Solved: Struggling to Scale Facebook Ads Spend and CPA

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I've had a look over the situation you've described. It's a classic scaling problem, and honestly, a very common one. It's especially frustrating when you've had a big win before, makes you feel like you should be able to just repeat it. But every product is its own beast, with its own audience and its own path to scale.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what we've seen work for our e-commerce clients. What you're experiencing isn't unusual, but there are definitely things you can do to break through that £300/day plateau. It's not always about finding one magic bullet, but more about building a solid, repeatable system for testing and optimisation. Lets get into it.

We'll need to look at your entire funnel...

Before we even touch the ads themselves, we have to talk about the machine they're feeding. You can have the best ads in the world, but if they're sending traffic to a leaky bucket, you'll just be burning cash faster. You mentioned your AOV is $110 and you're getting a CPA of $55. That's a 2x ROAS on the face of it. For some businesses, that's break-even or even profitable. For others, once you factor in cost of goods, shipping, and other overheads, it's a loss. Your target of $40 CPA tells me you need a 2.75x ROAS to be comfortable, which is a perfectly reasonable goal.

The first place to look for that extra margin isn't always in the ads, it's on your website. This is what I'd call improving your funnel. Any small percentage increase in your website's conversion rate has a massive knock-on effect. If you can get your conversion rate up by just 20%, your $55 CPA suddenly becomes a $44 CPA, without changing a single thing in your ad account. That's how powerful it is.

So, have a really honest look at your product pages and checkout process.
-> Is the sales copy persuasive? Does it speak directly to the problems your solar product solves?
-> Are the product photos and videos top-notch? For a physical product, people need to see it in action, from every angle. It needs to look and feel premium.
-> Is your checkout process seamless? How many clicks does it take? Are there any unexpected shipping costs that appear at the last minute? This kills conversions.
-> How's your site speed? A slow-loading page, especially on mobile, will destroy your conversion rate. People are impatient.

Another angle here is your customer lifetime value (LTV). Right now you're focused on that first purchase. But what if you could get customers to come back and buy again, or buy accessories? If you can increase the total amount of money a customer brings in over their lifetime, you can afford to pay more to acquire them in the first place. A $55 CPA looks a lot different if the average customer is worth $200 over six months instead of just the initial $110. This involves things like email marketing, retargeting past purchasers with new offers, and maybe even building a subscription component if it makes sense for your product. It's a longer-term play, but it's how businesses truly scale profitably.

I'd say you need to completely overhaul your creative testing...

Okay, now for the ads. You've said you've tested many ads and nothing sticks for more than a few days. This, to me, points to a creative issue, and possibly a systematic one in how you're testing. It's not about the sheer number of ads you test, but the quality and the diversity of the concepts you're putting out there.

Your previous success with a security camera is a great data point. The messaging for that is likely built around fear, security, peace of mind. It's a very strong, primal emotion to tap into. A solar product is completely different. The angles here are probably more around freedom, sustainability, saving money, convenience for outdoor activities, or preparedness. You can't just apply the same creative formula and expect it to work. You need a totally fresh approach.

What we've seen work incredibly well for our e-commerce clients is a big push on User-Generated Content, or UGC. I recall one client selling women's apparel where we managed to achieve a 691% return on ad spend by shifting away from polished, branded content to more authentic, real-looking creatives on Meta and Pinterest. People are tired of slick ads; they trust other people more than they trust brands. For your solar product, this could look like:
-> Unboxing videos from real customers (or creators who can make it look real).
-> Videos of people using the product while camping, during a power cut, or in their back garden. Show, don't just tell.
-> Testimonial-style videos where someone talks to the camera about how the product solved a problem for them.

The key is to make it look native to the platform. It shouldn't scream "I'm an ad!". You mentioned working with creators, which is the right idea, but perhaps the brief or the angles weren't quite right. You need to test wildly different hooks and messages. Don't just mix and match the same clips. Test a "cost-saving" angle against a "never be without power" angle. Test a "perfect for camping" angle against an "eco-friendly" angle. Each of these is a different hypothesis about why someone would buy your product. You need to find out which one resonates most.

In terms of refreshing, if your ads are dying after a few days, that's a sign of rapid ad fatigue. This happens when your audience is either too small, or the creative isn't strong enough to hold attention. A truly winning ad, a 'god-tier' creative as some call it, can often run for weeks or even months with minimal changes. You shouldn't have to be constantly refreshing ads just to stay afloat. The goal of testing isn't just to find something that works for a day, it's to find a winning concept that you can then iterate on. Once you find a winning video, you can create 5-10 new versions of it with different first 3 seconds (hooks) to keep it fresh. But you need to find that core winner first. It sounds like you haven't found it yet, which is why it feels like such a slog. Don't feel bad about that, it can take dozens and dozens of tests to find one.

You probably should rethink your audience targeting strategy...

This goes hand-in-hand with creative. The best creative won't work if it's shown to the wrong people. A common mistake I see is people testing all sorts of random, disconnected audiences. You need a logical structure to your testing, moving from the broadest audiences to the most specific, high-intent ones.

I usually organise campaigns into a funnel structure: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). This helps to seperate your cold prospecting from your warm retargeting, allowing you to control budget and messaging for each stage.

Here's how I'd prioritise audiences for a new e-commerce product like yours:

ToFu (Cold Audiences - Prospecting):
This is where you find new customers. For a new account or product, you start here.
1. Detailed Targeting: This is your bread and butter to start with. But you need to be smart about it. Don't just target "Solar Power". That's way too broad. Think about the person who buys your product. What else are they interested in?
-> Behaviours & Hobbies: Camping, Hiking, RV Life, Off-grid living, Survivalism/Prepping.
-> Other Brands they Like: Patagonia, The North Face, Yeti, Goal Zero (a competitor!).
-> Publications they Read: Outdoor magazines, tech blogs, sustainability websites.
-> Layer these interests. For example, people who are interested in "Camping" AND are also "Engaged Shoppers". This narrows the audience to people more likely to actually buy something. Your security camera audience was probably very different, maybe focused on homeowners, new parents, or tech enthusiasts. You need to build this persona from scratch for the solar product.
2. Lookalike Audiences: Once you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but honestly, more like 500-1000 for it to be really effective), these will become your best prospecting tool. You MUST prioritise them correctly. A lookalike of "All Website Vistors" is much lower quality than a lookalike of "Purchasers".
-> Start with a Lookalike of your Purchasers. This is gold.
-> Then test a Lookalike of Add to Carts.
-> Then a Lookalike of Initiated Checkouts.
-> Work your way up the funnel. The closer the seed audience is to the final conversion, the better the lookalike will be.
3. Broad Targeting: Once your pixel has thousands of purchase events and is really well-trained, you can test just targeting an entire country with no interest or lookalike targeting at all (maybe just age and gender). Meta's algorithm is pretty good these days and can sometimes find buyers better than you can. But you need a lot of data for this to work, so don't start here.

MoFu/BoFu (Warm & Hot Audiences - Retargeting):
These are people who already know you. They've visited your site, watched a video, or engaged with an ad. This is where you should see your lowest CPA. I'd combine these into one ad set if your budget is small to start with.
-> Added to Cart (last 7-14 days): These are your hottest leads. Hit them with an ad showing a testimonial, or maybe a small discount code to push them over the edge. "Still thinking about it?"
-> Initiated Checkout (last 7-14 days): Same as above. They were so close.
-> Viewed Product Page (last 30 days): Show them the same product again, maybe in a different ad format.
-> All Website Visitors (last 30-90 days): A broader retargeting pool. Show them your best-selling points or a brand video.
-> Video Viewers (50%+): People who've shown high interest in your video ads. Retarget them with a call-to-action to visit the site.

You should have separate campaigns for ToFu and BoFu/MoFu. Don't lump them all together. The messaging and offers need to be different. A cold prospect needs to be introduced to the brand, while someone who abandoned their cart needs a direct nudge to complete their purchase. This structure allows you to controll the budget and see clearly what's working and what isn't.

You'll need to look beyond Meta for true scale...

Here's a hard truth: some products just have a ceiling on certain platforms. You scaled your last product to $12k/day on Meta, which is fantastic. But maybe this solar product has a more niche audience that's harder to find on Meta, or maybe the competition is just fiercer. It's entirely possible that the path to $7k-$8k/day spend for this product doesn't lie solely with Meta.

Once you've optimised your funnel and have a solid creative testing system on Meta, the next step in scaling is to diversify your traffic sources. If you've maxed out the pool of likely converters on Facebook and Instagram, you need to find new pools of customers elsewhere. This is something we often do with clients once they hit a certain spend level. We've run campaigns for clients across Meta, TikTok, Apple Ads, and Google Ads to achieve scale. As I recall, for an app we worked with, this multi-platform approach was what got them to over 45,000 signups at under £2 cost per signup.

For your solar product, the most obvious next step is Google Ads.
-> Google Search: People are actively searching for "portable solar panel", "solar charger for camping", "emergency power bank". This is high-intent traffic. You're not interrupting their social feed; you're providing a solution to a problem they have right now. This can be incredibly profitable.
-> Google Shopping / PMax: This gets your product listed visually in the shopping results. Again, this is for people with high commercial intent. Performance Max campaigns can also tap into YouTube and Display audiences.

You might also consider platforms like Pinterest, especially if your product has strong visual appeal and solves problems related to home, garden, or outdoor activities. We achieved great results combining Meta and Pinterest for a women's apparel brand, driving a 691% return on ad spend. The point is, don't put all your eggs in the Meta basket, especialy when you're struggling to make it work. Thinking about platform expansion now will set you up for long-term, stable growth rather than being reliant on the whims of a single algorithm.

Let's talk about that CPA target...

Finally, a bit of a reality check on your CPA. While it's good to have a target, it's also important to understand the typical costs. Based on our experience running hundreds of campaigns, the cost for a sale in developed countries like the US can vary massively.

A typical CPC (Cost Per Click) might be anywhere from £0.50 to £1.50 ($0.60 - $1.80). A decent e-commerce conversion rate is around 2-5%. Let's do the maths:

As you can see, the expected range for a sale is huge, somewhere between $12 and $90. Your current CPA of $55 is right in the middle of this range. It's not an outlier. Your target of $40 is on the lower, more desireable end of this range, which is great to aim for, but it will require everything to be working very well – great creative, spot-on targeting, and a high-converting website. It's not a failure to be at $55; it just means there's optimisation work to be done to get it down to your profitibility target of $40.

This is where methodical testing comes in. Better creatives and better targeting can lower your CPC and increase your click-through rate. A better landing page will increase your conversion rate. Each improvement chips away at that CPA. I remember one case where we reduced a client's CPA from £100 all the way down to £7 for a medical job matching SaaS. It's possible, but it takes a structured process of identifying the weakest link and fixing it, over and over again.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've put the main recommendations into a table for you. This is the framework I'd use to tackle this problem.

This is where professional help often comes in. As you can see, scaling isn't just about increasing the budget. It's about building a complex, multi-faceted machine that involves funnel optimisation, deep creative strategy, structured audience testing, and multi-platform management. It's a full-time job, and doing it all yourself while also running the rest of the business is incredibly tough.

An experienced agency or consultant can bring a systematic process and years of experience to the table, helping you shortcut the endless testing phase and get to what works faster. We've done this for numerous e-commerce and software clients, navigating these exact challenges to help them scale profitably.

If you'd like to chat further about your specific situation and see how we might be able to help you implement a strategy like this, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review everything in more detail.

Hope this helps give you a clearer path forward.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh