Solved: Meta Ads Campaign Structure for Clothing Brand

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on running Meta ads for your female clothing brand. It's easy to get bogged down in the settings like ABO vs CBO, but honestly, that's often the last thing that makes or breaks a campaign. The real wins come from getting the fundamentals right before you even spend your first pound. I'll walk you through how I'd approach it.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, first things first. Before we touch a single button in Ads Manager, we need to talk about who you're actually selling to. Most new brands make the same mistake: they define their customer with vague demographics. "Women, 25-40, interested in fashion". That's not a customer profile; it's half the population of the UK. It tells you absolutely nothing of value and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain, their frustration, their 'nightmare'. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What's the real reason someone buys your clothes? They aren't just buying a dress. They're buying confidence for a first date, or a feeling of professionalism for a big meeting, or the relief of finally finding jeans that actually fit properly.

Let's get specific. Is your customer a young professional who's terrified of looking boring at work but also doesn't want to look unprofessional? Is she a new mum who feels she's lost her personal style and wants to feel like 'herself' again? Is she frustrated with the poor quality of fast fashion and is looking for investment pieces that will last?

Each of these is a completely different 'nightmare'. The ad that speaks to the young professional will be totally different from the one that speaks to the new mum. When you understand the specific frustration, you can write copy that hits them right between the eyes. You stop selling 'clothes' and start selling the solution to a real, emotional problem.

Once you've nailed that nightmare, everything else becomes easier. Where does this person hang out online? What fashion magazines or blogs do they actually read (not just the big mainstream ones)? Which influencers do they trust? Are they members of any specific Facebook groups? Do they follow certain competitor brands? This is the intelligence that builds your targeting strategy. Don't spend a single quid on ads until you've done this work.

We'll need to look at your budget... but not in the way you think

The second biggest question I get is "what's a good budget to start with?". And my answer is always the same: it depends. A £20/day budget could be a massive waste of money or an incredible investment. The only way to know is to understand your numbers.

The real question isn't "How low can I get my cost per purchase?" but "How high a cost per purchase can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?". The answer is all about Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). In simple terms, how much profit does a customer bring you over their entire relationship with your brand? Once you know that, you know how much you can afford to spend to get them.

For an eCommerce brand, the calculation is a bit simpler than for SaaS. Let's break it down:

• Average Order Value (AOV): What's the average amount a customer spends in a single transaction? Let's say it's £80.
• Purchase Frequency (F): How many times does the average customer buy from you in a year? Maybe it's 3 times.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on each sale after the cost of the goods? Let's say it's 60%.
• Customer Lifetime (in years): How long does a customer typically keep buying from you? Let's be conservative and say 2 years.

Now, the calculation for a rough LTV:

LTV = (AOV * F * Gross Margin %) * Customer Lifetime

LTV = (£80 * 3 * 0.60) * 2

LTV = (£144) * 2 = £288

In this example, each new customer is worth roughly £288 in gross margin to your business over two years. This is the truth. This number changes everything.

A healthy business aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for every £3 of value a customer brings, you can spend £1 to acquire them. So, with a £288 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £96 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business.

Suddenly, seeing a £40 Cost Per Purchase in your ads manager doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. It frees you from the panic of trying to get £5 sales. You can now confidently set your budget knowing what a successful outcome actually looks like. Use the calculator below to play with your own numbers.

I'd say you need a proper campaign structure

Okay, now that we have the foundations in place, we can talk about the campaign itself. This is where people get lost in the weeds with ABO vs CBO and a million other settings. My advice? Keep it simple. The complexity should be in your strategy, not your account structure.

The best way to structure your account is to mirror your customer's journey, which we often describe in terms of temperature: Cold, Warm, and Hot.

• Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Cold Traffic: These are people who have never heard of you before. Your only job here is to introduce them to your brand and get them to your website. This is where you'll use interest-based and eventually lookalike audiences.
• Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Traffic: These are people who have shown some interest. They've visited your website, watched a video, or engaged with your Instagram page, but they haven't bought anything. The goal here is to remind them you exist and show them more of your products.
• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Traffic: These are people who are on the verge of buying. They've added a product to their cart or started the checkout process but didn't finish. The goal is to give them a final nudge to complete their purchase.

So, your starting structure should be simple. I'd recomend two main campaigns:

1. A ToFu Prospecting Campaign: This is where you'll test your different cold audiences based on the ICP work you did earlier.
2. A MoFu/BoFu Retargeting Campaign: This campaign will target all your website visitors, people who've engaged with your social profiles, and specifically people who have added to cart. When you're small, you can combine these into one campaign to make sure the audiences are big enough.

Now, to answer your specific questions:

ABO vs CBO: Honestly, it doesn't matter as much as people think. CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation) lets Facebook decide which ad set gets the budget, which can be good for scaling. ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimisation) gives you manual control over how much to spend on each audience. When you're starting and testing, I'd probably go with ABO. It gives you more control to see which specific audiences are working without Facebook shifting budget away too quickly. Once you find winning audiences, you can group them into a CBO campaign to scale. But this is not the setting that will make or break you.

Age Groups & Advantage+: Don't use Advantage+ targeting when you have zero pixel data. Advantage+ is powerful, but it needs data to learn who your customers are. When you're new, you have to feed it that data yourself. Start with specific age ranges (if your brand has one, e.g., 25-45) and specific, layered interests. Be the algorithm's brain at first. Only once your pixel has hundreds of purchases should you even consider testing broad or Advantage+ audiences. Leaving it all on default at the beginning is just asking Meta to waste your money finding an audience you should have already defined.

So, for your budget, if you can afford £30/day, I'd put £20/day into the ToFu (ABO) campaign, split across 2-3 different ad sets testing different interests. I'd put the remaining £10/day into the Retargeting campaign. This is a good starting point to gather data without breaking the bank.

You probably should prioritise your audiences correctly

Targeting is the engine of your campaigns. Get it wrong, and you go nowhere. Get it right, and you'll find customers you never knew existed. With no pixel data, you're starting from scratch, which means we have to be smart and methodical.

Your first step is Detailed Targeting. This is where your ICP work pays off. Don't just target "ASOS". That's too broad. Think deeper. What niche brands does your ideal customer love? What specific magazines do they read? (e.g., Vogue, Harper's Bazaar). What high-end department stores do they shop at? (e.g., Selfridges, Harrods). You can layer these interests. For example: `Interest 1: ME+EM` AND `Interest 2: Subscribed to 'The Business of Fashion'`. This creates a much more qualified and specific audience than just targeting one broad interest.

I usually group related interests into themes for each ad set. For example:

• Ad Set 1 (Competitor Brands): Targeting followers of 3-5 direct or aspirational competitor brands.
• Ad Set 2 (Publications): Targeting readers of specific high-end fashion magazines and blogs.
• Ad Set 3 (Lifestyle): Targeting interests related to your customer's lifestyle. If you sell sustainable clothing, you could target interests like "Sustainable fashion", "Ethical consumerism", etc.

Once you have data (I mean at least 1,000 unique website visitors and ideally 100 purchases), you can move up the ladder to more powerful audience types. The hierarchy of performance is usually quite clear. An audience of people who have abandoned their cart is almost always going to perform better than a cold interest-based audience. I've worked on a women's apparel campaign where we saw a 691% return, and a massive part of that success was a rigorous approach to retargeting and audience prioritisation.

The progression looks like this:

1. Start Here: Detailed Targeting (Interests, Behaviours).
2. Once you have data: Retargeting (Website visitors, Video viewers, Instagram engagers).
3. Then: Retargeting specific actions (Viewed Content, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout).
4. When you have 100+ purchasers: Lookalike Audiences (Start with a 1% Lookalike of your Purchasers. This is often gold).

The chart below gives a rough idea of what you can expect in terms of performance from these different audience types. It's not exact, but it shows a clear pattern: the "warmer" the audience, the higher the return.

You'll need a message they can't ignore

The last peice of the puzzle is your creative - the actual ads people see. You could have the most perfectly structured campaign and the most laser-targeted audience in the world, but if your ad is boring, you've wasted your money. This is especially true in fashion, where visuals are everything.

You need professional-looking photos and videos. This doesn't mean you need a massive budget. A modern smartphone can shoot incredible video. But it needs to look good. Good lighting, clear shots of the product, and ideally, show the clothes on a person so customers can see how it fits and moves. User-generated content (UGC) can also be incredibly powerful. Photos or videos from actual customers build massive trust and social proof.

For the ad copy, go back to the 'nightmare' we identified. Don't just list features. Talk about the transformation. Use a simple framework like Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: Describe their current frustration. "Staring at a closet full of clothes, but feeling like you have nothing to wear."
• After: Paint a picture of the ideal outcome. "Imagine effortlessly putting together a chic, powerful outfit in five minutes."
• Bridge: Introduce your product as the solution. "Our new capsule collection is the bridge. Five versatile pieces, endless confidence-boosting outfits."

Test different creatives relentlessly. Test static images vs. carousels vs. videos. Test different headlines and different primary text. You never know what's going to resonate until you try. Your job in the first few weeks isn't necessarily to be massively profitable; it's to learn. Learn which audiences respond, which creatives they engage with, and which products they click on. That data is worth its weight in gold.

I know this is a lot to digest, especially when you're just starting out. The key is to be methodical. Don't try to do everything at once. Start with the foundations: your ICP and your numbers. Then build a simple, clean campaign structure. Test, learn, and then scale what works. I've put the main recomendations into a table for you below to make it a bit clearer.

Getting paid ads right is a process of constant testing and refinement, and it can be a bit of a minefield when you're doing it alone. You need to combine the right high-level strategy with meticulous, in-the-weeds execution. Many business owners find they just don't have the time to dedicate to learning and managing it all effectively, which is where getting some expert help can make a massive difference.

If you'd like to go through your specific brand and plans in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can have a proper look at things together. Sometimes a 20-minute chat can save months of expensive trial and error.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh