The complaint was "costs are high." Everyone's first instinct is to open the ad account.
He did the opposite. The ad account came last. First the site, the pricing and the funnel.
And the site turned out to be unusable. Not slow. Not in need of improvement. Unusable.
What he did was take a ready-made structure for a fashion site and work on it for six hours. Six hours.
The next day: conversion rate tripled, from roughly 0.5% to 1.5%. With nobody touching the ads. Same campaigns, same budget, same traffic. Just more of the same people buying.
Run the arithmetic so the number lands. If cost per order is X at a 0.5% conversion rate, then on the same spend and the same visits at 1.5% it becomes X divided by three.
Cost fell to a third. Any media buyer would have spent a full month trying to reach that from inside the account, and might not have got there.
Why did the result arrive in a single day? Because the ads were working correctly all along. They were bringing genuinely interested people, and those people were arriving and breaking on the page. Once the page was fixed, the same people completed.
The traffic was never the problem. The problem was where the traffic was going.
That inverts the order most people follow. The instinct when costs rise is to open the account and start pausing, launching, switching audiences and testing creative. You can spend a month doing that while repairing something that was never broken.
"Costs are high" doesn't mean "the ads are wrong." Sometimes the ads are paying the price of a website.
The lesson
Before calling ads expensive, look at the site
