Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out about your DTC clothing brand. An £80k monthly budget is a serious amount to work with, and hitting a tight £5-£12 CPA with high ROAS is definitely achievable, but it's not about finding a magic "structure". Tbh most of the advice out there on complex, multi-layered campaign structures is outdated and will just burn your cash faster.
I’m happy to give you some initial thoughts based on what we see working for our eCommerce clients right now. The real win isn't in the campaign settings, it’s in a fundamental shift in how you think about your audience, your creative, and your numbers.
TLDR;
- The biggest mistake is over-complicating your account structure. With an £80k budget, you need to simplify and give Meta's algorithm room to work, not tie its hands with dozens of tiny ad sets.
- Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic. It's a specific, urgent problem or desire your clothing solves. Targeting should be based on this "nightmare scenario," not just age and gender.
- Creative is your single biggest performance lever. Stop running the same static images. You need a relentless testing engine for UGC, videos, and different messaging angles.
- Your CPA target of £5-£12 is likely arbitrary. We'll show you how to calculate your true allowable CPA based on your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), which is probably much higher than you think.
- We'll outline a simple, powerful 2-campaign structure (Prospecting & Retargeting) that scales effectively and is designed for an £80k/month spend.
You need to stop thinking about audiences as demographics
Let's be brutally honest. "Women aged 25-34 in the UK who like ASOS and Zara" is not a target audience. It's a lazy guess that puts you in the most competitive, expensive auction possible, bidding against brands with ten times your budget. It tells you nothing about *why* someone buys clothes.
To get a £12 CPA, you need to stop targeting demographics and start targeting a *problem state*. Your ideal customer isn't a person; it's a moment of frustration, a "nightmare" they need to solve *right now*. What is it for your brand?
- -> Is it the woman endlessly scrolling Instagram at 10 PM because she has a wedding next weekend and feels like she has "nothing to wear"? Her nightmare is feeling frumpy and invisible at a big event.
- -> Is it the guy who just got a new job and needs to upgrade his wardrobe but despises the thought of spending a Saturday in a crowded shopping centre? His nightmare is looking unprofessional or out of place.
- -> Is it the person searching for a festival outfit that's unique and won't be worn by five other people in the same field? Their nightmare is blending in when they want to stand out.
Once you define this nightmare, your targeting becomes so much clearer. You're not just targeting "fashion interests." You're looking for behavioral clues. Are they engaging with wedding venue pages? Following career advice influencers? Members of festival-goer Facebook groups? This is the work that has to be done *before* you even think about campaign structure. It informs everything else. Without this, you're just throwing money at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Your creative is probably boring
With a budget of £80,000 a month, your single biggest lever for performance isn't some clever bidding strategy; it's your creative. You should be operating like a small media company, constantly testing and iterating on your ads. Most brands fail here. They get one nice photoshoot done and then run the same 5-10 static images into the ground for six months.
Your ad needs to stop the scroll and speak directly to the "nightmare" we just defined. We often use a few frameworks that work really well for our eCommerce clients.
For a specific problem: Use Problem-Agitate-Solve.
"Hate that feeling when your 'perfect fit' jeans are baggy by lunchtime? (Problem) You spend all day hiking them up, feeling sloppy and uncomfortable. (Agitate) Our Stay-Fit Denim is engineered with a unique fibre blend that holds its shape, wash after wash. Look sharp from your morning coffee to your late-night commute. (Solve)"
For a desired transformation: Use Before-After-Bridge.
"Before: Your wardrobe is a sea of boring black and grey. Getting dressed feels like a chore. (Before) After: You walk into a room and heads turn. Your friends ask, 'Where did you get that?'. You feel confident, vibrant, and totally yourself. (After) Our latest collection is the bridge to a bolder you. Shop the drop now. (Bridge)"
You need a constant flow of different creative formats to test:
- -> User-Generated Content (UGC): Raw, authentic videos from actual customers are gold. They build trust far better than polished studio shots. Reach out to customers and offer them a voucher for a quick phone video of them unboxing or wearing your product. It's cheaper and often performs better. I remember one campaign we worked on for a women's apparel client that got a 691% return leaning heavily into this.
- -> Influencer Whitelisting: Pay influencers not just for a post on their feed, but for the right to run ads from their account. It combines their credibility with your powerful targeting.
- -> Studio Shots vs. Lifestyle: Test your professional product shots against more casual, real-world "lifestyle" images. Often, the less "professional" looking photo wins because it feels more relatable.
You should have a dedicated process for this. Think of it like a production line. New ideas go in one end, they get tested, winners are scaled, and losers are killed. Fast.
Step 1: Ideate
Brainstorm 5 new angles based on customer pain points.
Step 2: Create
Produce low-cost versions (e.g., simple phone videos, Canva graphics).
Step 3: Test
Run in a dedicated creative testing campaign for 3-5 days.
Step 4: Scale
Move winning creatives into your main Prospecting campaign.
Your CPA target is probably wrong (and costing you money)
You've set a max CPA of £12. Why? Is it based on your actual business metrics, or does it just 'feel' right? Most founders I talk to pick a number out of thin air. This is one of the most dangerous mistakes you can make, as it forces you to turn off potentially profitable campaigns too early.
The only number that matters is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). How much gross margin does a customer generate for you over their entire relationship with your brand? Once you know this, you can calculate how much you can *actually* afford to spend to acquire them.
Let's do some quick maths. The formula is: LTV = (Average Order Value * Gross Margin % * Purchase Frequency) / Churn Rate. But a simpler way for DTC is often just to look at historical data.
A more straightforward model looks at repeat purchases over a period, say 12 months. Let's imagine:
- -> Average Order Value (AOV): £60
- -> Gross Margin: 60% (so you make £36 per order)
- -> Repeat Purchase Rate: 25% of customers buy a second time within 12 months.
Your value from a new customer isn't just the first purchase. It's the first purchase *plus* the expected value of their future purchases. In this case, the average value of a new customer over 12 months is (£60 * 1) + (£60 * 0.25) = £75. Your gross margin on that is £75 * 60% = £45.
A healthy business can often afford to spend 1/3 of their LTV on acquisition. So, in this scenario, your *true* allowable CPA is £45 / 3 = £15. Suddenly, your £12 target looks a bit restrictive. What if the very best customers cost £14 to acquire? Your current rules would force you to turn off the very campaigns that are bringing you your most valuable buyers. You are optimising for a cheap first sale, not for long-term profit.
Use this calculator to get a rough idea of your numbers. It'll show you how small changes in repeat business can dramatically increase what you can afford to pay for a customer.
I'd say you should use this simplified account structure
Okay, now we've covered the strategic stuff, let's talk structure. With an £80k/month budget, simplicity and consolidation are your best friends. You want to give the Meta algorithm as much data and flexibility as possible to find buyers. A fragmented structure with dozens of ad sets, each with a tiny budget, is the worst thing you can do. It leads to slow learning, unstable results, and makes it impossible to know what's actually working.
Here’s the structure we use to scale eCommerce brands:
Campaign 1: PROSPECTING (Top of Funnel)
- Objective: Sales (Conversions)
- Budget: Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) ON. Set this to about 70-80% of your total budget (e.g., £56k-£64k/month).
- Ad Sets: No more than 3-5 ad sets inside this campaign. You need to give each one enough spend to exit the learning phase.
- Ad Set 1: Broad. No interest targeting, no lookalikes. Just your country, age, and gender. Your pixel has thousands, if not tens of thousands, of purchases on it. Trust Meta to find more people like them. This is often the best performer at scale.
- Ad Set 2: High-Value Lookalikes (Stacked). Create lookalikes of your best customers. Not just all purchasers. We're talking top 10% LTV customers, people who've purchased 3+ times, etc. Stack them together (1%, 1-2%, 2-5%) in a single ad set.
- Ad Set 3: Interest Stack. Based on your ICP "nightmare" research, group 5-10 of your most relevant, high-intent interests together in one ad set. Don't do single interest ad sets; they're too small.
- Ads: Use Dynamic Creative (DCO) and load it up with your 5-10 top-performing, proven creatives (images and videos). Let Facebook find the best combinations. Continually swap in new winners from your testing process.
Campaign 2: RETARGETING (Middle/Bottom of Funnel)
- Objective: Sales (Conversions)
- Budget: CBO ON. Set this to the remaining 20-30% of your budget (e.g., £16k-£24k/month).
- Ad Sets: Just two is often enough.
- Ad Set 1: Warm Retargeting (MoFu). Target people who have engaged with your Facebook/Instagram page or viewed 50% of a video ad in the last 30 days. Exclude website visitors and purchasers.
- Ad Set 2: Hot Retargeting (BoFu). Target people who have Viewed Content or Added to Cart in the last 7-14 days. This is where you should use Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) from your catalogue. Exclude purchasers.
- Ads: The messaging here is different. It's about overcoming objections and building trust. Use ads featuring customer reviews, testimonials, press mentions, or highlight your free shipping/returns policy. For the DPA, you want to show them the exact products they looked at.
That's it. Two campaigns. Clear seperation between prospecting for new customers and retargeting warm audiences. This structure is stable, scalable, and easy to manage. It gives the algorithm the power to allocate budget to the best-performing audiences and creatives automatically.
CBO Prospecting Campaign (~75% of Budget)
Ad Set 1: Broad
- No targeting
- Trust the pixel
Ad Set 2: LAL Stack
- LAL 1-5% of Purchasers
- LAL 1-5% of Top 10% LTV
Ad Set 3: Interest Stack
- 5-10 related interests
- Based on ICP research
CBO Retargeting Campaign (~25% of Budget)
Ad Set 1: Warm (MoFu)
- 30d Engagers
- 50% Video Viewers
- (Exclude Purchasers/VC)
Ad Set 2: Hot (BoFu)
- 14d View Content
- 14d Add to Cart
- (Dynamic Product Ads)
I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
To pull this all together, here is a table summarising the key actions and the shift in thinking required to properly scale your brand. This isn't just a list of settings; it's a strategic framework.
| Area | Old Way (Likely What You're Doing) | New Way (What We Recommend) |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Focusing on campaign structure and bidding tactics. | Focusing on deep customer understanding (ICP), compelling creative, and solid business maths (LTV). |
| Targeting | Broad demographic and interest targeting (e.g., "women 25-34 who like Zara"). | Targeting a "problem state". Using a mix of Broad (trusting the pixel), high-value Lookalikes, and curated Interest Stacks. |
| Campaign Structure | Complex, granular structure with many campaigns and ad sets (ABO). | A simplified 2-campaign CBO structure: one for Prospecting, one for Retargeting. |
| Creative | Using the same polished studio shots for months, leading to ad fatigue. | A relentless creative testing engine. Constant flow of new UGC, influencer content, and different messaging angles. |
| Measurement | Obsessing over a fixed, arbitrary CPA target (e.g., £12). | Calculating your true allowable CPA based on LTV. Making decisions based on long-term profitability, not short-term cost. |
Managing an £80k/month budget effectively is a full-time job that requires deep expertise. The difference between getting it right and getting it slightly wrong isn't a few quid; it can be tens of thousands of pounds in wasted spend or missed revenue every single month. While the structure I've laid out is powerful, the real art is in the day-to-day management: knowing which creatives to kill, when to scale budgets, and how to interpret the data to find new opportunities.
If you'd like to go through your account and discuss how we could implement a strategy like this for your brand, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can review what you're currently doing and provide some more specific, actionable advice.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
