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If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat
Meta just opened a setting to all advertisers that decides who your Black Friday budget buys: new customers, or people who already bought from you.
It’s called Customer Lifecycle Strategy, and on default it leans the wrong way for peak season.
Meta chases the cheapest conversion, and in November, that is often a past customer who was going to buy anyway. That’s how a brand posts its best November ever and walks into January with barely any new customers.
Flip an ad set to “Acquire new customers” and those past buyers drop out. You’ll pay more per conversion, but that ad set’s budget only goes to people who haven’t bought from you yet.
Every ecommerce operator I know has a swipe file full of PDP, carts and checkout screenshots they swear they’ll rebuild "someday".
But those designs rarely see the light of day. Why? Because "someday" usually means writing a dev ticket, waiting on a two-week sprint, and praying you don't break your theme code right before Q4.
I’ve been playing around with Rokt Aftersell's new Aftersell Cart, and it completely bypasses that bottleneck.
It actually uses AI to rebuild a cart directly from your screenshot.
The workflow is wild: you take an image of a cart you like, drop it into your LLM with their specific prompt, and import the generated file. Your new cart is live in under five minutes. It requires zero code and doesn't touch your theme files at all.
Once your layout is built, you can turn it into a revenue engine:
Grow the order: Drag and drop 18+ different widgets like one-click upsells, cross-sells, and rewards progress bars.
Personalize the funnel: Set up logic to show specific offers based on customer tags, subtotals, or what’s already in the cart.
If you want to see exactly how this looks in production, the team is doing a live masterclass teardown with Grüns on October 27 at 1 PM ET.
Plus, they are giving away 3 high-converting cart templates to live attendees that you can apply to your store — highly recommend tuning in if you want to optimize your cart before the Q4 rush. RSVP here ->
What The Setting Actually Does
This new setting sits at the top of the ad set when you build a Sales campaign.
You get two main choices.
The default, “Reach new and existing customers,” goes after the lowest cost per result and happily includes past purchasers.
The other option, “Acquire new customers,” excludes them, and Meta warns up front that your cost per result may rise.
There’s also a separate option to reach or skip people who’ve engaged with you but never bought.
One catch trips people up: the exclusion only works if you’ve defined your Existing Customers audience segment in Advertising Settings.
If that segment is empty or stale, the setting has nothing to exclude, and nothing in the interface tells you so.
And it’s an on/off switch per ad set. In what’s been documented so far, there’s no slider for a percentage split between new and returning.
If you leave this on default, a chunk of your prospecting spend goes to people already on your customer list. During peak weeks, that chunk tends to grow, because returning buyers convert cheapest when the whole market is running offers.
We covered paying twice for that customer a few weeks back. This is Meta’s own fix.
Open Advertising Settings today and confirm your Existing Customers segment is defined and pulling from a current customer list.
It’s a five-minute check, and it decides whether the setting works or quietly does nothing.
Why This Is A Customer Decision
Back in August I argued that BFCM is really a decision about which customers you want to own next year.
The pushback I got was fair. The account optimizes for blended cost. You can’t cleanly steer who it buys.
Now you can, one ad set at a time.
So when you plan November, add two lines before anyone sets a ROAS target:
• How much of peak spend goes into new-customer-only ad sets
• The CPA you’re willing to pay for those buyers
Agree on that CPA before the month starts.
By week two, those ad sets will look expensive next to your default ones. That’s expected. The CPA you agreed on upfront is what stops someone from turning them off.
My working assumption is that brands who set this number on purpose will look worse on the dashboard in November and better in the bank by spring. I can’t prove that across the board yet, but it’s where the cohort math keeps pointing on the brands I work with.
Pull your numbers from your own cohort data, and decide this week who on your team owns them.
Setting Your November Mix
Because the control lives at the ad set level, your mix ends up being a budget decision.
Here’s the illustrative math:
Total November prospecting budget: $100K
Budget in ad sets set to Acquire new customers: $40K
New-customer share: $40K ÷ $100K = 40%
The other $60K stays on default and keeps picking up returning buyers and cheap conversions.
What you’re really deciding is how much of the budget gets walled off from the easy win.
How I’d pick the share:
1. Pull last BFCM’s new versus returning revenue split.
2. Decide what your returning customer base needs to look like next year.
3. Put enough budget into Acquire new customer ad sets to buy that base, and treat the higher CPA as part of the deal.
Treat the first few weeks as a test. It’s a new control, and nobody has a long track record on it yet.
Judge it in the audience segments breakdown and keep blended ROAS out of the call. When you deliberately buy more new customers, blended ROAS drops by design.
Teams that miss this end up switching it off in a panic halfway through November.
Lock It In Before November
Three things for this week.
1. Open a Sales ad set and confirm Customer Lifecycle Strategy is live in your account, with your audience segments defined.
2. Write down your November new-customer share and the reasoning behind it.
3. Brief whoever reads the dashboards. Blended ROAS is expected to dip. New-customer CPA and the audience segment split are the scoreboard.
The cost of skipping this probably won’t show up in November.
It shows up later, when the customer list you were counting on for next year barely grew.
The tool finally caught up with the argument.
Meta will pick your customer mix if you let it. This month, you get to pick.
If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat.
I appreciate you reading and as always if there's anything I can do to help you in anyway just respond to this email. I personally respond to every email I get.
- Kody ✌️
