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 its conversion rate from 0.82% to 1.53%, while its Facebook budget rose by about a fifth.
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, and those people 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.
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.
When we audited the account, we 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 it kept paying to reach the same audience and brought in little new demand. Traffic campaigns also bring low-intent visitors, and the store converted fewer than one in a hundred sessions.
Strategy
- Measurement rebuilt: Conversions API, domain verification, UTM conventions and offline conversions checked end to end
- Google Analytics cleaned up, and the links between Shopify, Analytics and each ad channel verified
- Campaign structure rebuilt as a funnel: prospecting, engagement and retargeting at the campaign level
- Audiences split by gender, age and campaign objective
- A creative testing process with five to seven new creatives every week
- Google Ads run alongside Facebook as a supporting channel
We started with measurement, because every budget decision depends on the numbers underneath it. We checked the Conversions API and the offline conversion setup, verified the domain, put UTM conventions in place across every channel, and cleaned up Google Analytics so that Shopify, Analytics and the ad platforms were reporting the same orders. After iOS 14.5 no platform sees every sale, so store revenue became the number the team judged performance on.
With the numbers in place, we rebuilt the account as a funnel. New prospecting campaigns brought fresh people in, engagement campaigns warmed them up, and retargeting closed the sale. Audiences were segmented by gender, age and objective, so each stage of the funnel could be judged on its own terms. Google Ads ran alongside on a much smaller budget.
Creative testing ran at five to seven new creatives a week. The client wanted a premium look with high-quality assets only, so we worked inside that brief and tested three formats against each other: organic-style content, breakdown creatives that explain the product, and split-screen comparisons. Mostly static images, with video and GIFs tested alongside. The test setup itself was tuned in the first few weeks and revisited every two to three months.
One result 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 ads that worked best also stayed narrow: one product and one selling point, such as the certified organic fabric, and carousel ads for full collections.
Results
Monthly store revenue rose from €113,274 in February 2022, our first month on the account, to €159,321 in March and €202,038 in April. That is 78% more revenue in the third month than in the first.
Over the same three months the store’s conversion rate rose from 0.82% to 0.98% and then 1.53%, close to double where it started. Most of that came from better-matched traffic: fewer low-intent visitors and more people arriving from prospecting and retargeting built for them.
Facebook’s own reported return on ad spend rose from 1.87 in March to 2.67 in April, while the Facebook budget moved only from around €25,000 to around €30,000 a month. Store revenue grew much faster than spend.
Conclusion
The growth came from doing things in order. We fixed the measurement first, so budget decisions were made on store revenue. Then we replaced a retargeting-only account with a real funnel, and fed it a steady stream of tested creative. In a single-language market with a limited audience, that combination is what let revenue scale without spend scaling with it.
Notes on the data
Source: Shopify store revenue and conversion rate by calendar month, February to April 2022, and Facebook Ads Manager account-level reporting for March and April 2022. Currency EUR. February 2022 is the first month of the engagement, not a pre-engagement baseline, so the revenue comparison measures growth within the engagement. Facebook return on ad spend is purchase conversion value as reported by Ads Manager divided by spend, and after iOS 14.5 it undercounts purchases, so it is shown as a trend rather than as the total return. Monthly Facebook budgets are approximate. The client is not named.