41% lower CPL. Three weeks after launch.
A DTC apparel brand at $1.4M ARR spending $12k/month on Meta and getting 1.9× ROAS. The store was a 5-year-old free theme. Attribution was blind. The team thought Meta had stopped working. The ads were the last thing wrong.
The challenge
The brand had been on Shopify since 2019, running on a free theme with 14 third-party apps injecting JavaScript on every page. Mobile load time was 4.1 seconds. Lighthouse Mobile Performance was in the low 40s. Every paid visitor was landing on a page that took four seconds to do anything.
On the paid side: $12k/month on Meta, 1.9× ROAS, 78% checkout abandonment. The checkout had five steps. The Conversions API had never been configured — Meta was making decisions on browser-side events only, missing roughly 35–40% of actual purchases. Instagram, which skews iOS-heavy, was being systematically under-attributed by nearly half.
Creative was brand-focused with no product benefit in the first three seconds. UGC-format content consistently outperformed studio content on the brand's own organic posts — but paid had never tested a single UGC creative. The previous agency had cycled creative every three weeks without ever touching the landing experience.
Project details
Client type
DTC apparel brand
Services
Shopify OS2.0 · Meta Ads · Email · Creative Strategy
Timeline
18 days to live · 90-day optimisation
Outcome
3.8× ROAS · 41% lower CPL · CVR 1.8% → 3.2%
What we built
Shopify Online Store 2.0 rebuild — mobile-first from 375px. PDPs with social proof, UGC modules, and Shop Pay express above the fold. Pruned 11 of 14 apps; replaced four with first-party theme code. Load time 4.1s → 2.1s. Lighthouse Mobile 43 → 91. One-page checkout with cart upsells surfaced before the customer clicks through.
How we did it
Configured Meta Conversions API via GTM Server-Side. Event Match Quality went from 5.2 to 8.4. The algorithm immediately saw a third more purchase signal. Consolidated campaigns, eliminated overlapping audiences, and launched a 6-hook UGC creative rotation — result-open, pain-state, social proof, comparison, curiosity, direct. Studio content moved to retargeting only.
What changed
Within two weeks of the CAPI fix, Meta auto-shifted 31% more spend to Instagram — the channel that had been under-attributed for three years. Checkout abandonment dropped from 78% to 54% in the first fortnight. By week 8, the result-open UGC format was the clear winner and became the primary prospecting creative for the rest of the engagement.
By the numbers
Flat spend. 79% more revenue from paid.
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