Most Shopify brands run ads the expensive way: send cold traffic straight to a product page.

But if you do that, you’re asking Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and every other ad platform to do the one thing they don’t want to do. Let people leave the platform. 

And they charge you extra for it every time. 

The Real Reason Your CPAs Keeps Climbing

The longer users stay, the more ads they see, so the algorithm rewards content that keeps people scrolling. So when your ads try to take their users and bring them off-platform, CPAs are going to jump every time.

That’s why CPAs get so expensive, because you’re fighting the algorithm. 

When Ezra Firestone discovered this, he discovered an ad strategy that would scale his Shopify store to over $200 million in sales.

The Solution: The Engage & Filter Method

The Engage & Filter Method flips the normal ad funnel upside down. 

Instead of asking someone to buy first then building trust with founder stories and educational content after the sale, it builds a relationship first then only sells to people who are interested. 

Here’s how the Engage & Filter Method works:

Stage 1 — Engage

Run video content as engagement ads to cold audiences.

  • Objective: views, likes, comments
  • Goal: keep people interested (don’t try to sell)
  • Benchmark: $0.05–$0.10 per 30-second view
  • Budget: starts at $5/day

Stage 2 — Filter

Retarget to people who actually paid attention.

  • Build audiences from 50%+ video viewers
  • Show branded content (testimonials, demos, stories)
  • Goal: educate about brand

Stage 3 — Sell

Run conversion ads only to warm audiences.

  • Offers: bundles, discounts, free shipping
  • Audience: people who already engaged
  • Outcome: lower CPA, higher ROAS

“You take your buyers, subscribers, fans, prospects, people who don’t know about you. You put content in front of them, you filter out the people who consume that content, and you run a sales cycle to them.” — Ezra Firestone

The Proof: BOOM Beauty

BOOM Beauty, Ezra’s pro-age beauty brand for women over 50, built its audience with engagement-first content: 

  • face-to-camera videos 
  • real customer stories
  • makeup demos from real women.

One engagement ad got 800,000 people to watch 95% of a 30-second video with a budget of $4,500. That’s roughly $0.05 per qualified view, before BOOM ever asked for the sale.

BOOM wasn’t buying traffic. It was buying attention, then turning that attention into a retargeting audience. 

Why Those Cheap Views Turned Into Revenue

Another campaign got viewers to watch 4:40-minutes of brand content for $0.40 each. 

BOOM used those low-cost engagement ads to build 935K followers and email subscribers, then retargeted the people who actually paid attention.

The result: $27M+ in revenue at a 22% profit margin.

Every person who watched became a warmer lead for the next campaign. 

Ezra repeated this loop again and again: cheap engagement content first, then conversion ads only to the people who proved they were paying attention. 

That repeatable system is what scaled BOOM BEAUTY into a $200M Shopify brand. 

Run the Engage & Filter Method for Just $5/Day

You do not need to be a $200 million brand to do this. It can work for all stores of every size.

Start with one piece of content that’s not intended to sell: a founder video, customer story, product demo, before-and-after, or simple face-to-camera explanation.

Run it as an engagement ad for $5/day, then build a retargeting audience from the people who watched at least 50%. That’s your first filter. Once that audience is warm, then put your offer in front of them. Not before.

Get the Full Funnel on One Page

Now you have the 3-step Engage & Filter Method, but it only works with the right content. That’s why we created this Free Infographic and Playbook:

This shows you Ezra’s entire Engage & Filter ad strategy in one simple page, and it gives you every type of content you need to run it. 

Everything you need to launch this campaign for your own brand is inside, and you can get started right now for just $5/Day.