Performance ads, SEO and checkout work that returned 3–4x on ad spend and filled more than six in ten orders with first-time customers at Singapore’s original all-chocolate cake brand.

A chocolate cake is not something anyone buys on a Tuesday because they thought about it. It is bought for a birthday, an anniversary, a farewell in the office, a family dinner that needs an ending — which means demand arrives in a burst, on someone else’s calendar, and then goes quiet for months. That makes online cake a difficult category to buy media for. The customer is rarely loyal in the way a coffee drinker is loyal; they are loyal to the occasion, and at the moment of need they open a search box rather than an app they already have. Singapore has no shortage of bakeries, patisseries and delivery platforms bidding against that same moment, so the auction is expensive and crowded, and a brand with genuine name recognition can still lose the click to whoever happened to rank or bid higher that afternoon. Add the operational reality — delivery slots, lead times, a perishable product that has to arrive on the right day — and the gap between someone wanting a cake and someone completing an order is wider than the category’s simplicity suggests. The channel had to earn back real revenue, not impressions, against a purchase that by its nature is infrequent.

Make online ordering a channel that pays for itself and keeps widening the customer base, rather than one that recycles the same buyers at increasing cost. Three measures defined success. First, a return on ad spend high enough to justify re-investing month after month. Second, a larger share of the people who reached the store actually completing an order instead of stalling at product selection, delivery date or checkout. Third — and the measure that matters most for an occasion-led product — genuinely new customers rather than the existing base buying again, because in a category people return to once or twice a year, growth comes from reach into people who have never ordered before. The scoreboard was a sales one: revenue return, order conversion rate and new-customer share.

We built performance campaigns across Meta and Google Shopping and Search, structured around the occasions the range is genuinely bought for rather than the way it is catalogued — birthday cakes, celebration and gifting, the seasonal peaks that concentrate a disproportionate share of the year’s orders, and the smaller everyday lines that bring a first-time buyer in at a lower price. Search carried the high-intent moment, where someone is already looking for a cake and simply needs to be found; social carried the discovery and prompting work, putting the product in front of people whose occasion had not yet turned into a search. A retargeting layer ran constantly against browsers and cart abandoners, because in this category an unfinished order is usually a delivery-date question rather than a change of mind. The product feed and campaign structure were maintained so spend concentrated on the lines that actually converted instead of being spread evenly across a menu.

Around the paid work we developed SEO for the branded and category searches the brand should own outright, so a steady share of that high-intent demand arrived with no media cost attached to it — important in a category where the cost of the click rises every time a competitor decides to be aggressive. On the store itself we reworked the ordering and checkout experience, tightening product pages, delivery date and slot selection, cart and the steps to payment where orders were leaking, and making the path from a browsing visitor to a confirmed delivery as short and as unambiguous as possible. Email capture was built into both the site and the campaign journeys, so visitors who were not ready to order — the ones whose occasion is still four weeks away — still entered the database, and lifecycle email and retargeting flows carried them back when the date came round. That combination is what allowed acquisition to stay the focus without the media budget simply buying the same customers twice.

Over five to six months the campaigns returned 3–4x on ad spend, order conversion settled between 2.5% and 3%, and new customers made up more than 60% of orders — an online channel that earns back several times what it costs while spending the majority of that budget reaching people who had never bought from the brand before.

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