Solved: One Sale After $40 Paid Ads - Good Start or Not?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what you've shared about your paid ad efforts so far.

Look, trying to judge the success of paid advertising from just $40 spend over a week is honestly not enough data to go on at all. It's just not enough budget or time for any ad platform to do its job properly, which is learning who is most likely to buy from you. You need way, way more of both before you can draw any conclusions or decide if paid ads are even going to work for your business.

I'd say you need to give it more time and budget...

Think about it. For $40, depending on your niche and how competitive it is, you might only get maybe 10, 20, perhaps 30 clicks if you're lucky. That's barely anyone visiting your site. Even if your website was perfect and converted brilliantly, you'd be extremely lucky to get a sale from such tiny traffic volume. Most of the time, you need hundreds, maybe even thousands of visitors to get a meaningful number of sales that tells you anything.

Ad platforms like Meta or Google work by collecting data. When someone clicks your ad, visits your site, views a product, adds to cart, or buys something, the system learns about that person. It uses this data to get better at finding other people like them who are also likely to buy. But with just $40 and a week, you just haven't given the system enough data to learn anything. It's still completely blindfolded.

Also, ad platforms have a 'learning phase'. This is where they experiment with showing your ads to different people to see who responds best. This phase takes time, often a week or two, and usually requires a certain number of conversion events (like sales) before it finishes. Until that learning phase is over, performance can be really inconsistent, and you can't properly optimise anything. $40 over a week isn't even close to getting through that learning phase for most campaigns.

We've run quite a few campaigns for eCommerce stores, and it's rare to see meaningful results in the first week, let alone with such a tiny budget. It often takes several weeks, sometimes a couple of months, of consistent spend and optimisation to really get campaigns dialled in and profitable.

So, my first bit of advice is that you simply haven't spent enough yet to know anything. You need to commit to a proper test budget over a longer period. What that budget needs to be depends hugely on your niche and average cost per click, but I'd say you're probably looking at a minimum of maybe £500 - £1000 over a month just to get enough clicks and data to start seeing patterns and having something to work with. Obviously, if your products are high-ticket, you'd need less traffic to potentially get a sale, but the clicks themselves might be more expensive. For lower-ticket items, you'll need significantly more traffic.

We'll need to look at traffic quality and your website...

Once you are spending more and running ads for a longer period, you'll start to get data you can actually use. This is where you can look at your performance metrics in the ad platform and on your website analytics to see where people are dropping off. Without this data, you're just guessing.

For example, once you have enough clicks:

If you see you have really low click-through rates (CTR) on your ads but the cost per click (CPC) isn't too bad, it might mean your ad images or the text in your ads aren't very appealing or relevant to the people seeing them.

If you have good CTR and reasonable CPC, but people aren't getting past your homepage to view products, maybe your ad targeting is off (bringing the wrong sort of people), or perhaps your homepage isn't doing a good job of directing people to the products they're interested in. It could be cluttered, slow, or just confusing.

If lots of people are viewing product pages but hardly anyone is adding things to their cart, the issue is likely on the product pages themselves. This could be poor product photos (using models or even videos showing the product can help massively, just like I've seen work for other eCommerce clients), rubbish or non-existent product descriptions, pricing that's too high compared to competitors, or maybe you need a special offer to encourage them to buy now.

And if people are adding to cart but not completing the purchase, the checkout process might be too long, complicated, or there could be unexpected shipping costs. Or maybe people just weren't ready to buy on that first visit and you need a strong retargeting strategy to bring them back later.

Honestly, based on my experience with eCommerce, often the biggest bottleneck isn't the ads themselves, but the website. If your website doesn't look trustworthy, isn't easy to use, or doesn't showcase your products well, no amount of advertising is going to work cost-effectively. People just won't buy.

I've seen stores where just improving the product photos, writing proper descriptions, and adding some trust factors (like customer reviews, links to social media, clear contact info) has made a massive difference to conversion rates. If your site isn't up to scratch yet, that needs to be your absolute top priority before throwing more money at ads. Fixing your conversion rate means you'll convert more of the traffic you do pay for, which directly lowers your cost per sale.

Actionable Steps Overview

To sum up, here's what I'd recommend you focus on initially:

Keep doing your organic marketing for sure – that's essentially free traffic if your time isn't accounted for, and it builds a relationship with your audience. But paid ads offer the potential to scale much faster than organic, if you can get them working profitably. The key is to approach them with realistic expectations regarding budget and time needed for testing and optimisation.

Regarding whether to put more money into paid ads now, I'd say yes, but only after making sure your website is ready to receive traffic and convert it. Throwing more money at a site that doesn't convert is just burning cash. Get the foundations right, then allocate a proper test budget and commit to running it for long enough to gather the data needed for optimisation.

Getting paid ads to work consistently can be complex, requiring ongoing testing of different audiences, ad creatives, and landing page optimisations. Understanding the data and knowing what to tweak can be tricky, especially when you're just starting out. Having someone with deep experience in running campaigns for businesses like yours can significantly speed up the process of finding what works and help you avoid wasting money on strategies that aren't right for your niche or offer. We've helped clients in eCommerce achieve significant results, like generating £107k revenue at a 618% ROAS for a prize draw site or 633% return for a cleaning products company, by focusing on these fundamentals and relentless optimisation.

If you'd like to discuss your specific situation in more detail and explore how a structured approach to paid advertising could work for your products, we'd be happy to offer you a free initial consultation. It might help clarify some of these points and map out a potential strategy.

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh