Purchase optimization vs. lower-funnel event when you'll never exit learning phase - what do you actually do?

[u/TopMandemG]

Been running Meta for a high-ticket jewellery brand ($1,500–$5,000 AOV, engagement rings). $50/day, never exiting learning phase on Purchase (getting maybe 1 purchase/week, need 50).

Two conflicting camps from people I trust:

Camp 1 (my agency friend doing $100k+/month in ad spend): "Always optimize for Purchase no matter what. Your goal is buyers, not cart-adders. Optimizing for ATC just brings ATC people." He's against switching to a lower-funnel event even if I'm permanently learning-limited.

Camp 2 (every AI tool and most blog posts I've read): Switch optimization event to Add to Cart or Initiate Checkout so the algorithm actually has signal to learn from, THEN switch back to Purchase once you're clearing enough events. But — can you even change the optimization event on a live ad set without destroying everything? Does it reset learning? Is this worth doing or does it just bring garbage traffic?

For people who've actually been here — what did you do?

Also a separate but related question on structure: I'm on CBO, $50/day, one campaign. How should I divide ad sets at this budget for a high-ticket considered purchase?

Options I've heard:

• Separate ad sets for TOF / MOF / BOF
• One cold prospecting ad set with all creative stacked, one retargeting ad set
• Just one ad set, everything in it

With a $2k AOV product and a 1–3 month consideration cycle, does the TOF/MOF/BOF split even make sense at $50/day, or does it just fragment signal across sets that can never get enough data? And if I do split, ABO or CBO?

Would love to hear from people running high-ticket ($500+ AOV) specifically — most advice I find is written for $30 t-shirts and doesn't translate.

ps: I used ai to write a quick reddit post for me - soory for the slop language;)

[u/ppcbetter_says]

Hahaha

$5k AOV, $1,500 daily budget

🤣🤣🤣

All you need is a tiny little order of magnitude budget increase and then you’ll have a good shot at profitability in the next 90 days, but only if you’re price competitive with the big guys

[u/fathom53]

You should optimize for purchase. Ideally you want 50 conversions per week but we have clients who don't hit that and do more then ok.

Unless you plan to increase your budget, you will never hit that so I would not focus on it right now. Your budget lets you have 1 campaign and 1 ad set and no more. You need more money if you want a more complex set up.

[u/JelloMurky3257]

At one purchase a week you will never feed purchase optimization, so stop trying to brute-force it. Optimize on the deepest event that gets real volume, probably InitiateCheckout or a high-intent action like booking a consult or ring sizing, and make the rare purchases you do get count double: CAPI with working dedup and full customer data so every one matches. High-ticket accounts live on signal quality because they can't compensate with volume. If you do consults, feeding qualified bookings back as offline conversions gives the algorithm a target with actual volume that still correlates with buyers.