Your CPA is not the problem. Your offer is.
We audited a long list of ad accounts this spring. In the vast majority of them the media buying was fine. The thing being advertised was not.
The brief we receive most often reads like this: “CPA has gone up 40% since March, can you take a look at the account?” We look. The account is usually fine. Campaign structure is sensible, creative is being refreshed, the pixel fires. What has changed is that the same product, at the same price, with the same free-shipping threshold, is being shown to people who have now seen it eleven times.
1. What an offer actually is
An offer is not a discount. It is the complete answer to “why should I buy this, from you, today?”: the product, the price, the bundle, the guarantee, the delivery promise and the reason to act now, all at once. Most Danish stores have a product and a price and call it an offer. Meta then has to do the persuading on its own, and Meta charges for that.
When we say the offer is the problem, we mean the ad account has nothing new to say. No amount of bid strategy fixes that.
2. The three tests we run before touching a campaign
First: would a stranger understand the deal in three seconds from the ad alone? Second: is there a reason to buy this week rather than next month? Third: is there a version of the offer for someone who already bought? If the answer to two of the three is no, we do not open Ads Manager yet.
“If the ad account is the only place in the business trying to sell, the ad account will look expensive.”
3. What moves the numbers
When the account is healthy, the fix is rarely in the media buying. It is usually in the offer. A bundle that makes the average order worth advertising. A first-order guarantee that removes the hesitation. A replenishment offer for existing customers so prospecting does not have to carry the whole target. None of them requires you to touch the bidding.
What we do instead
Every account we run gets an offer review before a media review, and the two are owned by the same team. That is the practical meaning of “one senior team, one P&L”. If your CPA is climbing and the account looks healthy, the answer is almost certainly on the product page, not in the campaign.
Every channel incl. Shopify. One senior team, one P&L, paid on results.
SEE THE MODEL
