How a 70% drop in CPA saved a struggling Balkan ecommerce business.

The starting point

This client sells insecticides, plant protection products, and repellents for mosquitoes and ticks through an ecommerce store based in Serbia, a narrow, low-volume niche where the total pool of buyers is small to begin with. When we took over, the business was losing money: CPA was very high, and the numbers didn't work at the spend levels needed to get meaningful volume.

In a niche this small, there isn't a large audience to spread budget across, and no favourable market conditions to cover for weaknesses in the account. Every inefficiency shows up directly in the CPA, and at the levels this account was running at, that inefficiency was the difference between a profitable business and one bleeding money on every sale.

What we did

1. Rewrote Google Ads copy and reworked the landing pages

   We updated ad copy across Google Ads and adjusted the landing pages themselves, adding product photography and other assets that were missing, since a niche this specific needs the page to do more convincing than a generic ecommerce listing would.

2. Shifted Meta budget to retargeting instead of spreading it thin

   The Meta budget wasn't large enough to run a full prospecting funnel and still hit meaningful volume, so we concentrated it on retargeting instead. That single change lifted conversion rates more than spreading the same budget across the whole funnel would have.

3. Worked with their team on offers and product pages

   We worked directly with the client's team on stronger offers, and with their development team on improving the product pages themselves, since no amount of media buying fixes a product page that isn't giving people a reason to buy.

The results

CPA is down roughly 70% from where it started, and the account has gone from losing money to profitable. In a niche this size, that's not a marginal improvement: it's the difference between a business that can keep running paid ads and one that can't.

None of the individual changes here were dramatic. Better ad copy, a retargeting-first Meta setup, stronger offers, and cleaner product pages don't sound like much on their own. In a low-volume niche where every inefficiency compounds, together they were enough to save the business.