Solved: Reducing Ad Costs for Sports Camps on Facebook

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's great to hear you've had some initial success with your Facebook ads. Scaling that same approach across different markets is a solid start, but I can see you've hit the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and just doing more of the same won't necessarily bring down your costs. You're right to question your current strategy.

Your idea about using an 'Awareness' objective to "soften up" a new market is a common one, but from my experience, it's one of the quickest ways to burn through your advertising budget with very little to show for it. The truth is, your entire approach, from using 'Traffic' objectives to considering 'Awareness', is likely what's keeping your costs higher than they need to be. The good news is there's a much more effective way to approach this that will not only reduce your true cost per booking but also find you higher quality customers who are more likely to sign up.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts on how you can shift your strategy from chasing cheap clicks to driving profitable, scalable growth for your sports camps.

We'll need to look at why 'Awareness' is a costly mistake...

Let's tackle your main question first. Should you use an 'Awareness' objective to warm up a new market? My answer is an emphatic no. This is one of the most common and costly myths in paid advertising.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about these types of campaigns. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the Facebook algorithm a very specific, literal command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being an incredibly efficient machine, does exactly what you asked. It scours the audience you've defined and serves your ad to the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card and book a spot in one of your camps. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. By choosing this objective, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your business.

The same logic, to a lesser extent, applies to your current 'Traffic' campaigns. You've told Facebook to find people who click on links. And it does. But the group of people who habitually click on ads is not always the same group of people who follow through and make a purchase. You're optimising for an action that is one step removed from your actual business goal, which is getting signups.

The best form of brand awareness, especialy for a small business, isn't a vague impression; it's a happy customer. It’s a parent signing their child up for one of your camps, having a fantastic experience, and then telling their friends. That kind of awareness is a *byproduct* of effective advertising that drives real business results, not a prerequisite for making a sale. You don't need to "soften up" a market; you need to find the people in that market who have a problem you can solve *right now* and present them with a compelling offer.

I'd say you need to focus on conversions, not clicks...

So, what's the alternative? You need to switch your primary campaign objective from 'Traffic' to 'Conversions'. This is without a doubt the most impactful change you can make to your advertising strategy.

When you set your objective to 'Conversions' and tell Facebook you want to optimise for a specific action—like a 'CompleteRegistration' or 'Purchase' event on your website—you fundamentally change the instruction you give the algorithm. Now, you're telling it: "Ignore the idle clickers and the cheap impressions. I want you to go out and find people who behave like the ones who have already signed up for my camps. Analyse the data from my past customers and find more people just like them."

This requires having your Facebook Pixel set up correctly on your website, tracking the entire journey from viewing a camp page to completing the checkout process. This data is the lifeblood of your campaigns. It's the fuel the algorithm uses to learn, adapt, and become progressively better at finding your ideal customer at the lowest possible cost.

This shift in thinking also requires you to change the metric you care about. Forget Cost Per Click (CPC). It's a vanity metric. Who cares if you're getting £0.50 clicks if it takes 200 of them to get a single booking? Your true north metric is your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost Per Booking. How much does it cost you in ad spend to get one child signed up for a camp? It's perfectly normal, and in fact desirable, for your CPC to go up when you switch to a conversion campaign. You are now targeting a more valuable, in-demand segment of the audience, so their attention costs more. But because these people are vastly more likely to convert, your overall CPA will plummet. That's how you reduce your real advertising costs and build a profitable business.

You probably should structure your account like this...

A successful advertising strategy isn't just about choosing the right objective; it's also about structure. Your current approach of one traffic campaign and one retargeting campaign is a good start, but it's a bit too simplistic to allow for efficient scaling. A much better approach is to structure your account according to a marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

This doesn't mean you need dozens of campaigns. For your budget, you can start with just three seperate, long-running campaigns, each dedicated to a specific stage of the funnel. This allows you to allocate your budget more intelligently and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

-> Top of Funnel (ToFu): Finding New Prospects. This campaign's job is to reach cold audiences—people who have never heard of your sports camps before. The key here is that even though you're targeting new people, your campaign objective is *still* Conversions. You're telling Facebook to find brand new people who are most likely to sign up. Inside this campaign, you'll have different ad sets, each testing a different cold audience (we'll cover what those are in a moment).

-> Middle of Funnel (MoFu): Nurturing Warm Leads. This campaign targets people who have shown some interest but aren't ready to buy yet. This includes people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram pages, or watched a significant portion of your video ads. You're re-engaging them, perhaps with testimonials, highlights from past camps, or an early-bird offer to push them further down the funnel.

-> Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): Closing the Deal. This is your highest-intent audience and where you should see the best return. This campaign targets people who have visited your website, viewed specific camp pages, or even started the booking process but didn't finish. Your current retargeting campaign is essentially a BoFu campaign. The messaging here should be direct, creating urgency and making it easy for them to complete their registration.

By separating your audiences this way, you can analyse performance much more clearly. You can see which cold audiences are bringing in the most cost-effective new customers and scale the budget there, while ensuring you're not losing potential customers who just needed a little more convincing.

You'll need to get your targeting right...

With a proper funnel structure in place, the next question is who to put in it. Your success hinges on testing the right audiences, and there's a clear priority order to this.

For your ToFu (cold) campaign, you'll want to test two main types of audiences:

1. Detailed Targeting (Interests, Behaviours): You need to think like the parents you're trying to reach. What are their interests? It's not just "sports". Get more specific. Are they interested in specific youth sports leagues? Do they follow pages related to parenting advice, family activities, or educational resources? Do they shop at certain family-oriented brands? You can even target based on the schools in the areas where you run camps. The key is to find interests that are more likely to be held by your target customer than by the general population.

2. Lookalike Audiences: This is your most powerful tool. Once your Pixel has enough data (ideally 100+ bookings from a specific country), you can ask Facebook to create a "Lookalike" audience. This is an audience of millions of people who share the same characteristics and online behaviours as your existing best customers. A 1% Lookalike of your past purchasers is often the highest-performing cold audience you can build. As you gather more data, you can create lookalikes from other actions too, like people who initiated checkout or your highest value customers.

For your MoFu and BoFu (retargeting) campaigns, your current setup is a good foundation, but you can get much more granular. Instead of lumping all website visitors and engagers together, you can prioretise them by intent:

The golden rule is to test, test, test. You create different ad sets inside your campaigns for these different audiences. Let them run for a few days, see which ones are delivering bookings at a profitable CPA, turn off the losers, and give more budget to the winners. This systematic process is how you find pockets of scalability and consistently reduce your costs.

Let's talk about realistic costs...

So what kind of cost per booking should you expect with this new strategy? The answer isn't a single number, as it depends on factors like your camp's price, the competitiveness of the city you're targeting, and the quality of your ads and website. However, based on our experience with similar B2C service businesses, we can establish a realistic ballpark.

For a signup or registration in a developed country like the US, a cost per result can range anywhere from £1.60 to £15 ($2 to $20). We’ve run ads for childcare services where the CPL was around $10 per signup. Our best consumer services campaign for a home cleaning company got the cost down to £5/lead. It really varies. For your sports camps, which are a higher-ticket item than a simple email signup, you might find yourself in the $20-$60 per booking range initially. The goal of continuous optimisation is to drive that number down over time.

The key is that you can afford a higher CPA if your return is strong. From our experience, this is very achievable. I remember one campaign we worked on for a sports and events app, which has a similar target audience to yours. By focusing purely on conversion objectives and systematically testing audiences, we were able to generate over 45,000 signups at an average cost of under £2 per signup. While every account is different, it demonstrates the power of aligning your campaign goals with your actual business needs.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To put it all together, transforming your results from Facebook ads requires a strategic shift, not just tactical tweaks. It's about moving from hoping for traffic to engineering conversions. If you focus on implementing this structure, you'll be well on your way to a more efficient, scalable, and profitable advertising operation.

As you can see, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about understanding your audience, building a sound strategy, optimising your targeting, and creating compelling ads. It's a complex process with a lot of moving parts, and getting it right can be the difference between stagnating and scaling rapidly.

That's where a professional consultancy like us can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the advertising landscape, we can help you implement this entire strategy, ensuring that every pound you spend is working as hard as possible to grow your business.

If you'd like an expert pair of eyes on your current setup and a tailored plan to implement what we've discussed today, we offer a free, no-obligation consultation call. We can walk through your account together and identify the biggest opportunities for reducing your costs and increasing your bookings.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh