The situation
Merin Studio is an e-commerce brand selling womenswear. They work in seasonal collections and were spending an average of 148,000₺ a month on Meta ads.
Cost per order had climbed to 360₺. The team had accepted this as the nature of the category: “competition is high in womenswear, that’s what costs look like”.
The problem
Every product competed inside one campaign. The catalogue ad showed the entire collection from a single pool. Low-margin products fed from the same budget as high-margin ones.
The creative showed the product, not its use. Product photography on a white background. Nothing to stop a scroll.
Sizing uncertainty was inflating returns. A 28% return rate was seriously eroding the real margin. The ad dashboard couldn’t see it; in the dashboard every sale was a sale.
Retargeting was taking half the budget. Because it showed a high ROAS it had been fed continuously. But as the flow of new customers weakened, that audience was shrinking too.
What we did
Week 1 — We separated products by margin. The whole catalogue was split into three groups: high margin, mid margin, low margin. Low-margin products were removed entirely from cold-audience campaigns and used only in retargeting and upsell.
Week 2 — We changed the budget split. The retargeting share was cut from 48% to 22%. The freed budget went to new-customer campaigns.
Weeks 2-8 — We started a creative wave. 20 new creatives a month were produced. Instead of white-background photography: try-on videos, the same product shown on models of different sizes and heights, outfit suggestions, close-ups of the fabric.
Week 4 — We tackled the sizing problem. A clear note in the style of “this item runs one size small” plus the model’s measurements was added to every product page. The ad creative also showed the item on different sizes.
Weeks 8-12 — We scaled the winners. The video format showing models of different sizes and heights wearing the same item clearly beat every other angle. It was turned into a creative family and took 40% of the budget.
The result
Cost per order fell from 360₺ to 235₺. Monthly orders from advertising rose from 410 to 690.
An unexpected second result: the return rate fell from 28% to 19%. When the size expectation was set correctly, people sent back less of what they bought. That alone contributed 9 points to the margin.
Average order value also rose 20%, thanks to the outfit suggestions.
What we learned
Ad cost is sometimes not about advertising at all.
In this case the biggest gain was the return rate — and returns are a figure that never appears in the ad dashboard. When the creative sets the expectation correctly, the cost that comes after the sale falls too.
Most of the numbers accepted as a “category average” are really the result of a process nobody has fixed.