Neo Tokyo Case Study
Target Market: Norway 🇳🇴
How We Scaled Neo Tokyo to 15.05x ROAS with Meta Ads — Japanese Pop Culture Ecommerce Case Study
Neo Tokyo is Oslo's leading online destination for Japanese pop culture — anime merchandise, cosplay accessories, authentic Japanese snacks, and fashion. A deeply passionate niche audience with high purchase intent and genuine cultural affinity for the products they buy. When they approached Digital Global Branding, three challenges defined the brief: high ad spend with low initial ROAS, low conversions from new visitors, and difficulty retargeting disengaged users.
Between April 1 and June 28, 2024, we ran 15 Meta Ads campaigns across Facebook and Instagram. The result: 15.05x average ROAS on kr1,12,101.90 in ad spend, 184 confirmed website purchases, 74,064 unique users reached, and kr2,85,343.52 in total revenue generated — making this the highest-ROAS campaign in our Meta Ads portfolio.
15.05x
ROAS
184
Purchases
74,064
Reach
kr2,85,343
Revenue
Client Overview
Brand: Neo Tokyo
Industry: Ecommerce — Japanese Pop Culture Products
Location: Oslo, Norway (also has a physical store)
Target Market: Anime fans, Japanese culture enthusiasts, and pop culture followers in Norway and Scandinavia
Platform: Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Campaign Duration: 1 April 2024 – 28 June 2024
Currency: Norwegian Krone (kr)
Total Campaigns Run: 15
The Problem We Were Hired to Solve
Neo Tokyo had the rarest asset in ecommerce advertising: a genuinely passionate audience who already loved the product category. The problem was not demand — it was capture. Three specific challenges needed to be solved:
1. High Ad Spend with Low Initial ROAS: Early campaigns were spending aggressively without the campaign architecture to convert that spend into proportional revenue. Budget was being consumed by broad audiences with low purchase intent.
2. Low Conversions from New Visitors: Cold traffic was landing on the site but not purchasing. The gap between ad click and checkout completion indicated a disconnect between ad creative, audience temperature, and landing page experience.
3. Difficulty Retargeting Disengaged Users: A large pool of users had visited the site, engaged with products, but not completed a purchase. Without a structured retargeting funnel, this high-value audience was being lost entirely.
Our Meta Ads Strategy for Neo Tokyo
Campaign Architecture
Three campaign types were structured to work as a complete funnel rather than isolated campaigns:
• Traffic Campaigns: Built top-of-funnel awareness among new visitors — anime fans, Japanese culture enthusiasts, and pop culture followers in Norway and Scandinavia who had never encountered Neo Tokyo.
• Conversion Campaigns: The core revenue engine. These campaigns targeted warm audiences with direct purchase intent, optimised for website purchases using Meta's conversion objective. The 'NEW | Scale Up | Conversions' campaign alone delivered 70 purchases at kr2,704.89 CPP with a 14.01x ROAS.
• Remarketing Campaigns: Specifically addressed the third challenge — retargeting users who visited but did not convert. Structured remarketing sequences turned abandoned-visit audiences into buyers, contributing directly to the account's 15.05x average ROAS.
Audience Strategy
Three audience layers operated simultaneously across all active campaigns:
• Interest-Based Audiences: Targeted users engaged with anime, manga, Japanese culture, cosplay communities, and pop culture media in Norway and neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
• Lookalike Audiences: Built from Neo Tokyo's existing customer purchase data — finding Norwegian and Scandinavian users who mirrored the purchase behaviour of proven buyers.
• Geo-Targeting: Primary focus on Norway with secondary expansion into Scandinavian markets where Japanese pop culture has a strong and growing fanbase.
Creative Execution
• Product-centric carousel ads highlighting popular categories: anime merchandise, cosplay accessories, Japanese snacks, and fashion
• Video ads showcasing product culture and lifestyle — not just the product, but the world it belongs to
• Dynamic seasonal content featuring limited-time offers and exclusive product drops
• Engagement-driven CTAs: 'Shop Now' and 'Explore Japanese Culture' to match audience intent at each funnel stage
• Static conversion ads tested against dynamic formats to identify per-audience winners
Optimization Protocol
ROAS and cost-per-result were monitored continuously across all 15 campaigns. Budget was allocated toward the highest-performing conversion campaigns. The 'Scale Up | Conversions' campaign achieved an extraordinary 40.72x ROAS — the peak performer in the account. Campaigns showing low or zero purchase attribution (like the Catalogue trial campaigns) were identified early and held back from scaling, preserving budget for proven conversion drivers.
Campaign Results — Full Data Breakdown
Campaign Period: 1 April 2024 – 28 June 2024
Total Campaigns: 15
Total Ad Spend: kr1,12,101.90
Total Purchases: 184
Average Cost Per Purchase: kr609.25
Total Revenue Generated: kr2,85,343.52
Average ROAS: 15.05x
Total Reach: 74,064 unique users
Total Impressions: 1,13,303
Key Insights from This Campaign
1. Niche Passion Audiences Produce the Highest ROAS in Ecommerce
Neo Tokyo's 15.05x average ROAS — the highest in our Meta Ads portfolio — is not an accident of budget or platform. It is the direct result of advertising to an audience that has deep cultural passion for the product category. Anime and Japanese pop culture fans in Norway are not casual browsers. They are active collectors and repeat buyers. When the right product meets the right passionate audience, ROAS scales dramatically beyond what generalist ecommerce achieves.
2. The Scale Up Strategy Unlocked Peak Performance
The 'Scale Up | Conversions' campaign delivered a 40.72x ROAS — the single highest-performing campaign in this account. With only 3,673 reach and 12 purchases, this was a precision campaign: a small, perfectly qualified audience converting at an extraordinary rate. The lesson is that scaling spend into a proven, high-intent audience delivers exponentially better returns than spreading budget across broad, unqualified reach.
3. Conversion Optimisation Beats Traffic Optimisation Every Time
The 'Website Traffic | Link Clicks' campaign — the only traffic-objective campaign in the account — delivered just 2 purchases at a 2.68x ROAS on kr356.45 spend. Every other conversion-optimised campaign significantly outperformed it. For ecommerce brands with purchase data available, running traffic campaigns instead of conversion campaigns is one of the most common and costly mistakes in Meta Ads management.
4. Small Reach, Enormous Returns — The Niche Ecommerce Advantage
Neo Tokyo reached only 74,064 unique users — significantly fewer than the Indian fashion and football campaigns in our portfolio. Yet it generated a 15.05x ROAS compared to 6.33x and 5.77x for those larger-reach campaigns. Reach volume is not a proxy for campaign quality. A smaller, more qualified audience converting at a higher rate consistently outperforms mass reach with lower intent. This is the structural advantage of niche ecommerce on Meta.
5. Remarketing Was the ROAS Multiplier
Three of the top five campaigns by ROAS were conversion and remarketing variants — 'Conversions | Static | New' (42.15x), 'Scale Up | Conversions' (40.72x), and 'NEW | Improve Conversions' (21.74x). These campaigns targeted users who had already demonstrated interest in Neo Tokyo's products. Retargeting warm audiences consistently delivered 3x–5x the ROAS of cold traffic campaigns, confirming that the remarketing funnel was the primary driver of the account's extraordinary average.
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