A while back I helped someone whose account had burned through about $150 with zero sales. Jewellery eCommerce, beautiful product, but the ads were bleeding money.
Looked at everything from the ground up. The usual mess: keyword plus community targeting, both feed and conversation placements, USA geo, conversion goal set to purchase, lowest cost bidding, no UTM on the URL, eight ads crammed into one ad group, no audience exclusions. Classic shotgun approach.
Fixed it by splitting into two clear categories: awareness via community targeting and remarketing for site visitors. The awareness campaign optimised on 'add to cart' rather than sales, feed only. Remarketing optimised on 'purchase' and used both feed and conversation. Cut the ads down from eight to three.
The numbers tell the story. CPM went from about $15 to $17, but CTR climbed from 0.8% to 1.2%. CPC dropped from $1.80 to $1.40. Frequency nudged up from 1.1 to 1.7, which makes sense for remarketing. The big one: CPA for add to cart crashed from $71 to $10. And we finally saw purchase conversions at around $60 CPA, which for jewellery is a healthy start.
It's a reminder that tiny structural tweaks-audience segmentation, goal alignment, ad count reduction-can unlock performance that was hiding in plain sight. The macro lesson: don't let the platform's default settings dictate your strategy. You have to build the funnel yourself.
