A fast-growing skincare brand watched their Meta ROAS collapse from 4.1x to 2.3x over eight months. We restructured their full paid stack — Meta, Google Shopping, and email — recovering £1.4M in incremental annual revenue.
Lumara (name changed) is a premium skincare brand selling direct-to-consumer across the UK and Europe. They launched in 2021 with a tight product range — three hero SKUs — and grew quickly off the back of strong Meta performance. At their peak in Q2 2022, they were running at a blended ROAS of 4.1x.
By the time they spoke to us, that number had fallen to 2.3x. Monthly ad spend had grown from £28,000 to £47,000 — but revenue had barely moved. Their Meta account had accumulated over 300 ad sets across three years of untidy scaling. Google Shopping was running on broad match with minimal negative keywords. They had 52,000 email subscribers and were sending a newsletter once a month. Their previous agency had no explanation for the decline.
Before making any changes, we ran a full audit across all three channels. The findings were stark.
Consolidated 300+ ad sets into a clean three-campaign structure: cold prospecting using interest and lookalike audiences with strict exclusions, warm retargeting for site visitors and video viewers within 30 days, and a retention campaign for past purchasers. Hard audience exclusions enforced at every level to eliminate overlap. Produced eight new creative concepts — UGC testimonials, problem-agitate-solve videos, and ingredient-education statics — A/B tested in the first month, with winners scaled in month two.
Rebuilt the product feed with detailed, keyword-rich product titles and descriptions. Segmented campaigns by margin tier so high-margin products received aggressive bids and low-margin products were capped. Added 400 negative keywords in the first week to eliminate irrelevant spend. Launched a dedicated brand-defence campaign to recapture the 26% of branded impression share being lost. Introduced Performance Max only for the two top-converting hero SKUs — kept standard Shopping for the rest to maintain full bidding control.
Built and launched six automated flows in six weeks: a five-email welcome series over 14 days, a three-email abandoned cart sequence over 48 hours, a browse abandonment flow, a post-purchase education and cross-sell sequence, a 90-day win-back campaign, and a VIP loyalty programme trigger. Each written by a specialist copywriter, designed on-brand, and tested across a sample before full deployment.
Measured at six months versus the six months prior:
Most paid media problems are structural, not creative. Lumara did not need new ad ideas — they needed their existing budget to stop working against itself. The audience overlap, the absent email flows, the untargeted Shopping campaigns: each was a separate leak. We plugged the leaks before pouring more budget in. That sequencing is almost always the right one, and almost always the one agencies skip because plugging leaks is less exciting to pitch than a brand new campaign.