How I Attained a $0.03 Cost per Acquisition on Facebook Ads (And It Wasn’t Enough)

It was 2018 and I was working at Canva. I already had roughly 5 years of Digital Marketing experience under my belt, most of which had been as an organic social media marketer. Sure, I had done a few ads here and there, notably for e-Commerce stores, and I had achieved impressive results, but when I attained a $0.50 CPA on behalf of Canva, I thought that was the best I could ever achieve. 

As I presented the results of the ad campaign to my manager he congratulated me before giving me the bad news straight: “My Manager Says $0.50 CPA isn’t good enough for us. We need to aim at a $0.25 CPA.”

So I went back to the drawing board. I had a few ads which had dipped below the $0.50 mark and had hit $0.41 CPA. 

I tried to draw conclusions based on how those ads had performed. What was the language used? What type of models had been presented? How could I drill down further on the successes I had already achieved with the previous test matrix I had laid out initially which had taken us to $0.50 CPA.

After two weeks of testing hundreds of creatives and potential new targets, I had done it. In fact, I had more than done it, I had beaten expectations. We had achieved a $0.10 sustained CPA.

I excitedly relayed our success to my manager who shared in my enthusiasm. 

You can imagine my bewilderment when I received a Slack message the next day telling me that his manager was unhappy with the results I had obtained.

“A $0.10 CPA isn’t good enough for us. We need to get closer to a $0.03 CPA.”

“A $0.03 CPA!? That’s insane. Unheard of!” I thought to myself. Being someone that relished a challenge, though, I set out to do the impossible.

I looked closely at the geos we were serving in, optimizing only for those which had been consistently cheapest. I doubled down on testing variants of our top performing creatives. I made sure that every element of the ad was aligned with our messaging and that I was selling the transformative nature of the product we were selling. 

After 3 weeks of further testing, I had done it.

I had achieved the $0.03 CPA. To this day, 5 years later, it remains my proudest achievement. I don’t know any other marketer who has done something similar. Whenever I tell my potential clients about it, I can practically see them salivating at the prospect of me replicating that level of success.

Canva didn’t see it that way, though. When I told them about it, they replied, “We need cheaper user acquisition. Aim to deliver a $0.001 CPA.”

That was insanity. If anyone can prove to me that a $0.001 CPA is possible, I’d love to speak to you over the phone. I remained at Canva for a few more months before they decided that SEO was the channel that would deliver the practically free results they were looking for. 

I saw they were looking for someone to run their paid ads back in 2022. Apparently, they realized that inexpensive user acquisition comes at a cost.

Cost per Acquisition Isn’t Everything 

Want to know what the cost of the $0.03 CPA was? 

I was forced to target geos with low 4G and broadband internet access. Sure, the cost per acquisition was low, but what type of users were they? Canva was a relatively resource-intensive mobile app. Could users on slow internet connections truly find value in the product? They might have downloaded it, but ultimately it was purely aspirational for the users who did end up being acquired. They likely did not have the capacity to become active users, much less the type of users who will recommend the Canva product and end up being evangelists, therefore contributing to the app’s long-term success.

One of the last things I did at Canva was a post-mortem of the campaign. I put together all the above points in a very attractive slide. Management has changed since then and I hope that somewhere, my presentation and experience there can serve as a cautionary tale: cost per acquisition isn’t everything. 

Consider this: according to a study by Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising. Additionally, a study by McKinsey & Company found that word-of-mouth marketing generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and customers acquired through word-of-mouth have a 37% higher retention rate.

These two points alone should be enough to convince you that in order to maximize the impact of your ad campaigns it isn’t enough to solely focus on the cheapest CPA. Instead, focus on users who are likely to be your early adopters. Your evangelists. Be willing to pay more for them. Even though it’s more difficult to model what their impact would be on your bottom line, there are ways of obtaining a referral rate and then estimating what the additional value brought in by these highly-engaged customers would be.

Ultimately, the experience I had at Canva was formative and extremely positive for me. It led me to one of the greatest ‘leveling up’ experiences I’ve had in any career. It was thanks to this experience that I was able to test methodologies I had already been developing and apply them at a higher scale than ever before. I was then able to systematize my framework for ad success – a framework that would then go on to endure more strenuous tests at companies like Ground News and Starbucks.

Want to know more about my methodology and how it can apply to your business’ product or service? Sign up below and I’ll send you my 6-step Roadmap for Ad Success along with a template you can use for setting up your very own Ad Creative Test Matrix.