A New Channel From Scratch: How Meta Advertising Delivered £56,000 in Six Months for a 125-Year-Old Retailer

Category: Ecommerce Strategy | Shopify | Meta Advertising | CAPI Tracking | Reading time: 4 minutes

The Business

Our client is one of the UK's most established home lifestyle retailers, trading since 1898 from a 25,000 sq. ft. showroom in the East Midlands. Across more than a century of trading, the business has built a reputation for premium brands and specialist expertise across kitchens, bathrooms, fires and stoves, outdoor living, and tiles and flooring.

The Fires and Stoves department is a significant part of the business. The range covers designer fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, gas fires, and electric fires from premium manufacturers, with products that carry a high average order value and attract customers who are typically researching a considered, long-term purchase. These are not impulse buys. A customer browsing for a designer fire or a quality wood-burning stove may spend weeks or months in the decision-making process before committing.

The business had been trading online for years, but on a bespoke legacy content management system that had accumulated technical debt and imposed real limitations on what the marketing team could do. When we began working with them, one of the first priorities was a full migration to Shopify Advanced, giving the business a modern, scalable platform and access to a far broader ecosystem of tools and integrations.

The Challenge

Despite a long-standing presence on Google Ads, the business had never run Meta advertising. This was not an oversight. It was a practical consequence of the legacy platform. 

Without reliable, accurate tracking in place, running paid social advertising on a platform as data-dependent as Meta would have been commercially risky. Meta's campaign optimisation relies heavily on conversion signals fed back from the website. Without those signals, the algorithm cannot identify the right audiences, cannot optimise spend toward buyers, and cannot report results accurately. 

Poor data in means poor decisions out.

The migration to Shopify Advanced changed this. With a modern platform in place, we were able to implement Conversions API (CAPI) tracking for Meta, which sends conversion events directly from the server rather than relying solely on browser-based pixel data. 

This is particularly important in a world where browser privacy restrictions, ad blockers, and iOS changes have significantly degraded the reliability of client-side tracking. CAPI fills those gaps, giving Meta's algorithm a much cleaner and more complete picture of what is actually happening on the site.

With accurate tracking in place, the business was ready to run Meta advertising properly for the first time.

The Approach

We launched campaigns specifically for the Fires and Stoves department, timed to align with the natural peak of consumer demand for this category. Fires and stoves are a seasonal product. Demand rises sharply in late summer and autumn as consumers begin thinking about heating solutions ahead of winter. Getting into market ahead of that peak, and sustaining presence through it, was central to the strategy.

Because the purchase journey for premium fires and stoves is protracted, the campaign structure needed to reflect that. A customer who sees an ad in August may not convert until October. The targeting and creative strategy needed to reach people at the right stage of their consideration, not just those ready to buy immediately. Audience targeting was built around interest signals, in-market behaviours, and retargeting layers that kept the brand visible throughout the research phase.

Budget pacing was managed carefully throughout the six-month period. Rather than spending evenly across the calendar, we concentrated budget around the periods of highest intent, pulling back during lower-demand windows and increasing spend as the season built. This is straightforward in principle but requires accurate data to execute well. Without reliable conversion tracking, you cannot see which periods are performing and which are not. The CAPI implementation made this possible.

The client's own commercial discipline was also a material factor in the results. They are price-competitive, they monitor the market closely, and they respond quickly when a competitor changes their position. In a category where customers are comparing prices across multiple retailers before committing, being genuinely competitive on price and having that reflected in the advertising is not a small thing. It converts browsers into buyers.

The Result

Over six months, the Meta campaigns generated £56,000 in additional revenue for the Fires and Stoves department, at a customer acquisition cost of 5.01% of revenue. For a high-AOV category with a long consideration window, this represents a strong return on a channel that had previously been entirely absent from the business's marketing mix.

The commercial significance extends beyond the revenue figure itself. The business had been reliant on a single paid channel for its digital acquisition. Adding Meta as a functioning, profitable channel reduces that reliance and builds resilience into the marketing strategy.

If Google Ads costs rise, if auction dynamics shift, or if algorithm changes affect organic visibility, the business now has an alternative route to market that it owns and understands.

The six-month period also established a baseline of audience data, creative learnings, and seasonal performance patterns that the business can build on. The first six months of any new advertising channel are partly about generating revenue and partly about learning what works. Both objectives were met.

What This Illustrates

The decision not to run Meta advertising was not irrational. It was a sensible response to the limitations of the platform the business was on. The migration to Shopify Advanced did not just improve the website. It unlocked a commercial capability that had been unavailable for years.

Tracking is not a technical detail. It is the foundation on which paid advertising decisions are made. Getting it right, specifically through server-side CAPI implementation, is what made it possible to run campaigns that the algorithm could actually optimise, that the team could actually trust, and that the business could actually measure.

For traditional retailers with long trading histories and established customer bases, the move to a modern ecommerce platform is often framed as a website project. It is also, if approached correctly, a marketing infrastructure project. The two are not separate.

If you are considering a platform migration or looking to add Meta advertising to your channel mix, get in touch to discuss what that could look like for your business.