Solved: Is This Facebook Ads Targeting Good Enough to Start?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Saw your post and thought I'd give you some detailed thoughts based on my experience. It's a really common question for people new to Facebook ads, and to be honest, getting the targeting right is probably 80% of the battle. You can have the best product and ad creative in the world, but if you show it to the wrong people, nothing will happen.

I'm happy to give you some initial guidance. What you're planning isn't a terrible start, but it can be refined quite a bit to give you a much better chance of success, especially if you're working with a limited budget as your name suggests!

Let's look at your current plan...

Okay, so you're thinking of using a 4% lookalike from all website visitors and a 6% lookalike from Facebook page engagers. My first thought is that these are quite broad, especially for a new account without a ton of data.

Just so we're on the same page, a 4% lookalike audience means Facebook is looking for the top 4% of users in your chosen country who are most similar to your source audience (in this case, your website visitors). That's a huge number of people, millions in most developed countries. When you go that broad, the quality of the audience can get diluted pretty quickly. The algorithm has to make bigger and bigger logical leaps to find people, and the similarity to your original seed audience gets weaker.

The other thing is the source audiences themselves. 'All website visitors' and 'Facebook page engagers' are what we'd call Top of Funnel (ToFu) audiences. They've shown a very low level of interest. Someone might have accidentally clicked on your site from a link and left immediately, or they might have just liked a single post on your page once. This doesn't make them a high-qualaty potential customer. Building a lookalike from a low-intent audience often just gets you more people with low intent.

The biggest red flag for me, though, is your campaign goal: 'Drive traffic'. I see this all the time, and it feels logical, right? You want people on your website, so you tell Facebook to get you traffic. The problem is, Facebook's algorithm is very literal. When you choose the 'Traffic' objective, you are telling it: "Go and find me the people inside my target audience who are most likely to click a link, for the lowest possible cost".

Facebook knows who these people are. They're the 'click-happy' users. They click on lots of ads, but they often don't do much else. They rarely buy. So you'll get clicks, your traffic numbers will go up, and your cost per click (CPC) might look amazingly low. But you'll likely see very few sales or meaningful actions on your site. You're optimising for the wrong behaviour. You're paying for clicks, not for customers. This is a trap that a lot of new advertisers fall into.

I'd say you need to build a proper audience strategy...

Instead of jumping straight to broad lookalikes, I'd recomend building your audiences out in a more structured way. Think of it like a funnel. You start broad at the top to find new people, and then you narrow down to the people who are most interested at the bottom.

Step 1: Start with Detailed Targeting (Prospecting)

Before you even think about lookalikes, you need to feed your Facebook Pixel with data. The best way to do this from a standing start is with detailed interest, demographic, and behaviour targeting. This is your prospecting phase, or Top of Funnel (ToFu). Your goal here is to find brand new customers who have never heard of you.

The key is to be specific. Don't just target 'Food' because you're 'Foodieonbudget'. That's way too broad. Think about your ideal customer.

• What magazines do they read (e.g., Bon Appétit, Delicious Magazine)?
• What celebrity chefs do they follow (e.g., Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver)?
• What specific kitchen gadget brands do they like (e.g., KitchenAid, Le Creuset)?
• What other food-related pages or groups are they members of?

I always tell clients to avoid targeting huge, generic interests if a more specific one exists. For example, if you're selling vegan snacks, targeting "Veganism" is okay, but targeting specific vegan foodie influencers, vegan recipe websites, or brands like "Beyond Meat" is much better. Why? Because the audience in the "Veganism" interest is massive and contains a lot of people who are only casually interested. The audience who likes a specific vegan influencer's page is almost certainly your core customer. You're aiming for audiences that contain a high density of your ideal buyers.

You'd set up different ad sets to test these different interest 'themes' against each other to see which one performs best.

Step 2: Nurture with Retargeting (Mid & Bottom of Funnel)

This is where you start talking to people who already know who you are. This is your Middle of Funnel (MoFu) and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). Once your prospecting ads start driving people to your site, your Pixel tracks them. You can then create custom audiences based on their actions.

For an eCommerce business, a simple retargeting funnel would look something like this, in order of increasing intent:

• -> All website visitors (last 30/60/90 days)
• -> People who viewed a product page (ViewContent)
• -> People who added a product to their cart (AddToCart)
• -> People who started the checkout process (InitiateCheckout)

You can see how someone who initiated checkout is a much 'hotter' lead than someone who just landed on your homepage. You can run ads specifically to these groups. For the 'add to cart' audience, you might show them an ad with a small discount or a reminder to complete their purchase. For general website visitors, you might show them your best-selling products or customer testimonials to build trust. This is usually the most profitable part of any ad account.

Step 3: Scale with Quality Lookalikes

Now, and only now, do we talk about lookalikes. Once you have enough data from your prospecting campaigns (you need at least 100 of a specific event, but honestly, you want 500-1000+ for it to be really effective), you can start creating lookalikes. But not from 'all website visitors'. You create them from your highest-intent audiences.

Here’s the priority list I generally follow for building lookalike audiences for an eCom store:

1. Lookalike of your highest value customers (if you can upload a list)
2. Lookalike of all purchasers
3. Lookalike of people who initiated checkout
4. Lookalike of people who added to cart
5. Lookalike of people who viewed a product
6. Lookalike of all website visitors

You start at the top of that list. Create a 1% lookalike of your purchasers first. That is your absolute gold-standard audience. It's Facebook finding the top 1% of people who look just like your actual paying customers. Test that. If it works, you can then test a 1-2% lookalike, then a 2-3% lookalike, and so on. You're scaling methodically based on what actually works, rather than starting with a huge, vague 6% audience.

You probably should rethink your campaign objective...

As I touched on before, this is probably the single most important change you can make. Do not use the 'Traffic' objective if you want to sell things. It's a false economy.

You need to use the 'Sales' objective (it used to be called 'Conversions'). When you select this, you then tell Facebook which specific conversion event you want it to optmise for. For an eCommerce store, you should always, always optimise for the 'Purchase' event.

What this does is tell Facebook's algorithm: "Ignore the cheap clickers. I don't care about clicks. Go through my audience and find the specific people who have a history of actually buying things online, and show my ad to them."

Yes, your Cost Per Click (CPC) will almost certainly be higher. This can be scary for new advertisers. But your conversion rate will be massively higher. You'd rather pay £1.50 for a click that has a 5% chance of turning into a £50 sale, than pay £0.30 for a click that has a 0.1% chance of converting. It's all about the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), not the vanity metrics like CPC. One campaign we ran for a women's apparel brand saw a 691% return after shifting from a traffic objective to a pure sales objective. It really is that powerful.

For this to work, you absolutely must have your Facebook Pixel set up correctly on your website, tracking all the standard eCommerce events (ViewContent, AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, Purchase).

You'll need a simple but effective structure...

Your idea of having one ad set with two goals isn't really how it works. An ad set has one goal (e.g. target this audience) and you choose the campaign objective at the campaign level. Within an ad set, you can have multiple ads that point to different places.

A much better, more scalable structure to start with would be this:

Campaign 1: Prospecting - Sales Objective (Optimised for Purchase)

• -> Ad Set 1: Targeting Interest Group A (e.g., people who like high-end kitchenware brands). Have 3-5 ads in here.
• -> Ad Set 2: Targeting Interest Group B (e.g., people who follow celebrity chefs). Have the same 3-5 ads in here.
• -> Ad Set 3: Targeting Interest Group C (e.g., people who read foodie magazines). Same 3-5 ads again.

You let these run and see which ad set (which audience) brings you the cheapest purchases. You turn off the losers and put more budget behind the winners. Later, when you have enough data, you can add new ad sets here for your high-quality lookalike audiences (e.g., Ad Set 4: 1% LAL of Purchasers).

Campaign 2: Retargeting - Sales Objective (Optimised for Purchase)

• -> Ad Set 1: Targeting 'All Website Visitors (30 Days) - EXCLUDING Purchasers (180 Days)'.
• -> In this ad set, you'd have different ads. Maybe testimonials, reviews, or a reminder of your brand's unique selling point.
• -> Ad Set 2 (Optional, for later): Targeting 'Added to Cart (14 Days) - EXCLUDING Purchasers (180 Days)'.
• -> In this ad set, your ads can be more direct: "Did you forget something?" or "Complete your order and get free shipping".

This kind of clear structure separates your cold and warm traffic, allowing you to speak to them differently and properly analyse what's working. I remember one campaign we did for an outdoor equipment brand where we used a similar principle to this, and it helped us drive over 18,000 high-quality website visitors that actually converted.

We'll need to look at what happens after the click...

This is a whole other topic, but it's vital. Even with perfect ads and targeting, if your website doesn't convert, you'll waste all your money. You mentioned sending traffic to your homepage and your "All products" page. These are generally not great landing pages for ads.

A homepage often has too many options and no clear call to action. An "All products" page can be overwhelming. For ads, you want to send traffic to a specific, relevant page. If your ad shows a specific gourmet salt, the click should go directly to the product page for that gourmet salt. This is called maintaining 'ad scent' - the journey from ad to landing page should feel seamless.

You also need to critically assess your website. Is it trustworthy?

• -> Are the product photos high quality?
• -> Are the product descriptions persuasive and detailed?
• -> Is your pricing clear? Are there unexpected shipping costs at the end?
• -> Does the site load quickly on mobile?
• -> Do you have reviews, testimonials, or other trust signals?

I always look at the funnel metrics. If your ads have a low Click-Through Rate (CTR), your ads are the problem. If you have a high CTR but people leave the landing page immediately (high bounce rate), your landing page is the problem. If people view products but don't add to cart, your product page (price, photos, description) is the problem. If they add to cart but don't buy, your checkout process is the problem. Analysing this data tells you exactly where to focus your efforts.

So, what should you expect to pay?

This is the million-dollar question. The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on your country, your niche, your product price, and the quality of your ads and website. However, I can give you some very rough ballpark figures from our experience with eCommerce clients to manage your expectations.

Let's look at the maths for getting a sale in a developed country (like the UK, US, Canada, etc.).

As you can see, the range is huge. Your actual Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will likely fall somewhere in between. If your product costs £30, a £10 CPA is great. A £75 CPA means you're losing money on every sale. The goal of all the optimisation I've described is to push your numbers towards that best-case scenario. For some of our clients, such as a cleaning products company, we've achieved returns of over 600% by systematically improving these metrics.

For developing countries, the costs are lower, but often so is the average order value and customer quality.

Here's my main recomendations for you...

I know that was a lot of information to take in. To make it easier, I've broken down my core advice into an actionable table for you to follow.

As you can probably tell, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about understanding your audience, building a methodical testing structure, creating compelling ads, and fine-tuning your landing page and offer. It's a process of continuous optimisation.

This is where professional help can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can spot opportunities you might miss, avoid costly beginner mistakes, and implement a robust strategy from day one, ensuring that every pound you spend is working as hard as possible to grow your business.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail and have us review your specific plans and website, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could walk through your account together and give you a clear roadmap for what to do next.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh