Google Ads paused, €10 a day moved to Meta: 131 more orders

• Client: GusturiBio by Phenalex (gusturibio.ro), a Romanian online store for natural products: supplements, food, and cosmetics.
• Channels: Google Ads, then Meta Ads.
• Period analyzed: October 9, 2024–January 31, 2025, compared with June 19–October 11, 2024.
• Goal: more online sales and a better-known brand.

Background

The store sells natural Romanian products to people aged 28 to 65, in and around cities, who want a healthier lifestyle.

In April 2024, the site moved from WordPress to Merchant Pro, and the move broke the Google Ads campaigns:

• product IDs changed, so Performance Max lost what it had learned and started over from zero;
• Google Merchant Center started disapproving products under Healthcare and medicine;
• ROAS dropped noticeably and cost per conversion went up.

By the fall, the Google campaigns still hadn’t recovered.

What we changed

On October 9, 2024, we paused the Google Ads campaigns that had stopped producing results and moved 20% of their budget, about €10 a day, into Meta Ads. Campaigns were already running there at about €50 a day, so the daily Meta budget reached about €60.

On Meta, we ran four types of campaigns:

• traffic, to bring new people to the site;
• conversion, optimized for orders;
• engagement, so the brand was seen more often;
• remarketing, for people who had already visited the site or the page.

Audiences were built from interests (nutrition, health, organic products), lookalike audiences, on-site behavior, and engagement with the Facebook and Instagram pages.

What happened on the site

In Google Analytics 4, the period after the change versus the one before, sitewide:

• orders: 920, versus 789 (+16.6%);
• sessions: 27,863, versus 24,758 (+12.54%);
• engaged sessions: 12,895, versus 12,205 (+5.65%);
• total revenue: +19.7%.

By traffic source, the biggest growth came from outside the ads:

• orders from organic search: 73, versus 19 (+284%);
• orders from direct traffic: 596, versus 176 (+239%).

Visits from organic search almost doubled: 3,394, versus 1,684.

What happened in Meta Ads

The nine campaigns in the table below spent €6,415, and Meta attributes 1,065 purchases to them, with an average ROAS of 5.65. The conversion value reported by Meta rose 31.71% versus the previous period, and page engagement rose 64%.

Remarketing worked best. The campaign for people who had added products to their cart without buying had a ROAS of 8.73: 120 purchases on €333 spent. Many people didn’t buy on their first visit, but came back and finished the order.

How to read the numbers

• Seasonality. The period after the change includes Black Friday and Christmas; the one before covers the summer. Part of the growth would have happened anyway.
• Direct traffic. Almost two-thirds of the orders in the second period (596 of 920) came in as “direct.” The Facebook and Instagram apps don’t always pass on where a visit came from, so it’s very likely that some of these orders came from the Meta ads.
• Organic search. With the Google ads paused, some people searching for the store by name probably clicked the organic result instead of the ad.
• Meta and Google Analytics count differently. Meta reports 1,065 purchases; Google Analytics, 920 orders sitewide. Meta also credits an order to someone who saw the ad without clicking it, so the two numbers don’t add up.

With Google Ads paused and an extra €10 a day in Meta, the store had 131 more orders than in the period before.