Yerba Mate Ecomm – Meta Ads

Background

E-commerce brand selling yerba mate products positioned as premium.

Product pricing was significantly higher than competitors, without a clear functional or qualitative advantage to justify the price difference.

The project was short-term and intensive:

1-month collaboration
very high daily budgets
focus on aggressive creative and media testing

Business Context & Challenge

Key challenges were business-side, not technical:

product price ~3× higher than competitors
low repeat purchase potential
weak product-market fit at scale
profitability already below target before takeover

At this point, paid ads were expected to solve a business problem, not just scale demand.

Budget & Scale

This required fast decision-making and rapid testing, not slow optimization cycles.

Creative Strategy

This case was designed as a creative stress test, not a “find one winner” setup.

Creative Angles Tested

Five main messaging angles were tested in parallel:

Weight loss
Energy boost
Health & wellbeing
Yerba mate vs coffee
Lifestyle / daily habit

Each angle was treated as a separate hypothesis.

Campaign Structure

Main Creative Testing Campaign

Project info

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Single large testing campaign
Broad targeting
The majority of the daily budget is allocated here

For each creative angle:

separate ad sets
Two main formats tested:
- 4:5 format with direct link to website
- 1:1 format, opening the post first, then linking to the website from the caption

This allowed testing not only of creatives, but also of click behavior and user intent quality.

Additional Campaigns (Attribution & Bidding Tests)

Two additional campaigns were run in parallel using existing proven creatives:

Attribution window changed to 7-day click only (no 1-day view)
Hypothesis: reduce frequency and push delivery toward new audiences
Bidding strategy tests:
- Target ROAS
- Highest volume

These setups were tested to counter:

rising frequency
declining ROAS caused by audience saturation

Results

Ad spend: $110,000
Revenue: $154,000
ROAS: 1.4x
Performance remained similar to previous setups

Despite extensive testing:

ROAS did not improve meaningfully
performance aligned with historical results and competitors

Why It Didn’t Scale

This case clearly showed that:

creative volume cannot compensate for weak pricing
high frequency hurts expensive, low-repeat products
media buying cannot fix poor unit economics

At scale, the bottleneck was product and pricing, not ads.

Takeaway

This case demonstrates large-scale creative testing, structured hypothesis-driven media buying, and the ability to identify when performance limitations come from the business model rather than advertising execution.

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