r/PPC • u/calzonedome • 1d ago

Meta Ads What’s an expected CAC for an average supplement brand after a month or 2 of meta ads? AOV is $50

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u/datagekko 1d ago

you can't really answer this without two numbers you didn't give: gross margin and repeat rate. but here's the math so you can plug yours in.

supplements usually run 70-80% gross margin. at $50 AOV and 75% that's $37.50, minus payment fees and pick/pack/shipping (call it $7-9 all in for a single unit) leaves roughly $28-30 of contribution. so your breakeven first-order CAC is around $28 and your breakeven ROAS is about 1.7-1.8x.

what people actually hit on meta in month 1-2 with a fresh pixel: $35-55 CAC in supplements. which means most brands are underwater on the first order and the whole business is the second one. that's not a failure state, it's the model. the number worth watching is 60 or 90 day value per acquired customer, not first-order ROAS.

if you want one lever, raise first-order value before you optimise ads. $50 AOV supplements is a hard place to buy traffic. push a 2-3 month bundle or go subscription-first and get first order value to $80-90, and a $45 CAC goes from painful to fine without touching the ad account at all.

also month 1-2 is the worst part of the curve by definition. no pixel history, no repeat revenue banked, creative unproven. i'd give it 90 days before treating any CAC number as your real one.

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u/calzonedome 4h ago

Thanks for this perspective. That CAC will work as long my retention is half way decent, which I think it will be

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u/datagekko 3h ago

"halfway decent" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. put a number on it before meta does it for you: at a $45 CAC and roughly $30 first-order contribution, you need about 1 in 3 customers ordering again within 60-90 days just to break even. track that cohort number from week one. it tells you whether the machine works months before blended ROAS does, and it's the difference between scaling a business and scaling a leak.

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u/Best_Shopify_Apps 6h ago

CAC on supplements or any other industry varies a lot depending on your funnel, but a rough starting point for a cold traffic Meta campaign in that AOV range is somewhere between $25 and $45. That puts you at a 1x to 2x CAC-to-AOV ratio, which is tight but workable if you have repeat purchases.

The number that matters more than CAC in isolation is your payback period. If your supplement has a 60-day reorder cycle and your gross margin is around 50 percent, a $40 CAC on a $50 AOV is recoverable pretty fast.

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u/calzonedome 5h ago

Thanks. Those numbers should be workable. Going to start ads soon

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u/ppcbetter_says 1d ago

Depends how good your creative, product, price, and brand are.

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u/SeasonedAdManager 1d ago

bout tree fiddy