The traffic was fine. The page was making people work.
The brand sells natural hair colour in several shades and in packs of two or three. Its Meta ads sent people to a collection page. To buy, a shopper had to open a product page for one shade, go back, open another to compare, and then work out which pack size to choose, one page at a time. Every extra page is a point where someone on a phone gives up.
Meta’s numbers already said the ads were doing their job: people clicked. The drop happened after the click, so buying more traffic would only have bought more drop-off. We studied how customers moved through the site and how competitors laid out shade selection, and the fix was to stop sending ads to the collection page at all.
The new page showed every colour in one place and let shoppers mix shades inside a Buy 2 or Buy 3 pack. Calls to action became clearer and more prominent, the layout was simplified, and the checkout moved from Shopify’s default to GoKwik, a one-click checkout widely used by Indian D2C brands.
Read the funnel one stage at a time
A single conversion rate hides where things changed. Split it into the stages between the click and the sale, and each stage points at a different part of the site.
May against July, Meta Ads Manager account totals
The biggest single gain is the page itself: the share of visitors adding to cart rose by about half once they could see every shade and pack on one screen. More clicks also turned into page views, which is the page speed work showing up (more on that below). More carts moved into checkout after the switch to one-click checkout.
The last line is the one to watch. A smaller share of started checkouts finished, down from 44.6% to 36.9%. Easier checkout entry pulls in people who are less committed, so some drop is normal, but it is now the weakest stage in the funnel and the next thing to work on.
Why ROAS barely moved, and why that is the win
If conversion rate rose 62%, why did ROAS only go from 2.11 to 2.38? Because the auction got more expensive at the same time. Cost per 1,000 impressions rose 45% between May and July, and cost per click 65%.
Costs against conversion, May to July
Run the rough arithmetic the other way. If July’s clicks had converted at May’s rate, at July’s prices, ROAS would have been about 1.5 instead of 2.38, assuming the same order value. That is the gap the landing page work closed, by getting more out of every click the account paid for. It is also why we judge growth on blended efficiency rather than one platform’s ROAS, as we explain in The one number that tells you if you’re actually growing.
ROAS also rose slightly more than conversion rate and cost per click alone would predict, which suggests orders got a little larger. That fits a page built around Buy 2 and Buy 3 packs, though the data here does not show order value directly.
Speed is part of the page
The first version of the new page was heavier than the old one, and on some days it showed it: slower loads and Core Web Vitals problems, Google’s measures of how fast and stable a page feels. A page that converts better but loads slower can give back everything it gained, because people leave before they see it.
We sent the brand’s team continuous feedback on image sizes, load speed and Core Web Vitals until the page held its features without the weight. The ledger shows it worked: the share of clicks that became page views rose from 69.5% to 75.3%, so about six more people in every hundred who clicked actually saw the page.
Caveats
Several things changed together, so the gain cannot be split cleanly between the page, the checkout and the speed work. Spend dropped in June and creative testing continued throughout, both of which affect who reaches the page. Conversion figures are Meta-reported. The case study reports conversion rate as 2.4% to 4.06% (+69%) using a different view of the same account; we use the single month-by-month table, 2.47% to 4.01% (+62%), so every month comes from one source. A controlled version would split traffic between the old and new page over the same dates.
If you take three things from this
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When cost per click rises, conversion rate is the lever that protects ROAS without changing the media plan. On this account, a 62% lift in conversion rate offset a 65% rise in cost per click.
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Send paid traffic to one page that answers every buying question, such as shade and pack size, instead of a collection page that makes people browse.
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Read the funnel stage by stage with the Adbuffs Post-Click Ledger, because a gain in one stage can hide a loss in another.
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