BBQ e-commerce store (UK)

The task

A British store selling charcoal and barbecue goods on Shopify. Two different buyers in one store: retail — a private customer picking up a bag or two for the weekend, and wholesale — venues and resellers, with a longer cycle where the decision is made by someone other than the person clicking. The task: grow sales with paid traffic without throwing these two audiences into one pot.

What we did

Split retail and wholesale into separate campaigns with different objectives: B2C optimized for an in-store purchase, B2B — for a lead. Worked in two channels, Meta and Google Ads, for 17 months straight, not as a one-off launch.

Ran Meta through three ad accounts: the main one, a second for scaling from August 2025, and a third connected in summer 2026. Channels were judged by their different roles: Meta took volume and cold demand, Google — warm search with ready intent to buy, and each was measured by its own ROMI, not a blended average.

Results

Ad spend $159,404 (£119,243) for 03.2025–07.2026, revenue $448,298 (£335,351), 281% ROMI.

Retail (B2C):

• ad spend £95,976, 5,387 purchases, revenue £325,769 — 339% ROMI
• cost per purchase £17.82 ($23.82), average order value £60.47 ($80.84)

Wholesale (B2B):

• ad spend £23,267, 1,536 leads, revenue £9,582 — 41% ROMI
• cost per lead £15.15 ($20.25)

By channel:

• Meta Ads — £80,781 → £189,641 (235%), three ad accounts: £32,985 (215%), £47,299 (247%), £497 (367%)
• Google Ads — £38,461 → £145,710 (379%), of which retail £34,899 → £145,710 (418%)

Insights

Google paid back almost twice as well as Meta — 379% versus 235%, and in retail as much as 418%. But only in retail: in wholesale it delivered 42 leads for £3,562 and brought not a single payment. Meta carried all of B2B. The conclusion is not that “Google is better” but that each channel is strong on its own type of demand: search picks up the ready private buyer, the social network finds the purchasing manager who was not looking for it.

Wholesale is cheaper than retail per action (£15.15 versus £17.82 per purchase) but pays back eight times worse — 41% versus 339%. A lead is not a payment: judging channel performance by cost per lead here would have meant picking the wrong channel and pouring budget into a direction that does not return money.

The £60.47 average order value is roughly two bags of charcoal at a retail price of £27.50 per 10 kg. Item margin is about 47%, so the 339% ROMI in retail leaves the store a profit after cost of goods, not just turnover.