A full year for an e-commerce brand across Egypt and the Gulf, told in numbers.
Sales were up 125% year on year. Snapchat ROAS from 4 to 6. TikTok from 6.5 to 8.9. Google from 13.6 to 25.76. And Meta ROAS fell, from 4.75 to 4.52, after a heavy drop across three consecutive months.
Stay on that last line for a moment. They published it plainly in the middle of otherwise rising numbers, and that is exactly what makes the three above it credible. Anyone showing four platforms all rising in a single year is either hiding something or measuring wrong.
The most important decision of the year came before any campaign: they split the year into seasons and assigned a target product to each. Not "sell everything all year." That's the difference between an account with direction and an account watching.
Then three problems, in deliberate order.
Creative first. The business relied entirely on in-house shooting, so creative was scarce and volume was impossible. The fix wasn't shooting more; it was a system where customers filmed in exchange for products, joined by influencers on commission, without commission, or for product alone. That produced enough creative volume to feed Snap and TikTok, and influencer codes became the backbone of TikTok.
Conversion rate second. Store-side work on content, guarantees, plenty of customer reviews, and direct landing pages for the most-requested products took CVR from 0.6% to 1.2%. The same traffic sold twice as much before anyone raised a budget.
Google third. Merchant Center had many issues: naming was made consistent, cart data was enabled, the bid strategy changed, and the Merchant feed was split with that same split reused in campaigns. ROAS went from 13.6 to 25.76.
On Snapchat, permanent retargeting on non-buyers from the last 180 days, catalogue split once by section and once by best sellers, with a bid suited to each section. Meta shifted to Gulf countries only, running catalogue and retargeting without major change.
Alongside all of it: the first two branches in Saudi Arabia and six exhibitions during the year.
The increase didn't come from a platform and it didn't come from budget. It came from creative gaining a system, the site starting to sell, and Google being rebuilt from its roots, because weakness in any one of them hits all four platforms at once.
The lesson
The number that dropped makes the rest credible
