Success Story
Italian Baby-Clothing Brand: 78% More Monthly Revenue in Three Months, Despite iOS 14.5
An Italian baby-clothing brand grew monthly store revenue from €113k to €202k and conversion rate from 0.82% to 1.53% in three months.
Reading time: 4 mins · Published
Overview
The brand sells baby and children’s clothing, and it sells in one market: Italy. That keeps the reachable audience far smaller than for a brand selling into English-speaking markets, so the same budget reaches a smaller pool of people who see the ads more often.
We took over paid social and paid search in February 2022, with around €25,000 a month going into Facebook and Instagram. The client’s goals were a Facebook ROAS of at least 2x, and tracking they could trust.
Challenge
The brand came to us after the iOS 14.5 update, when Facebook stopped seeing a large share of the purchases it used to report. Return on ad spend in Ads Manager had fallen, and nobody on the client side could say with confidence which channel was producing sales.
The audit found a bigger problem underneath the reporting gap: the account had no acquisition in it. Most of the budget went to traffic and engagement campaigns aimed at existing customers and people who had already interacted with the brand, so the brand kept paying to reach the same audience and brought in little new demand. The previous media buyer had focused on remarketing alone. Traffic campaigns also bring low-intent visitors, and the store converted fewer than one session in a hundred.
What we did
- Measurement rebuilt. We checked the Conversions API and offline conversions, verified the domain, introduced UTM conventions across every channel, and cleaned up Google Analytics so that Shopify, Analytics and the ad platforms reported the same orders. After iOS 14.5 no platform sees every sale, so store revenue became the number we judged performance on.
- A real funnel. We rebuilt the account as prospecting, engagement and retargeting at campaign level, with audiences split by gender, age and objective so each stage could be judged on its own terms.
- Creative testing at 5-7 new creatives a week. The client wanted a premium look and high-quality assets only, so we worked within that brief and tested organic-style content, product breakdowns and split-screen comparisons. Most were static images, with video and GIFs alongside. We tuned the testing setup in the first few weeks and revisit it every two to three months.
- Google Ads as a supporting channel, on a much smaller budget than Facebook.
One finding surprised the brand:
“Creatives with newborn babies outperformed creatives with toddlers or older kids even for products for toddlers or older kids.”
— Our e-commerce strategist on the account
The best ads also stayed narrow: one product and one selling point (certified organic fabric, for example), with carousel ads for full collections.
Results
| Month (2022) | Store revenue | Conversion rate | Facebook ROAS (reported) | Google Ads spend | Google conv. value / cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| February (our first month) | €113,274 | 0.82% | n/a | €3.19k | 15.61 |
| March | €159,321 | 0.98% | 1.87 | €2.79k | 15.95 |
| April | €202,038 | 1.53% | 2.67 | €4.9k | 24.99 |
- Monthly store revenue grew 78% from February to April.
- Conversion rate nearly doubled, from 0.82% to 1.53%.
- Facebook-reported ROAS rose from 1.87 to 2.67, while the Facebook budget only moved from about €25,000 to about €30,000 a month.
- Google Ads conversion value per euro spent rose from 15.6 to 25.0 as spend went up from €3.19k to €4.9k.
Shopify total sales: €113,274 (Feb), €159,321 (Mar), €202,038 (Apr).
Google Ads, February 2022: €3.19k cost, 15.61 conversion value / cost.
Google Ads, March 2022: €2.79k cost, 15.95 conversion value / cost.
Google Ads, April 2022: €4.9k cost, 24.99 conversion value / cost.
Meta Ads Manager, February 2022, by campaign (no account average shown).
Meta Ads Manager, March 2022: 1.87 average purchase ROAS.
Meta Ads Manager, April 2022: 2.67 average purchase ROAS.
Notes on the data
Store revenue and conversion rate come from Shopify by calendar month, February to April 2022, in EUR. February 2022 was the first month of the engagement, not a pre-engagement baseline. Facebook ROAS is as reported by Ads Manager, which undercounts purchases after iOS 14.5. Google Ads conversion value / cost is as reported by Google Ads and probably includes branded search. Monthly Facebook budgets are approximate. The client is not named.