Profitable in pockets, stuck at the ceiling.

LORAURA had found something that worked, just not at scale. There were small, profitable pockets in the account, but the moment budgets went up, efficiency fell apart. That is the most frustrating place a brand can be: you can see the demand, but you can’t press on the gas without watching your returns collapse.

In a category as crowded as skincare, the reason was almost always the same. Standard, polished ads simply weren’t doing enough work. When your creative blends in with every other brand in the feed, you can only buy so much attention before the cost of it eats the profit. The ceiling wasn’t the budget. It was the creative.

A creative-led growth engine.

So we built the account around creative first and let everything else follow. On TikTok especially, the ad is the targeting. Get that right and the platform does the heavy lifting. It came down to two things: making creative that actually stops the scroll, and scaling it with discipline.

1. Let creative do the targeting

• High-energy UGC over polished commercials: we traded studio-perfect ads for native, high-energy creator content that feels like the platform, not an interruption.
• Broad and lookalike targeting: instead of over-engineering audiences, we went broad and let the creative filter for the right buyer.
• Test at volume: we tested 397 individual ads to surface the real winners, including influencer creatives that peaked at a 17.53x ROAS.
• Optimize for money, not motion: we optimized exclusively for payments completed, not clicks or add-to-carts, so every dollar chased real revenue.

2. Scale with discipline

• The 72-hour rule: underperformers were killed within 72 hours, before they could quietly drain the budget.
• Incremental scaling: we raised budgets gradually to keep the algorithm stable, instead of shocking it with big jumps.
• Checkout analysis: we studied all 7,599 initiated checkouts to smooth the transition from ad to landing page, so fewer buyers slipped away at the last step.

$116,611.29 in revenue across 1,633 completed payments.

The creative-first approach broke the ceiling. The account delivered a 3.27x overall ROAS, with the best creatives peaking at a 17.53x return, all built on 397 tested ads and a checkout flow tuned across 7,599 initiated sessions. Same brand, same category, finally scaling.