Solved: Optimizing Facebook Ads for Highest Value/ROAS

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question about value optimisation. It's a good question to be asking, and it shows you're thinking about the right things. Most advertisers just focus on getting the lowest cost per purchase, but you're looking at the bigger picture: maximising revenue.

That said, while value-based bidding and ROAS goals are incredibly powerful tools in the Meta arsenal, they are absolutely not a silver bullet. I see a lot of store owners flicking this switch, expecting the algorithm to magically find them big spenders, only to see their costs skyrocket and their sales dry up. The truth is, it often fails spectacularly if you haven't laid the proper groundwork first. The issue usually isn't the bid strategy—it's the fundamentals of your targeting, your message, and your understanding of what a customer is actually worth to you.

I've put together some detailed thoughts on how I'd approach this for your home decor store. It's a bit of a read, but I wanted to give you a proper answer rather than just a quick tip.

You're asking the right question, but it's probably the wrong problem to solve first...

Let's get straight to it. When you tell Meta to optimise for 'Highest Value', you're asking it to do something quite complex. You're not just saying "find me people who will buy," you're saying "scour your entire user base and find me the people who are most likely to buy one of my more expensive art pieces, not just the cheap ones." A ROAS goal is similar, telling the system to aim for a specific return for every pound spent.

This is fantastic in theory. But Meta's algorithm, as clever as it is, is not a mind reader. It learns from data. Specifically, it learns from *your* pixel data. To effectively find high-value customers, it needs a healthy, consistent stream of purchases at various price points. It needs to see what kind of person buys the £49.99 print versus the person who springs for the £574.99 centrepiece. Without that data, it's just guessing. And it's guessing with your money.

Think of it like training a dog. You can't teach it to perform a complex series of tricks on day one. You start with 'sit'. You reward that behaviour over and over until it's second nature. In advertising terms, 'sit' is a standard purchase conversion. You need to rack up hundreds of those first. Only once the algorithm reliably knows what a generic buyer looks like can you start asking it to find the specialist, high-spending buyers. For a store like yours, with a wide price range, you probably need at least 50-100 purchases a month, with a good mix of high and low value items, before you should even consider testing value optimisation.

So, are you ready for value bidding? Here's a simple way to think about it.

I'd say your real issue isn't the bid strategy, it's who you're talking to...

So if value bidding isn't the immediate answer, what is? You need to fix the foundations. And that starts with having a brutally honest conversation about who your customer *really* is. Most businesses get this wrong. They define their audience with sterile demographics like "Women, 35-55, interested in interior design." This tells you precisely nothing and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

You need to stop defining your customer by who they are and start defining them by their *problem*. Their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a pain state. For your home decor store, you might have several:

• The Overwhelmed New Homeowner: Their nightmare is staring at vast, empty white walls in their first proper home. They're terrified of choosing the 'wrong' art, so they choose nothing. Their space feels impersonal and unfinished. They don't want "art"; they want a shortcut to making their house feel like a home.
• The Discerning Design Enthusiast: Their nightmare is being boring. Their home is already well-decorated, but it lacks a 'wow' factor. They're afraid their friends will see their space as generic and uninspired. They don't want "decor"; they want a statement piece, a conversation starter that proves their impeccable taste.
• The Stressed Gift Giver: Their nightmare is a fast-approaching housewarming or wedding, and they have no idea what to buy. They want something more personal than a gift card but have no time to search. They don't want "artwork"; they want to be seen as the person who gives the most thoughtful, unique gifts.

See the difference? Each of these people will respond to a completely different message and is looking for a different product on your site. Once you define these pain points, your targeting and ad creative becomes infinitely easier and more effective. You're no longer shouting into the void; you're whispering a solution directly into the ear of someone with a problem you can solve. One of our campaigns for a women's apparel brand achieved a 691% return by successfully connecting with their target audience's specific needs and frustrations.

We'll need to look at what you're actually saying in your ads...

Once you know who you're talking to and what their specific pain is, your ad copy can stop being about your products and start being about their problems. This is the most significant shift you can make. Nobody cares that your prints use "archival-quality Giclée ink on 250gsm matte paper." They care about how your product makes them *feel*.

Let's use the 'Problem-Agitate-Solve' framework for our New Homeowner:

• Problem: Are those blank walls in your new house starting to haunt you?
• Agitate: You scroll through Pinterest for hours, but every choice feels too big, too expensive, too... permanent. So the walls stay empty, and your dream home still feels like someone else's space.
• Solve: Stop overthinking it. Our curated art collections make it easy to find a piece you love, turning that echoey hallway into a welcoming entrance. Your home, finally feeling like *you*.

Now let's try the 'Before-After-Bridge' framework for the Design Enthusiast:

• Before: Your living room is nice. Everything matches. But it's missing something. It's safe. It's... forgettable.
• After: A friend walks in, stops, and says, "Wow. Where did you get that?" The entire room now has a focal point. A story. A personality.
• Bridge: Our limited edition prints are the bridge from a pleasant room to an unforgettable space.

Here's a quick comparison of the kind of copy that fails versus the kind that sells:

You probably should focus on this metric before anything else...

Right, let's talk about the single most important number you probably aren't tracking: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). You're worried about your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for a single purchase, but that's a very short-sighted view. Someone who buys a £50 print today might love it so much they come back in six months to buy a £300 piece for their living room. Or they might buy three more prints as gifts over the next two years. The initial £50 sale isn't the whole story.

Knowing your LTV changes everything. It tells you how much you can *truly* afford to spend to acquire a new customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). If you know that, on average, every new customer is worth £400 to your business over their lifetime, suddenly paying £80 or even £100 to get them in the door doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a great investment. This is the maths that allows businesses to scale aggressively and intelligently.

Calculating it can seem complicated, but we can simplify it for an eCommerce store. You just need three numbers:

1. Average Order Value (AOV): The average amount a customer spends in one transaction.
2. Purchase Frequency (F): How many times an average customer buys from you in a year.
3. Customer Lifetime (T): The average number of years someone remains a customer.

LTV = AOV * F * T

Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of your LTV. Play with the numbers. See how a small increase in how often people buy can dramatically increase what you can afford to spend on ads. This is infinitely more powerful than tweaking a bid strategy.

You'll need to structure your account to feed the algorithm...

Okay, so how does this all come together in a practical sense inside your Ads Manager? You need a structure that allows you to talk to different people at different stages of their buying journey. It's madness to show the same ad to a complete stranger as you would to someone who abandoned their shopping cart 10 minutes ago.

I usually prioritise audiences based on how close they are to making a purchase. The further down the funnel they are, the more likely they are to convert, and the more aggressive you can be with your ads. For an eCommerce client of ours selling maps, implementing a robust, multi-layered campaign structure was a key part of them achieving an 8x return.

Here's a simple, effective structure to start with:

• Campaign 1: TOFU (Top of Funnel) - Prospecting
  • Objective: Conversions (optimise for Purchase). For now, forget 'Highest Value'.
  • Budget: CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation) is fine to test here. Start with about 70-80% of your total budget.
  • Ad Sets: Create a separate ad set for each of your key ICPs.
    • Ad Set 1: Targeting 'New Homeowners' (Interests like 'Zillow', 'Just Moved', 'First-time home buyer grant').
    • Ad Set 2: Targeting 'Design Enthusiasts' (Interests like 'Architectural Digest', 'Dwell', high-end furniture brands).
    • Ad Set 3: A broad Lookalike Audience (1%) of your past purchasers, once you have enough data.
  • Ads: Use your problem-aware, pain-point focused copy.


• Campaign 2: BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) - Retargeting
  • Objective: Conversions (optimise for Purchase).
  • Budget: The remaining 20-30% of your total budget.
  • Ad Sets:
    • Ad Set 1: Website Visitors (Last 30 Days) - Exclude Purchasers. Show them social proof, reviews, and a variety of your best-selling pieces.
    • Ad Set 2: Added to Cart / Initiated Checkout (Last 7 Days) - Exclude Purchasers. This is your hottest audience. Hit them with an offer if you can (e.g., free shipping) and remind them what they left behind using Dynamic Product Ads.
  • Ads: More direct, assuming they already know your brand. Focus on overcoming final objections like shipping costs, trust, or urgency.

This structure gives Meta clear signals. The TOFU campaign's only job is to find new potential customers at an acceptable cost. The BOFU campaign's only job is to close the deal with people who already know you. Your BOFU campaign will almost always have a much higher ROAS, and that's normal. It's supported by the prospecting work of the TOFU campaign.

So, here's the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this up, trying to jump straight to 'Highest Value' optimisation is like trying to run a marathon without any training. You need to build your strength and stamina first. The roadmap I've laid out is your training plan. It focuses on getting the fundamentals right, which will give you far greater and more sustainable results in the long run.

Here’s the step-by-step plan I would implement:

I know this is a lot to take in. Getting all these pieces to work together—the audience research, the copywriting, the technical setup, the data analysis—is a full-time job. It’s what we do all day, every day. While you're busy creating and sourcing beautiful artwork, we're deep in the data making sure the right people see it.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail and have us take a look at your ad account, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session. We can walk through your current setup and identify the single biggest opportunity for growth right now. It might be the quickest and most valuable 20 minutes you spend on your marketing all year.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh