1. Creative is your targeting

We rarely use interest groups to find customers anymore. We use the creative itself.

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Product-focused creative captures high intent - people ready to buy. This is efficient but limited. 

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Lifestyle imagery captures those interested in the brand aesthetic but not yet looking for the specific product. 

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UGC and social proof capture the broad market who need validation.

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By running these three formats simultaneously, we force the algorithm to find customers in three different segments of the market. 

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This expands your reach automatically without needing to mess with audience settings.

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2. The offer is about unit economics

We assess offers purely on unit economics.

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A percentage discount reduces your revenue and your profit margin linearly. It weakens your ability to spend on ads. We prefer a value-add structure that uses the gap between retail price and landed cost.

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If you give away an item worth £20 to the customer but it costs you £4, you increase the conversion rate significantly while only impacting your margin by £4. 

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This creates better cash flow than a 20% discount, allowing you to bid higher for customers.

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3. Focus on the metrics that matter

In-platform ROAS is unreliable. We focus on four metrics: nCAC, LTV, MER, and Net Profit.

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nCAC (new customer acquisition cost) tells you what you're actually paying to acquire a customer. 

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LTV tells you what that customer is worth over time. 

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MER (total revenue divided by total marketing spend) tells you whether your overall marketing investment is working. 

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Net profit tells you whether any of the above actually mattered in the first place. What’s appearing in your bank account after everything.

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These four metrics give you the full picture. If your nCAC is below your LTV and your MER is covering fixed costs with margin left over, you scale. If not, you fix the leaky bucket before you think about spending more.

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4. Know your real targets

Most brands set ad account targets based on gut feel or numbers they quickly worked out on some paper. But most of the time business owners get this wrong - they miss crucial costs or factors that impact what you should be targeting.

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You need to work out the MER and nCAC you need to achieve to cover all your fixed costs and hit a healthy net profit - not just COGS, but salaries, software, warehousing, everything. 

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How much does the average return cost you? Can you resell the item or is it dead stock?

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Once you know your true break-even point, you can set targets that guarantee margin on every order.

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At the end of the month you can then know for certain that you will be profitable.

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5. Data Consolidation

Algorithms perform better with more data, so unnecessary campaign breakdowns cost you money. We see accounts fragmented across dozens of campaigns with no clear reason why.

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Every campaign should serve an individual purpose. We typically run a testing campaign to validate new creative concepts, then a scaling campaign for proven winners. When we want to scale further, we duplicate the scaling campaign and run it with a different bidding strategy - one on cost cap, one on lowest cost - for bid diversification.

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That's not the same as having 15 campaigns because you split things by audience or product category for no reason. The structure can expand, but each campaign needs to justify its existence.

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6. Retention fuels acquisition

If you rely solely on the profit from the first purchase, you're capped. You can only bid so much before you lose money.

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We focus heavily on the post-purchase journey - email marketing and SMS flows. By building a strong backend system, we turn a single purchase into a repeat customer.

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If your retention strategy turns a customer into £120 over six months, you can afford to spend £50 or £60 to acquire them on day one. Better retention allows for higher CPAs, which allows you to outbid competitors who are stuck trying to make a profit on the first transaction.

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The Bottom Line

These six principles are how we structure accounts for growth. If you're stuck at a revenue ceiling, it's likely one of these areas is the bottleneck - creative diversity, offer structure, the right metrics, financial alignment, intentional campaign structure, or retention.

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