Great Product, Wrong Traffic
R341,428.79 → R708,505.37
Revenue more than doubled on a third less traffic.
✦ The problem
Nearly 138,000 visits. Almost nobody buying.
The store was pulling close to 138,000 visits and converting only 0.36% of them. To keep sales moving, it leaned on discounting worth nearly 45% of gross sales. On paper it looked like a broken storefront.
It wasn't a broken storefront. It was the wrong traffic.
Conversion rate vs benchmark
Between 4× and 7× below where a healthy store lands.
Before · the starting state
Total sales
R341,428.79
Orders
527
Sessions
137,838
Conversion rate
0.36%
Discount depth
44.6% of gross
Average order value
R554.82
✦ What we did
Four workstreams. One outcome.
Paid social. Rebuilt the account to buy for purchases and to test and iterate creative, so budget reached people who actually wanted the product.
Google. Fixed broken event tracking that was crediting ad clicks as purchases, and built the missing Shopping campaigns, so Google's real contribution became visible.
Email. Built a full email programme from scratch, a channel the brand had never used.
Store experience. Clearer navigation, visible social proof, and a consistent, obvious buy button on every page.
✦ The outcome
Before and after.
Discount spend barely moved in absolute terms: up 4.5%, from R242,124.18 to R252,942.83, even as sales doubled. The store stopped buying its revenue.
✦ Supporting proof
Customer base
Returning customers 108 → 233, up 115.7%, holding the returning rate near 23% while acquisition more than doubled.
Average order value
The one number that fell, for a good reason: the expected trade when order volume more than doubles and the buyer base broadens.
Durability
A step up, not a seasonal spike. November peaked at R124,714.53, then the store held a R52,000–R64,000 monthly baseline, above the R43,032.51 low before the work compounded.
Breadth
No single hero product carried the result.
The rebuilt paid-social engine
4.34×
return on ad spend
R112,336.77
spent
R487,423.96
tracked purchase revenue
1,407
purchases
Advantage+ Shopping carried about 77% of it. These figures are evidence the traffic fix worked. They are measured on Meta's attribution model and do not add to the blended store revenue above.
Measurement basis
Store figures are from Shopify Admin analytics, blended across all traffic and not channel-attributed, measured over a 10-month window against the preceding equal-length period; both periods contain one Black Friday. Paid-social figures are channel-attributed from Meta Ads Manager on a 7-day click, 1-day view model.