Solved: Low ROAS on Meta Ads for Horoscope Product

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look over the situation with your Meta ads. Spending £30k without hitting your target ROAS is a frustrating place to be, I've seen it before and it's almost always a symptom of a deeper issue, not just a case of bad creatives or wacky CPMs. Those are the results, not the cause.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance. The good news is that with digital products, the margins are usually great, so once we get the machine working, it can scale very well. The problem usually isn't in the ad account's technical setup (you've got CAPI and S2S sorted, which is good), but in the core strategy: the offer, the audience, and the message connecting them. We need to stop thinking about this as an 'ads' problem and start thinking of it as a 'business growth' problem that ads can solve once the foundations are solid.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their star sign...

Right, let's be brutally honest. Nobody wakes up in a cold sweat thinking, "I desperately need to buy a digital horoscope product today." That's not a real, urgent problem. But they do wake up terrified about other things. This is where we need to start, not with ad creatives, but with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). And I don't mean "Women, 25-45, interested in astrology." That's a demographic. It's useless. It leads to the generic ads that you're probably running, which get ignored by everyone.

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. A nightmare. What is the specific, expensive, emotionally draining nightmare that your product, when properly positioned, can solve? For the horoscope niche, it could be things like:

• -> The Nightmare of Uncertainty: A recent graduate feeling completely lost about her career path, terrified of making the wrong choice and wasting her 20s.
• -> The Nightmare of a Failing Relationship: A woman who feels a growing distance from her partner, constantly second-guessing the relationship and desperate for a sign that they're 'meant to be' or if she should cut her losses.
• -> The Nightmare of Stagnation: Someone in their late 30s who feels like they've hit a plateau in life. Their job is fine, their life is fine, but they feel a deep lack of purpose and wonder if they're living up to their cosmic potential.

Do you see the difference? We're not selling horoscopes. We're selling clarity to the uncertain. We're selling hope to the heartbroken. We're selling a roadmap to the stagnant. This is a fundamental shift. You must become an absolute expert in one of these nightmares. Your entire business, from your website copy to your ad angles, must revolve around solving that one specific, painful problem for that one specific type of person.

When you define your customer by their pain, your targeting on Meta changes dramatically. Instead of just targeting 'Astrology' or 'Horoscope.com', you start thinking smarter. For the 'Uncertain Graduate', you might layer interests like 'University Leavers', 'Graduate Jobs', with interests in 'Mindfulness' and 'Personal Development'. For the 'Failing Relationship' persona, you might target people with an 'Anniversary within 30 days' who also show interest in 'Relationship advice' pages or authors. This is how you find your real audience. Everything else is just shouting into the void and hoping someone listens. This is probably the biggest reason your performance is so erratic; you're relying on a broad audience that contains a tiny percentage of your actual potential buyers, and the algorithm struggles to consistently find them.

Let's map out how you could redefine this ICP. It's not a simple checklist, it's a process of investigation.

Doing this work is non-negotiable. Without it, you're just gambling with your ad spend. And £30k is a very expensive bet to lose. You need to do this work first, or you have no business spending another pound on ads. It's the foundation for everything that follows.

I'd say you need to understand the maths that actually matters...

The second big issue I see is the obsession with metrics like CPM or even ROAS on a day-to-day basis. A creative doing well and then dying over a weekend is normal. Performance fluctuates. Chasing a stable daily ROAS is a fool's errand. You need to zoom out and focus on the only two numbers that truly dictate your ability to scale: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

The real question isn't "How low can my cost per purchase be?" but "How high a cost per purchase can I afford to acquire a valuable, long-term customer?" Knowing your LTV is what separates amateur advertisers from professional growth marketers. It's what gives you the confidence to spend £100 to acquire a customer, knowing they'll be worth £1,000 to your business over time.

Let's break down the calculation. It's simpler than you think.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you per month? For a subscription, this is your monthly price. Let's say it's £20.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? For a digital product, this is usually very high. Let's be conservative and say 90% after payment processing fees etc.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your subscribers do you lose each month? This is the most critical number you need to track. Let's say it's 10%.

The formula is:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So, in our example:

LTV = (£20 * 0.90) / 0.10

LTV = £18 / 0.10 = £180

In this scenario, each customer you acquire is worth £180 in gross margin to you. Now we can talk about how much you can spend to get them. A healthy LTV:CAC ratio for a growing business is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire a customer.

Affordable CAC = LTV / 3

Affordable CAC = £180 / 3 = £60

Suddenly, the game changes. You're no longer panicking if a purchase costs you £25, £30, or even £50. You know that as long as your CAC is below £60, you are running a profitable, scalable machine. This knowledge allows you to outbid and outspend competitors who are still stuck trying to get £5 purchases. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to focus on acquiring high-quality customers.

I've built a small calculator for you below. Play around with the numbers for your own business. See how a small decrease in churn or a small increase in your monthly price can dramatically change your LTV and, consequently, how much you can afford to spend on ads. This is the financial modeling you need to be doing.

You probably should structure your audiences properly...

Once you know who you're talking to (your ICP's nightmare) and what you can afford to pay (your target CAC), we can build an audience strategy that actually works. Most people just throw a few interests into an ad set and hope for the best. This is a recipe for the inconsistent results you've been seeing. A professional approach means building a full-funnel strategy that guides people from being unaware of you to becoming loyal customers.

I structure this as Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold Audiences): These are people who have never heard of you. Your only job here is to grab the attention of your ICP by speaking directly to their nightmare. This is where your detailed interest targeting comes in.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm Audiences): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't bought yet. They've visited your website, watched your videos, or engaged with your page. Your job is to build trust and overcome objections.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot Audiences): These people are on the verge of buying. They've added to cart, initiated checkout, but haven't finished. Your job is to give them a final nudge to get them over the line.

Here’s how I would prioritise testing audiences within this structure for your niche. The closer to the final purchase an audience is, the better it will almost always perform. You need to get the ToFu part working to feed the rest of the funnel.

You MUST have separate campaigns for each stage of this funnel. A ToFu campaign speaking to the pain point, and a Retargeting campaign (combining MoFu and BoFu if your budget is smaller) with messaging for people who already know you. Your budget allocation should probably be around 70-80% on ToFu and 20-30% on Retargeting. You always need to be filling the top of the funnel with new potential customers.

And for heaven's sake, stop running "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaigns. You are literally paying Meta to find the people in your audience who are LEAST likely to ever click or buy anything, because their attention is cheap. It's the worst possible use of your money. Your ToFu campaigns should ALWAYS be optimised for conversions (Purchases). You need to give the algorithm the right signal from day one. Tell it to find you buyers, and it will learn over time how to do just that. It'll be more expensive at first, but you're hunting for whales, not minnows.

You'll need a message they can't ignore and an offer they can't refuse...

So, we have a specific person with a specific nightmare, and we have a way to reach them. Now, what do we say? This is where your ad creative and your offer come in. A creative dying after a weekend isn't a disaster, it's a data point. It means the novelty wore off and it wasn't strong enough to keep converting. You need a constant stream of new ideas to test, all rooted in your ICP's pain.

Let's use a framework. For your kind of product, Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) is perfect.

• Problem: State their nightmare in a way they instantly recognise. "Feeling lost in your career after graduation?"
• Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make them feel the pain. "Are you endlessly scrolling through job sites that all look the same, while your friends are landing their dream roles? The fear of choosing the wrong path is paralysing, isn't it?"
• Solve: Introduce your product as the specific solution, the light at the end of the tunnel. "Stop guessing. Our Cosmic Career Roadmap analyses your unique astrological blueprint to reveal the industries and roles you're cosmically aligned for. Get the clarity you need to build a career with purpose."

This is a million miles away from "Check your daily horoscope!". It's specific, emotional, and offers a tangible outcome. You should be testing dozens of variations of this message, with different images, videos, and headlines.

But even the best ad copy will fail if the offer is wrong. Asking someone to immediately buy a subscription is a high-friction ask. It's like asking for marriage on the first date. You need to de-risk the decision for them. The most common failure point I see is an offer that asks for too much, too soon. You need to give them a moment of undeniable value for free, or for a very low cost, to earn their trust.

Instead of going straight for the subscription sale, what could you offer instead? You need to create a low-friction entry point.

• A Lead Magnet: A "Free 7-Day Personalised Cosmic Forecast". They give you their email, and you give them a taste of your product's value. Now you have a lead you can nurture via email, building trust until they are ready to subscribe. This is a much better use of your ad spend than just getting a website click.
• A Tripwire Offer: A small, irresistible, one-time purchase. For instance, a "£7 Detailed Relationship Compatibility Report". This turns a prospect into a customer, even for a small amount. Someone who has paid you once is infinitely more likely to pay you again. It qualifies them as a buyer and you can then upsell them to the main subscription.

Running ads to these lower-friction offers will almost certainly give you a better ROAS in the short term, and build you a valuable list of leads and buyers for long-term profitability. Your current strategy of going straight for the subscription is likely a huge part of why you're struggling to acheive a positive return.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. But turning around a struggling ad account isn't about finding one magic bullet. It's about getting the entire strategy right from the ground up. The good news is that you have data from your £30k spend. It's not a waste if we learn from it and build a better machine. Here's a summary of the actionable plan I would put in place.

Implementing this is a significant undertaking. It requires a fundamental shift in how you approach your marketing, moving from just 'running ads' to building a predictable customer acquisition system. This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can analyse your existing data, help you correctly identify your ICP's core pain points, and build out this entire structure far more quickly and effectively than doing it alone through trial and error.

We do this for digital product and subscription businesses all the time. For instance, we helped one of our clients with an app achieve over 45,000 signups at under £2 per signup. This kind of growth is possible, but it takes a disciplined, expert approach to execute correctly.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and see how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session where we can dive into your ad account together. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your business this year.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh