Case study: children's books, from 10 sales a month to 10-12 a day
The store sold only through Instagram on a budget under 500 dollars and made about ten sales a month. After a proper website, conversion tracking and managed traffic, it reached 10-12 orders a day, roughly two hundred a month. Production now struggles to keep up with demand.
Starting point
- Sales only through Instagram, orders collected in direct messages.
- Ad budget under 500 dollars a month, single channel.
- Around ten sales a month.
- No website and no analytics, so cost per customer was unknown.
The real problem was not the advertising. Relevant leads were arriving but stalling in conversation: someone asked the price, got an answer an hour later, and had already bought elsewhere. That model cannot scale, because the bottleneck is handling rather than budget.
What was done, in order
- A website instead of direct messages. So people could buy without waiting for a reply.
- Conversion tracking. Meta and Google tied to actual orders, revealing cost per customer rather than cost per click.
- Traffic to the site, not the profile. Campaigns re-optimised towards purchases.
- Google Ads built from scratch. A second channel for existing demand.
- Scaling only what worked. Budget increased only once the combination proved stable.
Outcome
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | ~10 per month | 10-12 per day, around 200 per month |
| Channels | Instagram only | Meta and Google together |
| Budget | under 500 USD | over 1,000 USD per channel |
| Ordering | manual chat | website, no human needed |
| Spend visibility | none | spend → order → cost per customer |
What to take from this
The common mistake here is raising budget first. This went the other way: remove the bottleneck, build measurement, and only once the combination became predictable, add money. Raising spend before that only increases the number of stalled conversations.
FAQ
How long did this take?
First changes show within weeks of launching the site and correct tracking. Reaching stable 10-12 orders a day and over 1,000 dollars per channel is a matter of months of gradual scaling, not a single launch.
Could it have stayed on Instagram without a website?
Up to a point, but the ceiling arrives fast: every order needs manual messaging, and the algorithm cannot see purchases, so it cannot optimise towards them.
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