The scenario
The brand sells sunglasses, prescription frames and coloured contact lenses online only, on Shopify with KNET, Tabby and cash on delivery. Two years of steady but modest growth had built a working Meta account and a smaller Snapchat presence, and the founder wanted to push into summer — the sharpest sunglasses season of the year — with a real budget increase.
The account had never been restructured since launch. Every new idea over two years had become a new ad set inside the same prospecting campaign, and by the time we were brought in, fourteen ad sets across the three product lines were competing against each other in the same auction for the same small pool of Kuwaiti shoppers.
- Monthly revenue band
- pending client sign-off
- Average order value
- pending client sign-off
- Prescription handling
- Customer's own optician prescription, lenses fitted by a partner optical lab
- Team
- One founder, one media buyer working part-time
Fourteen ad sets, three product lines, and a budget increase that made everything worse
The founder's first attempt to scale for summer was the obvious one: raise the daily budget on the existing campaign by half and let the algorithm find the extra volume. Within a week, frequency on the main prospecting audience had climbed sharply and cost per purchase had risen with it, across all three product lines at once. The instinct afterward was to raise the budget again to compensate, which is the one move that reliably makes frequency worse.
Pulling the account apart showed why the extra spend had nowhere useful to go. Fourteen ad sets, several of them running near-identical creative for the same product line, were splitting the same small Kuwaiti audience and bidding against each other in the same auction. Adding budget to a structure like that does not reach new people — it just shows the same people the same ads more often.
There was also a creative supply problem underneath the structural one: only three creatives across all three product lines were actually performing near the target cost, the rest were either fatigued or had never been properly tested. The account did not have room to scale. It had a structure and a creative supply that were both already stretched thin, and the budget increase exposed both at the same time.
What we did — the creative that carried the spend
The losers are here on purpose. A test with only winners was never a test.
Sunglasses: same frame, four face shapes
Winner"Round face, square face, long face — same sunglasses, four ways."
- Format:
- Vertical, 14 seconds, four quick cuts by face shape
One of only three creatives already performing near target cost before the scale attempt, and the one that carried most of the account's volume. Confirming it as a genuine winner, rather than assuming the whole account had proven supply, was the first step in deciding the sunglasses line was ready to scale before the other two.
Frames: the optician handles the lens
Winner"Send us your prescription. Our optician partner fits the lenses, not us."
- Format:
- Vertical, 16 seconds, phone camera, the founder explaining the prescription step
The second of the three proven creatives, and the only one carrying the frames line. Its cost per purchase held steady through the failed scale attempt while the rest of the frames ad sets deteriorated, which is what told us the frames line's problem was structural, not creative — it simply needed a clean campaign of its own rather than a new ad.
Lenses: colour on three eye tones, cut for Snapchat
Winner"Grey, honey, green — see the colour on three different eye tones first."
- Format:
- Vertical, 12 seconds, close-up eye shots, shot specifically for Snapchat's try-on culture
This was the third proven creative, but it was Snapchat-only — the same footage cut for Meta had never performed. That single finding is why the second-platform decision for the lens line specifically was Snapchat rather than a blanket move to add a new platform across the whole account.
The generic mixed-product ad kept running through the scale attempt
Lost"New collection is here — sunglasses, frames and lenses."
- Format:
- Vertical, 15 seconds, carousel-style cuts across all three product types
This ad absorbed the largest share of the extra budget during the failed scale-up simply because it had the most impressions already, not because it converted best. Its frequency climbed fastest of any creative in the account and its cost per purchase rose the most, making it the clearest single reason the initial budget increase read as a failure.
A flat 20% Eid discount ad across all products
Neutral"20% off everything for Eid."
- Format:
- Vertical, 10 seconds, text-on-screen discount card
Pulled a respectable click-through rate but a mixed cost per purchase, and it is worth recording as neither a clear win nor a clear loss: the discount attracted price-sensitive clicks across all three lines rather than the gift-driven sunglasses buyer the Eid season actually rewards, which is a targeting question to solve before running it again.
What we did — the optimizations, in order
Put measurement first, before touching the budget
Confirmed server-side conversion tracking on Meta and Snapchat, one link-naming convention across both, and blended marketing efficiency read against the store's actual margin rather than a target someone had picked.
Why: Scaling a poorly measured account amplifies the confusion along with the spend. Fixing measurement first meant every decision after this point was judged against a number the founder could trust, rather than a platform-reported figure that moves for reasons unrelated to actual sales.
Consolidate fourteen ad sets into one per product line, per platform
One prospecting campaign per product line on each platform — sunglasses, frames, lenses — replacing the fourteen overlapping ad sets that had been competing against each other in the same auction.
Why: The three product lines were never competing for the same buyer, so splitting them into separate campaigns let each one's budget learn against its own audience instead of being diluted by ad sets targeting a different buyer entirely.
Confirm real creative supply per line before adding a single dinar
Audited every ad set and found only three creatives across all three product lines genuinely performing near target cost; treated the sunglasses and frames lines as ready to scale and the lens line as needing fresh supply first.
Why: Adding budget to a line with only one proven creative is how frequency climbs and cost per purchase drifts up on that line specifically, which is exactly what had happened to the mixed campaign. Confirming supply per line, not per account, is what let two of the three lines scale immediately while the third waited two weeks for new creative.
Move the budget in steps, per line, not as one account-wide jump
Twenty to thirty percent per step on each product line's own campaign, held for five to seven days, with a rollback rule after two consecutive days above the cost ceiling for that specific line.
Why: The original failed attempt raised the budget on one shared campaign by half in a single move, with no line-specific ceiling to catch a problem early. Stepping each line's budget separately meant a lens line still building creative supply never had to absorb the same increase as a sunglasses line that was already proven.
Add Snapchat as the second platform for the lens line specifically
Kept Meta as the primary platform for sunglasses and frames, and made Snapchat the lead platform for coloured lenses once the Snapchat-only lens creative proved itself, rather than adding Snapchat spend evenly across all three lines.
Why: A second platform should be chosen by where the specific buyer already responds, not added as a blanket account-wide move. The lens buyer's own creative told us she was on Snapchat; applying that finding only to the lens line kept the sunglasses and frames budget from being spread thin on a platform that had not proven itself for them.
Pre-load the summer and Eid budgets by product line
Set a higher accepted cost ceiling in advance for the sunglasses line specifically through the peak summer and Eid weeks, since it is the line that genuinely benefits from the seasonal surge, rather than raising the ceiling account-wide.
Why: Sunglasses and frames do not share the same season — one peaks with the sun and gifting, the other sells steadily year-round on renewal cycles. A single seasonal ceiling for the whole account either overspends on frames in a slow month or underspends on sunglasses at its one real peak.
Watch for the ceiling on each line separately
Tracked cost per purchase against each line's own ceiling rather than an account-wide average, so the sunglasses line's genuine room to grow was never masked by the frames line already sitting near its own limit.
Why: A blended ceiling across three product lines with different margins and different seasons will always be wrong for at least one of them. Reading each line's ceiling separately is what let the sunglasses line keep scaling through summer while the frames line correctly stayed flat.
What changed
The headline figure is in the table above, and the shape underneath it explains why the second attempt at scaling worked where the first did not: spend went up on a structure that had already been proven, one product line at a time, rather than on one shared campaign asked to absorb everything at once.
Frequency is the number that tells the real story. It had spiked hard during the failed first attempt and settled back down once the account was split, even at a higher total spend than before, because the extra budget was now reaching genuinely separate audiences instead of showing the same three product lines to the same overlapping pool of people.
The lens line moved slower than the other two, which was expected rather than disappointing: it needed two weeks of fresh Snapchat-specific creative before it had anything worth scaling, and pushing budget into it earlier would have repeated the exact mistake the whole engagement started by fixing.
What we would do next
Rework the Eid discount creative so it targets the gift-driven sunglasses buyer specifically rather than a flat percentage across all three lines, since the neutral result there looked like a targeting mismatch rather than a genuinely weak offer.
Watch the sunglasses line for the first real signs of its ceiling once summer passes, since it has been the fastest to scale and is the one most likely to reach the point where further budget stops buying orders and starts buying frequency instead.