Khiara Stores: turning a utensil wholesaler's ads into orders

What was actually broken

The ads were not the first problem. Nothing in the setup could tell the owner whether an order had come from an ad, a walk-in customer, or a regular trade buyer making a phone call. Without that, every campaign looked the same: money out, and an opinion about whether it worked.

The second problem was who the ads were talking to. Kitchenware advertising on Meta in the UAE reaches households very efficiently, and households are not the customer a wholesaler wants at full margin. The audience was cheap, which is why it kept getting used, and the leads were wrong, which is why the owner kept being disappointed.

The order I did things in

1. Pixel, conversion events and retargeting, so anything that followed could be judged.
2. Campaign structure rebuilt around product groups and around trade buyers separately from households.
3. Offers reworked with the owner, priced so the promotion did not sell under cost.
4. Creative tested in small batches against one offer at a time.
5. WhatsApp follow-up on every enquiry, with the store answering it.
6. Monthly reporting that counted orders, not clicks.

What changed

Orders moved from roughly 8 to 10 a month to about 20 to 25 over the engagement, and the cost per lead came down while the leads got better. Both of those figures come from the owner's own records, which is why they are stated as approximate ranges.

What the numbers do not cover

This is not a clean before-and-after. The comparison period holds a Ramadan and an Eid, the strongest gifting months for kitchenware here, so part of the rise belongs to the calendar. Store footfall grew over the same months. Prices and stock changed, and the store began answering WhatsApp faster because someone was finally assigned to it. The honest claim is that the ads stopped being a black box and started producing order enquiries the owner could name, not that all of the increase was mine.

Handover

The ad accounts went back to the store at the end of the engagement. Since then I have not had access, so the figures above are the ones recorded at the time.