50% more scale at target CPA for a European habit-building consumer app

Challenge

• Manual optimisation ate the week: a small in-house team adjusted budgets and bids by hand across three platforms every day, which left almost no room for the work that actually moves growth.
• Native platform tools were not enough: Snapchat has no rules engine at all, and the ones inside Meta and TikTok are too blunt to express how this business values an install or a subscription.
• The in-platform numbers disagreed: reported performance was inconsistent enough between ad managers that scaling decisions were being made on figures nobody fully trusted.
• Peak seasons were being missed: in Q5 and other high-demand windows, performance moved faster than a person checking dashboards could react, so winning campaigns were scaled late or not at all.

Solution

Traffic Revenue took over paid acquisition across Meta, TikTok and Snapchat. Scaling, bid adjustment and stop-loss — pausing creative that is not earning — are ours to run, and the client’s team stopped touching the ad managers day to day.

• From manual tasks to strategy: with our buyers running the daily optimisation across all three platforms, the in-house team moved on to what it is better placed to do — testing new channels, networks and placements.
• A buying approach built for this business: we buy to the client’s own definition of a good user rather than the platform’s, with custom metrics, layered conditions and a different check cadence per campaign type.
• Decisions on data we trust: we monitor ad performance daily against the client’s own numbers, reconciled in a shared sheet, so budget follows the assets that drive real value rather than whatever the ad manager reports.
• Scaling inside the window that matters: we review performance every day and step budgets up on winning campaigns as they prove out, which is how spend grew through peak season without CPA drifting off target.

Results

• 50% more scale at target CPA: we grew spend 50% while holding the CPA the client had set as its ceiling.
• The in-house team got its week back: the hours that used to go into manual campaign management now go into new-channel testing.
• One team across three platforms: Meta, TikTok and Snapchat are bought and reported on together, so nobody is reconciling three ad managers to work out what happened.