Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
Happy to give you some of my thoughts on your plan. You've clearly got a solid background in marketing and copy, which is a massive head start. Running your own offers is a different beast though, especially when you get into paid traffic. I've seen a lot of people try and fail with this stuff, but your funnel idea is a classic for a reason. Let's get into it.
Okay, let's look at profitability with a low-ticket offer...
This is the big question, isn't it? Can you actually make money on cold traffic with a $27 front-end product? The honest answer is: it's very, very difficult. Possible, yes, but the maths has to be perfect.
You're a copywriter, so you know it's all about the numbers. With paid ads, the main numbers are your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – what you pay for one customer – and your Average Order Value (AOV) – what that customer spends on average in one go.
To be profitable from day one, your AOV has to be higher than your CPA. Simple as that.
So, what CPA can you expect? Based on my experience running ads for courses and eCommerce products, the costs can vary a lot. For a sale in developed countries like the UK, US, Canada, etc., you're often looking at a CPA anywhere from £10 to £75. Sometimes it's lower, sometimes its even higher, it really depends on the competition and your offer. I remember one campaign we ran for a course creator that was generating sales at a great return, but they had a very polished funnel and a proven offer.
Let's do some rough maths on your funnel:
Front-end product: $27
Your CPA from ads: Let's be optimistic and say you get it down to $35 (£28) after some testing.
Straight away, you can see you'd be losing $8 on every single sale. This is why so many people fail. They look at the front-end price and think they can't make it work. They're right, you can't. Not on the front-end alone.
Your entire business model relies on the bumps and upsells. That's where you make your money and fund your ad spend. So let's add those into the mix. These take-rates are just guesses, you'll need to test them yourself.
-> Front-end Product: $27 (100% of customers buy this)
-> Order Bump: $17 (Let's say a good 30% of people take this) -> $17 * 0.30 = $5.10 per customer
-> Upsell 1: $197 (Let's say a decent 10% of people take this) -> $197 * 0.10 = $19.70 per customer
So, your new Average Order Value (AOV) is $27 + $5.10 + $19.70 = $51.80.
Now the maths looks different. With an AOV of $51.80 and a CPA of $35, you're making a profit of $16.80 per customer. That works. You can scale that. But if your CPA creeps up to $55, you're losing money again. It's a game of fine margins. Your profit isn't in the product, it's in the funnel optimisation.
I'd say you need to nail the funnel and offer first...
Before you even think about spending a quid on ads, your funnel has to be airtight. Since you're coming from a copy background, you're already ahead of most people. The copy on the landing page, the bump, and the upsell page has to be incredibly persuasive.
You asked if you should build the high-ticket backend product first. Absolutely not. Don't waste your time. Prove the front-end funnel first. If you can't get that to work, you won't have any customers to sell the high-ticket thing to anyway. Get the economics of your customer acquisition sorted out, make it profitable, and *then* you can think about building out the backend.
Think about the drop-off points. Once you start running traffic, you need to watch your stats like a hawk:
- High Impressions, Low Clicks (Low CTR)? -> Your ad creative or ad copy isn't grabbing anyone. It's boring or not hitting a pain point. Time to test new images, videos, and headlines.
- High Clicks, Low Sales? -> People are interested in the ad, but the landing page isn't converting them. This could be the price, the offer itself, or the sales copy on the page isn't convincing enough. It could also be a trust issue - does the page look professional?
- High Front-end Sales, Low Bump/Upsell Take Rate? -> Your main offer is good, but the extra offers aren't compelling. Is the bump a no-brainer? Is the upsell a logical next step that solves a bigger problem? Your copy skills are absolutley vital here.
For some of the B2B SaaS campaigns I've run, we brought in a specialist copywriter just to handle the landing pages because getting that conversion rate up by even half a percent can be the difference between a campaign that scales and one that fails. Given your skills, you have a massive advantage here, but don't underestimate how much testing it will take.
You'll need a solid ad strategy for Meta...
Right, the "technical" part. A lot of people get bogged down here, but it's about having a logical structure and testing methodically. Don't just throw a bunch of interests into one adset and hope for the best. That's a recipe for burning cash.
Here's how I'd prioritise your audiences, starting from scratch:
Phase 1: Cold Traffic - Finding Your Winners (Top of Funnel - ToFu)
This is where you'll live for the first few weeks or months. You have no data, so you need to rely on Meta's detailed targeting. The goal is to find pockets of people who resonate with your offer.
-> Detailed Targeting (Interests/Behaviours): You're in personal development. Don't just target "Tony Robbins" or "Self-help". It's too broad and everyone does it, so it's expensive. Think deeper. What specific books do your ideal customers read? What podcasts do they listen to? What tools do they use? Maybe it's interests like 'Tim Ferriss', 'The 4-Hour Workweek', 'Headspace', 'Calm app', or followers of specific, smaller influencers in the niche. The aim is to find interests that contain a high density of your ideal customer, not just millions of random people. Group these into logical themes. For example, one ad set for 'mindfulness app' interests, another for 'business productivity author' interests.
You'll want to test different creatives against these audiences. I've seen some SaaS clients get incredible results with simple User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos. For a course, a video of you talking to the camera about the problem you solve can work really well. It builds trust. Mix in some well-designed image ads too.
Phase 2: Building Momentum - Retargeting & Lookalikes (Middle/Bottom of Funnel - MoFu/BoFu)
Once you've had at least 100 purchases (and ideally more), you can start getting a bit more sophisticated. You'll have pixel data to work with.
-> Retargeting (BoFu): These are your warmest audiences and should be your most profitable. These are people who've shown interest but didn't buy. You'd run different ads to them. For example:
- Target people who 'Added to Cart' but didn't purchase. Hit them with a testimonial ad.
- Target people who visited your landing page. Show them a different angle of the course or a video explaining a key module.
-> Lookalike Audiences (ToFu/MoFu): This is where you can start to scale. You take a source audience (e.g., a list of your actual customers) and ask Meta to find millions of other people who look just like them. The quality of your source audience is everything. The priority for testing lookalikes should be:
- Lookalike of Purchasers (your best audience)
- Lookalike of Initiated Checkouts
- Lookalike of Landing Page Visitors
- Lookalike of people who watched 50% of your video ad
Start with a 1% lookalike in your target countries, as it's the most similar to your source audience. You can test broader lookalikes (3%, 5%) later as you scale.
Regarding your budget question - you need to spend enough to get data quickly. If your target CPA is $40, a $10/day budget is useless. You might wait a week for one sale. I usually recomend a starting test budget of at least $1,000 - $2,000 per month (£800 - £1,600). This allows you to run multiple ad sets at maybe £15-£20 a day each and see which ones get traction. You need to be prepared to turn off the losers fast. A good rule of thumb is to kill any ad set that spends 2-3x your target CPA without a sale. Be ruthless.
You probably should look at some benchmarks...
It's always good to know what's possible. As I said, low-ticket is tough, but we have worked on campaigns for course creators that have done extremely well. I remember one campaign we ran, where we generated over $115,000 in revenue in just 1.5 months using Meta ads for course sales. I also recall another campaign we worked on for a different course, where we saw a 447% Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) in the first week using Meta ads.
Now, I'm not saying you'll get these results overnight. Tbh these were strong offers with very well-optimised funnels. It's just to show you that when the offer, the copy, the funnel, and the ad strategy all align, it's definately possible to be very profitable. But it takes a huge amount of testing and expertise to get there.
Your main metric to watch will be ROAS. If you spend £100 on ads and get £300 back in sales (a 3x or 300% ROAS), you have a winning campaign you can pour more money into. Your AOV calculation is the key to this. With an AOV of $51.80, a 3x ROAS means you need a CPA of around $17.26. That's pretty challenging, so you might need to be happy with a 1.5x or 2x ROAS initially just to prove the concept while you optimise.
Here's a breakdown of what you might expect for costs, just to keep it in perspective. These are general figures for sales in developed countries.
| Metric | Typical Low End | Typical High End | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Per Click (CPC) | £0.50 | £1.50 | Depends heavily on your audience and creative quality. |
| Landing Page Conversion Rate | 2% | 5% | Highly dependant on your copy, offer and page design. |
| Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) | £10.00 (£0.50 / 5%) | £75.00 (£1.50 / 2%) | This is the number your AOV needs to beat. |
As you can see, even with a good 5% conversion rate and cheap clicks, you're looking at a £10 CPA (~$12.50). At the other end, it can get very expensive very quickly. Your job is to pull all the levers to get your campaign operating at the low end of that spectrum.
This is the main advice I have for you:
I know that's a lot to take in. To make it clearer, I've broken down my main recommendations for you below. This is the step-by-step approach I would take.
| Area of Focus | My Recommendation | Why It's Important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Product Development | Do NOT build the high-ticket backend product yet. Focus 100% on the front-end funnel ($27 course, $17 bump, $197 upsell). | You need to prove the core business model first. If you can't acquire customers profitably with this funnel, a backend won't save you. |
| 2. Funnel Economics | Build out your sales page, bump offer, and upsell page. Get the copy perfect. Your only goal is to maximise your Average Order Value (AOV). | With a low-ticket $27 offer, your profit is made entirely on the bump and upsell. A low AOV will make it impossible to be profitable on paid ads. |
| 3. Initial Ad Budget | Commit a testing budget of at least £1,000 for the first month. Don't try to do this with £5 a day. | You need to spend enough money to get data. A small budget means slow learning and you'll never know if your ads could have worked. |
| 4. Ad Targeting Strategy | Start with 3-5 different 'interest-based' ad sets. Target specific, smaller interests first, not massive broad ones. | This is your fastest path to finding your initial pocket of customers. You need to find what works before you can think about scaling with lookalikes. |
| 5. Ad Creative | Test at least 2-3 different ad concepts. I'd try a video of you talking to camera, a well-designed image ad, and a testimonial/social proof ad if you have any. | The creative does the heavy lifting. The wrong creative to the right audience will still fail. You have to test to find what resonates. |
| 6. Optimisation | Be ruthless. Check your ads daily. Turn off any ad set that spends 2-3x your target CPA without a purchase. Move budget to the winners. | This is not a 'set and forget' process. Constant optimisation is how you lower your CPA and increase your ROAS, making the entire funnel profitable. |
As you can probably tell, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's a constant process of analysing numbers, understanding your audience, testing creative, optimising your landing pages, and making brutal decisions based on data. It's a full-time job in itself, and it's where most entrepreneurs (even ones with great products) fall down.
This is where getting professional help can make a huge difference. An expert can navigate this whole process for you, avoiding the common mistakes that cost new advertisers thousands, and speed up your path to profitability significantly. With our experience in scaling campaigns just like this using Meta ads, we can often identify the best strategies to drive down your costs and get your funnel working much faster than you could on your own.
If you'd like to chat through this in more detail, we offer a free initial consultation where we can look at your specific plans and give you some more tailored guidance. No obligation at all, of course.
Hope this helps give you a realistic picture of what's ahead!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
