
Nathan Miller explains why e-commerce ads cost $300-$400 CPM: consumer fatigue and market saturation. His strategy is finding underserved niches where direct-response ads haven't flooded yet. He shares a case where five native creatives in an unsaturated market hit 3× ROAS at $80 CPM.
Chapters
Making winning ads, winning natives, winning VSLs is the easiest it's ever been in e-com, but it's also the most sophisticated the market's ever been. I'm sure most of you guys can relate to this. You launch a product and it's got like $400, $300 CPMs. It's probably not even your ads that are bad. Like your copy is probably somewhat decent if you wrote it with AI. It's really just the fact that the customer you're advertising to has already seen a very similar creative before, probably multiple times, and so they're just ultra skeptical. You're gonna be seeing this a lot with supplements as well. We're starting to see a lot of people crack unaware ads now. And so sometimes unaware doesn't even work for certain things. So how do you find a niche or a product or a problem that you can advertise to that you could actually have success with these type of ads? It's much simpler than you think. You just need to find a market, a problem, you know, a certain area that hasn't been tapped into with these heavy direct response ads because If you're doing a supplement and trying to do it like ethically, you're competing with dudes making ridiculous claims that simply you cannot compete with. And so you need to do research and find markets and, you know, find problems that haven't really been targeted with these crazy direct response. And if you just bring regular, you know, ethical direct response to them, they actually work. Last night I did this. I actually found a niche and a problem where all the ads were just normal video ads. Maybe some VSLs, but no one was running these crazy natives, or— and nobody was definitely running unaware stuff. So I wrote like 5 natives, tested 5 avatars for this product, and it's kind of low spend right now, but I woke up to a 3 ROAS, like an $80 CPM, which nowadays is not that bad. So the moral of the story is just to find the places that are, you know, not as sophisticated. It's going to be a lot easier for you to compete in and you to actually see results in.










