more robust structure. I know it's painful to stop something you've already spent money on, but it's not working and more money won't fix a broken strategy. Here’s a simple starting point I'd recommend.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

In this structure, you allocate a portion of your budget to cheaply build a warm audience (C1) and the rest to convert that warm audience (C2). The retargeting campaign (C2) is where you'll see your clicks be more expensive, and that's completely fine! A $5 click from someone who has already visited your site and added a product to their cart is a thousand times more valuable than a $5 click from a complete stranger. You're paying for quality, not just a random click.

This approach will likely feel slower at first. You won't see sales on day one from the video campaign. That's not its job. Its job is to feed your retargeting campaign with qualified, interested people. Give this structure at least a week or two to run, let the audiences build, and then you can start making real decisions based on data, not guesses.

It's a more complex setup, for sure, and managing it takes more work than a single campaign. This is often where getting professional help can make a huge difference, as an expert can build, manage, and optimise this kind of system far more efficiently. But understanding the 'why' behind it is the first and most important step.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh