Performance ads, SEO and checkout work that returned 4–5x on ad spend and lifted average order value 15–20% for a heritage bakkwa name.

Few Singapore food brands are as recognisable as Lim Chee Guan, and few carry a reputation built so completely on a physical experience — the queue. That fame is real, but it is also a trap for an online store. The brand people know is the one they line up for in the fortnight before Chinese New Year, which pushes an enormous share of the year’s demand into a handful of weeks and leaves the rest of the calendar quiet. Bakkwa is also one of the easiest categories in the market to shop on price: at peak, gift-minded buyers compare slices, weights and hampers across every heritage name at once, and paid media gets expensive exactly when everyone wants the same attention. The e-commerce channel was being treated as an overflow valve for the queue rather than as a business of its own, and the media spent on it had to start paying for itself in orders instead of impressions.

Make online ordering something the brand could deliberately grow, not something that only spikes when the festive queue outgrows the shopfront. In practice that meant three things: a return on ad spend strong enough to justify putting more budget behind the channel, a larger share of the people who reached the store actually completing an order rather than stalling at the cart, and a bigger basket from the buyers already committed to purchasing. The scoreboard was a sales one — revenue return, order conversion rate and average order value.

We built performance campaigns across Meta and Google Shopping and Search, organised around how the range is genuinely bought — everyday sliced bakkwa, larger family packs, and the gift boxes and hampers that carry the festive season — with a retargeting layer running constantly against browsers and cart abandoners so demand created early was not lost. The product feed and campaign structure were maintained so spend concentrated on the lines that converted, and the seasonal ramp was planned and bid for in advance instead of being chased once the peak had already started.

Around the paid work we developed SEO for the branded and category searches the brand should own outright, so a meaningful share of demand — particularly the year-round, non-festive kind — arrived without a media cost attached. On the store itself we reworked the ordering and checkout experience, tightening product pages, cart and the steps to payment where orders were leaking, and merchandised bundles and gifting sets so trading up to a larger basket was the natural choice rather than an upsell prompt. Email capture was built into both the site and the campaign journeys, so visitors who were not ready to buy still entered the database and were carried back by email and retargeting flows — which is what turns a once-a-year gifting customer into a repeat one.

Over five to six months the campaigns returned 4–5x on ad spend, order conversion settled between 3% and 4%, and average order value rose 15–20% — an online channel that earns back more than it costs and grows the value of every order it wins, rather than one that only comes alive in the weeks before Chinese New Year.

See the rest of our client work on the case studies page.