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E-commerce store, Dubai · 8 months, 2026

How a Dubai e-commerce store turned under AED 85K of ad spend into a 9x return

9x
Return on paid search spend
AED 760K+
Revenue from paid search
11M
Ad impressions delivered
95%
Organic clicks from non-brand search

The starting point

The account had accumulated years of campaigns. Sixty-eight on Meta, fourteen on Google, most of them still switched on and quietly spending against no clear target. Budget was spread thin across everything instead of concentrated behind what actually returned. The brief was simple: make the marketing profitable and prove it with numbers the client could check themselves.

Google Ads — measured

Paid search

Fourteen campaigns existed in the account. Five were left running. The rest were switched off rather than allowed to keep spending at a low burn, which is most of the reason the return looks the way it does.

under AED 85,000
Ad spendmeasured
AED 760,000+
Revenue attributedmeasured
9x
Return on ad spendmeasured
11 million
Impressionsmeasured
1,000+
Conversionsmeasured
AED 0.71
Average cost per clickmeasured
~AED 700
Average order valuemeasured

Meta — measured

Paid social

Paid social ran at a lower return than search, which is normal for prospecting-weighted spend. The number worth reading is not the average, it is the direction: campaigns rebuilt later in the engagement returned 65% more per dirham than the ones they replaced.

~5x
Return on earlier campaignsmeasured
~8x
Return on rebuilt campaignsmeasured
+65%
Improvement, same account and productsmeasured
20 of 68
Campaigns kept runningmeasured

Google Search Console — traffic measured, value modelled

Organic search

Barely one organic click in twenty was somebody typing the brand name. The rest were people describing a product or a need and finding the store — the difference between search that grows a business and search that intercepts customers who already knew it existed.

20,000
Organic clicksmeasured
1.4 million
Search impressionsmeasured
95%
Clicks from non-brand queriesmeasured
61%
Clicks from inside the UAEmeasured
79%
Arrived on mobilemeasured
~184
Estimated ordersmodelled
~AED 130,000
Estimated value of organic trafficmodelled

Instagram — reach and clicks only

Organic social

We report reach and clicks here and no revenue figure. Social traffic converts well below shopping traffic, so applying a paid conversion rate to it would produce a number we could not defend. The 30,200 link clicks stand on their own.

678,000
Views (+307%)measured
119,000
Accounts reached (+250%)measured
30,200
Link clicks to the store (+296%)measured
587
New followers (+567%)measured

What actually drove it

Stop paying for campaigns that don't earn

Five of fourteen Google campaigns and twenty of sixty-eight Meta campaigns were left carrying spend. Everything else was switched off rather than left running at a trickle. Concentration beats coverage.

Let each campaign type do what it is good at

Shopping returned above 11x on a deliberately small budget. Performance Max absorbed the volume at close to 9x. Standard Search was switched off entirely rather than propped up to look busy.

Rebuild rather than optimise a losing structure

The paid social improvement did not come from tweaking existing campaigns. It came from new builds with a cleaner structure, against the same products and the same audience, in the same account.

Grow non-brand organic alongside the ads

Search impressions grew only 3% while clicks grew 16% across the wider period. The gain came from better rankings and better click-through on existing demand, not from chasing more visibility.

How these numbers were produced, including where they are estimates

  • Paid figures are taken directly from Google Ads and Meta Ads exports. They are rounded down, never up.
  • Organic order and revenue figures are modelled, not measured. Search Console reports clicks, not sales, so we applied this store's own paid click-to-order rate and its own average order value to its organic clicks. It is a reasonable way to size traffic that carries no revenue tracking, but it is arithmetic rather than a receipt.
  • Channel figures are never added together. Google and Meta both claim credit for the same purchase when a customer sees one and clicks the other, so summing platform-reported revenue double-counts every overlapping sale. The only honest blended figure compares total ad spend against actual store revenue over the same window.
  • Organic social is reported as reach and clicks with no revenue attached, because social traffic does not convert at shopping-traffic rates.
  • Client name withheld at their request.
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