Paid ads
$40 Drop in CPA for a Jewelry Brand
This jewelry brand was already generating around $100k/month in revenue with an AOV of $157.21. On paper, that sounds solid. But their Facebook ad account told another story.
May (Before)
Spend | Purchases | CPP | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|
$27,190.94 | 237 | $114.73 | 1.05M |
At $114 CPP on a $157 AOV product, there wasn’t enough margin left to profitably scale.
The Challenges
1. Overstuffed Campaign Structure
17 conversion campaigns.
Same 15 creatives recycled across all.
Mostly Advantage+ with overlap between the US, CA, and the EU.
👉 Problem: Instead of reaching new customers, they were hitting the same audience pools repeatedly, inflating costs.
2. Stale Creative Mix
They ran the same 15 creatives across every campaign. No fresh ads meant no new reach.
And here’s the hard truth: Interests or lookalikes no longer define targeting it’s defined by the creative.
If your ads don’t speak to new segments of your audience, Facebook simply doesn’t expand your reach.
3. Relying on Facebook Ads Manager for tracking.
The brand looked only at CPP inside Ads Manager.
But CPP in Ads Manager doesn’t tell you if your new customers are being acquired profitably, or whether spend is just cycling through returning buyers.
Without clarity on new customer CPA, contribution margin, and actual profitability, every decision was made in the dark.
Our Process
Phase 1: Simplify the Structure
We cut campaigns from 17 to 9.
1 Hero Offer campaign.
3 campaigns for top-selling products.
5 campaigns split by country.
👉 Why this works: Each product and each market has different audiences, problems, and stories. Clean segmentation enables campaigns to learn faster and spend against the right buyers, rather than overlapping ones.
Phase 2: Creative Testing Based on Desires
We didn’t just add random ads. We built a system:
More of what works → duplicate winning creatives with tweaks (headline, hook, background and unique versions).
Better of what works → make proven ads sharper and more precise.
New concepts → ads built around core customer desires.
We tested 46 new creatives in June.
8 hit our CPP goals and scaled.
38 were killed fast.
Through research, we uncovered two main desires:
Getting compliments from loved ones and peers.
Boosting confidence and self-worth by gifting themselves something unique.
When ads leaned into these desires, engagement and conversion rates lifted instantly.
💡 Lesson: Almost every successful DTC brand scales with 1–3 consumer desires. Find yours, and build new ad concepts around them relentlessly.
Phase 3: Refocus on Business Metrics
Instead of optimising for Ads Manager CPP, we shifted focus to:
New Customer CPA
Contribution Margin
% of New vs Returning Revenue
This lens allowed the brand to determine whether it was growing or just recycling sales, finally.
Results
The Impact
📉 $40 lower CPP
📈 20% more purchases
📈 600k more reach
📉 $8k less in spend
All achieved in a single month by restructuring campaigns and testing creatives the right way.
Key lessons for founders
Simplify to scale
Too many campaigns = audience overlap and wasted budget.
Creative = targeting
New ads aren’t optional; they’re the only way to unlock new reach.
Desires > Features
Customers don’t just buy jewelery. They buy confidence, compliments, and meaning.
Track the right numbers
Stop chasing vanity ROAS. Start tracking new customer CPA and contribution margin.
🔥 Final Thought
This brand didn’t change its product. They changed their system.
With simpler campaigns, a creative testing engine, and better metrics, they slashed acquisition costs by $40 and created a path to scale profitably beyond $100k/month.
