Solved: Should I Retarget Ads for New Collection Drop?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out with your question. It's a really common one, and you've hit on a massive point of confusion in the Meta ads world right now.

Happy to give you some of my thoughts on it. The short answer is yes, you should absolutely be retargeting for a new collection drop, especially for existing customers. The whole "broad is the only way to go" idea is a dangerous oversimplification that costs e-commerce brands a lot of money. Let me break down why that is and what I'd recommend you do instead.

That "Broad Targeting Only" advice is a trap...

Alright, let's tackle this head-on. There's a reason this advice has gotten so popular. Meta's algorithm is incredibly powerful, and when you feed it a huge, broad audience and a clear conversion goal (like 'Purchase'), it can be brilliant at finding new customers who look like your existing ones. It simplifies campaign management and when it works, it works well.

But here's the problem. By running only broad campaigns, you're treating every single person the same. You're showing the exact same ad to a 17-year-old who's never heard of your brand as you are to a 35-year-old loyal customer who has bought from you five times. Does that sound like a sensible marketing strategy? Of course not. It's like shouting the same message to a stadium full of people, hoping the right person hears it.

When you set your objective to 'Sales' and just let the algorithm run wild on a broad audience, you're basically asking it to find the cheapest possible path to a purchase. It will often find people who are impulse buyers or discount hunters. That's fine for getting new customers in the door, but it completely ignores the goldmine you're already sitting on: people who have already shown interest in your products and your most valuable asset, your existing customers.

I remember one campaign we worked on for a subscription box client saw a 1000% Return On Ad Spend, and a huge part of that was a rock-solid retargeting strategy that nurtured warm leads and kept existing subscribers engaged. We would have never achieved that by just running broad ads.

You need a proper funnel, not just a bucket

Instead of throwing everyone into one big bucket, you need to think about the customer journey. In marketing speak, we call this a funnel. It's just a simple way of separating people based on how well they know you. A proper structure will almost always outperform a single broad campaign.

I usually structure accounts into three distinct campaigns:

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting: This is where you find new people. This is the only place where you should be using broad targeting. Your goal here is to introduce your brand and products to a cold audience that has never heard of you. You can also test detailed interest targeting (e.g., people interested in competitor brands, related magazines, or specific fashion styles) and Lookalike Audiences (LALs). Despite what you've heard, LALs of your best customers are still incredibly powerful for finding more people just like them.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Re-engagement: This is for people who know who you are but haven't bought yet. They've visited your website, watched one of your video ads, or engaged with your Instagram page. They're warm. The goal here is to build trust and keep your brand top of mind. You show them different ads - maybe some user-generated content, testimonials, or a feature on how your products are made.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Retargeting: This is the business end. These are your hottest prospects and your existing customers. They've added a product to their cart, started the checkout process, or have purchased from you in the past. Your ad's job here is to get them over the line or bring them back for more. This is exactly where your new collection drop with a discount code for existing customers belongs. The messaging here should be direct, urgent, and tailored to them.

Here’s a simple visualisation of how that looks:

What about that pesky "fragmentation" warning?

You mentioned being worried about Facebook telling you to combine your ad sets. This is the system's way of trying to make things simpler and ensure each ad set has enough data to learn effectively (what they call 'exiting the learning phase').

However, the algorithm isn't always right. It sees three separate campaigns (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu) and calls it "fragmentation." I call it "strategic segmentation." You are deliberately separating these audiences because you want to speak to them differently and control your budget for each stage of the funnel. You might be willing to pay more to re-engage someone who abandoned their cart than you are to reach a brand new cold prospect. A funnel structure gives you that control.

The real fragmentation problem is when someone creates 20 different ad sets all inside one campaign, each with a tiny £5/day budget and slightly different but overlapping interest targets. That starves the algorithm of data and leads to poor performance. A clean, three-campaign structure is organised and effective. You can confidently ignore that warning.

You'll need to know your numbers to scale...

Before you even think about scaling your broad (ToFu) campaigns, you need to understand a critical metric: your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This tells you what a customer is actually worth to your business over time, not just from their first purchase. Why does this matter? Because it tells you how much you can actually afford to spend to acquire a new customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC) and still be profitable.

If you know each new customer is worth £300 to you in the long run, suddenly paying £50 to acquire them in your prospecting campaigns doesn't seem so expensive. It looks like a great investment. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Forget about cheap clicks; focus on acquiring high-value customers profitably.

I've built a little calculator for you below to help you figure this out. Play around with the numbers to see how small changes can massively impact your LTV.

I'd say you need this campaign structure for your new drop...

So, putting it all together, what should you actually do for your new collection drop? Your plan to run one broad campaign and one retargeting campaign is almost perfect. It's the right idea, just needs a bit of refinement.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table. This is the exact structure I would build for a client in your situation. It ensures you're capturing new customers while also maximising sales from your warmest audiences and most loyal fans.

By splitting your campaigns like this, you can tailor your message perfectly to each audience, control your spend more effectively, and see much better results than if you just lumped everyone together. Your instinct was correct - ignoring your existing customers and warm leads during a new product launch is leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Setting this all up correctly, creating the right ad creative for each stage, and managing the budgets can be a lot of work, of course. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best; it's about understanding the audience, optimising targeting, and constantly testing to improve performance.

This is where an expert can often make a huge difference, helping you avoid costly mistakes and scaling your results much faster. We spend our days inside accounts like these, fine-tuning these exact strategies for e-commerce brands.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy consultation where we can look at your account together and map out a growth plan. It might be helpful to get a second pair of eyes on it.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh