Know what you keep before you spend.

One complete method for Facebook and Instagram advertising — the fee math, the structure, the tracking and the policy rules that decide whether any of it was profitable.

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The arithmetic almost nobody runs

  • What one sale actually leaves you

    A $60 product. Take off $18 of goods, $7.50 to pick, pack and ship, $2.04 in card fees, and $2.40 set aside for returns. What's left is $30.06 — and that is your entire budget for finding the customer.

  • What that makes your floor

    A contribution margin of 50.1% means a break-even ROAS of 2.0x. A campaign sitting at 1.8x is losing money on every extra sale, so scaling it makes the loss bigger — while the dashboard still reads like success.

  • What you can actually bid

    Keep a third of the margin and your ceiling is $20.14 per purchase. That number is what tells you when to kill an ad, instead of your opinion of the creative.

 Most people never run this 

Almost everyone who loses money on Meta ads loses it the same way. They look at the revenue figure in Ads Manager, compare it to the spend figure beside it, see something above 1.0 and conclude the campaign works. It usually doesn't.

Revenue is what the customer paid. It is not what you kept, and the gap between those two numbers is where businesses quietly die while the dashboard still looks healthy. Work out your contribution margin first and every decision after it becomes arithmetic rather than a feeling — which ad to kill, which to scale, when to raise budget and when to stop.

Three parts, bought separately

 Find your row 

Every product has a number that decides whether it can be advertised profitably at all, and most people never work it out. Take your selling price, subtract cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and expected returns, then divide what's left by the selling price. That's your contribution margin.

Now find it in the table. If you land in the bottom two rows, the honest answer is that better ads won't save you — the fix is your pricing or your costs, and it happens before you spend anything on Meta. The Edition works through both, with the arithmetic shown rather than asserted.

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