Solved: Meta Ads Getting ATCs but No Purchases

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Meta ads situation. It’s good you're seeing some early engagement with Add to Carts, that's a positive sign for sure. But the real issue isn't whether to wait 5 days or not, it's about figuring out why those cart additions aren't turning into actual cash in your bank. It sounds like you've got a leak in your bucket, and pouring more ad spend in right now will just mean more water on the floor.

Let's get into what's likely going on and how you can actually fix it.

We'll need to look at why waiting 5 days is the wrong way to think about it...

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Everyone talks about the Meta "learning phase" like it's some magic box that you just need to feed money for a few days and it'll spit out customers. For massive accounts spending thousands a day, sure, it's a thing. For you, spending ₹600 a day, it's mostly a myth. You're not giving the algorithm enough data (purchases) for it to properly 'learn' who your best customers are. It's just guessing.

The problem with the "just wait 5 days" advice is that it makes you passive. It stops you from looking at the real data you do have. You've had 7 people interested enough to add your product to their basket, and every single one of them has then decided against it. That's not an ads problem. That's a website problem. Or an offer problem. Waiting another four days is unlikely to change that fundamental fact. You'll just have spent ₹3,000 to learn the same thing you've learned for ₹368: something is stopping people from giving you their money.

Think of it like this: if you had a physical shop and seven people walked in, picked up a product, walked to the till, and then all of them put it down and walked out, would you stand there for five days waiting for the eighth person? Or would you try and figure out what's wrong at the till? Maybe your card machine is broken, maybe your prices are confusing, maybe you look a bit dodgy. It's the same thing online.

Your focus for now shouldn't be on stabalising the campaign, it should be on fixing the part of your sales process that is clearly broken. The ads are doing their job for now – they're getting interested people to your site. Now you need to do yours and close the deal.

I'd say you need to become a detective on your own website...

You've already started doing this, which is great. Adding value points and clarifying the pricing is a good first step. But we need to go much, much deeper. You need to look at your entire customer journey, from the moment they click your ad to the moment they should be seeing a "Thank You" page, and identify every single point of friction. Every reason, no matter how small, that someone might hesitate.

Here’s the typical journey for an e-commerce customer. You need to analyse each step on your own site and be brutally honest with yourself.

Your problem is happening between step 3 and 4. Here's a checklist of things to look at, based on what I've seen fix this for dozens of eCommerce stores:

• Trust, Trust, Trust: You're a new store. Nobody knows who you are. Why should they give you their credit card details? You need to overcompensate. Do you have customer reviews or testimonials visible? A clear returns policy? A proper 'About Us' page with a story? A physical address or phone number? Secure payment logos (Visa, Mastercard, etc.)? Without these, you look temporary and untrustworthy, and people will abandon their cart. We worked on one campaign for a women's apparel brand that saw a 691% return, and a big part of that was building a really solid, trustworthy-looking website first.
• Shipping Shocks: You mentioned the COD fee, which is a common point of friction. But what about standard shipping? Is the cost revealed only at the very end of the checkout process? This is one of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment. Be upfront about all costs. If you can offer free shipping (and build the cost into the product price), it's a massive psychological win.
• Clunky Checkout Process: How many fields do they have to fill in? Can they check out as a guest, or do you force them to create an account? Every extra click, every extra box to type in, is another chance for them to get distracted and leave. Streamline it. Get rid of anything that isn't absolutely neccessary to process the order.
• Poor Mobile Experience: Most of your traffic from Meta will be on mobile. Have you gone through the entire purchase process on your own phone? Not just looked at it, but actually tried to buy something. Are the buttons big enough to tap? Is the text easy to read? Does the keyboard pop up correctly for each field? It's amazing how many sites are basically unusable on a phone.
• Product Photos and Descriptions: You said you moved the value points up, which is good. But are they compelling? Do your product descriptions sell a feeling or a result, or do they just list features? Are your photos professional? I remember one handcrafted jewelry client whose ads were getting clicks but no sales. We realised the product photos just didn't do the items justice. Once they got proper photography with models, sales started coming in. Your photos and copy need to make the product feel irresistable.

Before you spend another rupee on ads, you need to go through this list with a fine-tooth comb. Get a friend or family member who has never seen your site before to try and buy something and watch them. Don't help them. Just watch where they get stuck, where they hesitate, what questions they ask. Their confusion is your roadmap to a higher conversion rate.

You probably should rethink your offer, not just your ads...

This goes a bit deeper, but it's often the root cause of poor performance. A lot of the time, campaigns fail not because of bad targeting or a bad website, but because the core offer just isn't compelling enough. The number one reason I see campaigns fail is a lack of demand for the offer.

You need to ask yourself: what problem am I really solving for my customer? Why should they buy this product, from me, right now? If you can't answer that clearly, your ads will struggle.

Most ads just describe a product. Great ads sell a transformation. They use a simple "Before-After-Bridge" framework.

• Before: They describe the customer's current state, their problem or frustration. (e.g., "Tired of dull, lifeless skin?")
• After: They paint a picture of the desired state. (e.g., "Imagine waking up with a radiant, youthful glow.")
• Bridge: They introduce your product as the bridge to get from Before to After. (e.g., "Our new Vitamin C serum is the bridge to get you there.")

Look at your current ads and product page. Are you just saying "Buy our premium quality t-shirt"? Or are you saying "Stop feeling invisible in boring clothes. Our t-shirts are designed to make you stand out and feel confident the moment you put one on"? It’s a subtle shift, but it’s everything. People don't buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.

I've put a quick table together to show you what I mean. A lot of new store owners write copy like the 'Before' column. You need to be writing copy like the 'After' column.

This way of thinking should inform everything - your ad copy, your product descriptions, even your product photos. You aren't just selling an object, you are selling an outcome.

You'll need a structured way to test and scale, not just more budget...

Okay, let's assume you've fixed your website and people are starting to buy. NOW you can start thinking about your other questions: retargeting, dynamic ads, Advantage+, and scaling. Doing it before you have consistent sales is just a waste of money.

When it comes to scaling, you need a plan. Don't just increase the budget on your existing ad sets. You need to think in terms of the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): This is cold traffic. People who have never heard of you. This is what your current broad and interest-based ad sets are. The goal here is to find new potential customers.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't gone to the checkout. They might have watched one of your videos, visited your website, or liked an Instagram post.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): This is your hot traffic. People who have added a product to their cart or started the checkout process but didn't buy. This is your most valuable audience for retargeting.

Your question about when to introduce retargeting is a good one. The rule of thumb is you need at least 100 people in a custom audience for Meta to even run ads to them. But honestly, you want way more then that for it to be effective. I wouldn't even bother setting up a "viewed cart" retargeting campaign until you have at least 500-1000 of those events in a month. With your current budget, combining all your MoFu and BoFu audiences (e.g., website visitors + ATC + initiated checkouts) into a single retargeting ad set is your best bet to start with. Don't split them up until you have much more traffic.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) can be brilliant, but they need a lot of data to work well. They basically take all your audiences and creatives and let the algorithm figure it all out. It's powerful, but if you feed it garbage data (i.e., lots of clicks but no purchases), it will just get very good at finding you more people who click but don't buy. I'd wait until you have at least 50-100 purchases before you even test an ASC campaign.

To really understand how much you can afford to spend, you need to know your numbers. Specifically, your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they buy from you. Once you know this, it changes your entire perspective on ad costs.

Let's say your average order is ₹2000, and your profit margin is 60%. If a customer buys from you three times on average over their lifetime, your LTV isn't just the profit from one sale (₹1200), it's ₹3600. Knowing that, would you still be worried about a ₹52 Cost Per Add to Cart? Probably not. You'd realise you could afford to spend a lot more to get that valuable customer.

I've built a simple calculator for you below. Play around with it. It will help you understand the relationship between what a customer is worth and what you can afford to pay to get one.

We'll need to look at what 'good' even looks like...

Finally, let's talk about expectations. Running ads in India, your costs will generally be lower than in Western countries, which is a big advantage. Your cost per ATC of ₹52.63 is actually quite reasonable. But the only metric that really matters is Cost Per Purchase, and ultimately, Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

What should you be aiming for? It varies massively. For e-commerce, a typical conversion rate from click to purchase is somewhere between 1-3%. So, if your Cost Per Click (CPC) is, say, ₹10, you might expect a Cost Per Purchase of anywhere from ₹333 (at 3% conversion rate) to ₹1000 (at 1% conversion rate).

I've put together a chart to give you a rough idea of what you might expect. These are just ballpark figures based on our experience with many different eCommerce campaigns, but they should help you benchmark your own results once you start getting sales.

Remember, the cost itself isn't as important as the return. We've had campaigns for things like cleaning products achieve a 633% return, and another for navigation maps that did an 8x return. In both cases, the cost per purchase was different, but because the value of the sale was high enough, they were both very profitable. If your Cost Per Purchase is ₹500 but your profit on that sale is ₹1500, you're doing great. That's a 3x ROAS, which is a solid benchmark to aim for.

So, to sum up my main advice for you. Forget the ads for a moment. Focus all your energy on your website and checkout process. Act like a detective, find every point of friction, and fix it. Strengthen your offer and your messaging. Once you've done that, and you start seeing sales, you can begin to think about structured scaling.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can see, there's a fair bit to it, and getting it right involves a lot more than just setting up an ad set in Meta. It's about understanding the entire customer journey, the psychology of online buyers, and how to use data to make smart decisions. This is why many store owners eventually decide to get expert help. It lets them focus on their products and customers while someone else handles the complexities of growing their sales through advertising.

Hopefully this has given you a much clearer plan of action. If you go through these steps, you'll be in a much stronger position than 90% of new advertisers.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and have us take a proper look at your website and ad account, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. It can often be helpful to have a second pair of expert eyes on things.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh