How PRESS Healthfoods achieved 40% more sales and 33% lower cost per purchase with Meta AI ads

Company Overview

Founded in 2014, PRESS Healthfoods is a UK-based plant-based nutrition brand offering cold-pressed juices, smoothies, soups, vitamin shots, meals, snacks, and supplements designed to support immunity, energy, weight management, and digestive wellness.

With a substantial and rapidly growing ecommerce presence across the UK, Europe, and the US, PRESS operates alongside physical retail. The brand sought to expand consumer reach, increase product sales, and dramatically improve advertising efficiency without inflating spend.

The Challenge

Running traditional ad campaigns across Meta platforms required significant manual effort in creative production, audience segmentation, and budget allocation. Performance was inconsistent, and the cost per purchase remained higher than the team's target benchmarks.

The core challenge was creating enough high-quality ad variations to test across surfaces — while keeping production costs and time-to-launch low. PRESS needed a smarter way to reach motivated buyers at scale without proportionally increasing their creative or media investment.

BetaXLab Solution

PRESS Healthfoods, working with agency partner Highrise Marketing, tested Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns combined with Advantage+ creative featuring generative AI capabilities.

Standard AI enhancements included automated filters, cropping, text overlay adjustments, and brightness modifications to optimise existing assets across placements. Beyond that, Meta's generative AI powered full image variation generation, new background creation, expanded images for multiple ad surfaces, and automated headline and primary text variations.

Advantage+ placements enabled automated cross-platform delivery, while real-time budget optimisation distributed spend dynamically toward the top-performing ad sets and creatives throughout the campaign lifecycle.

Implementation

An A/B test was conducted from April 26 to May 13, 2024, comparing traditional Meta shopping campaigns against the AI-enhanced Advantage+ approach. Highrise Marketing handled campaign oversight and ongoing monitoring while PRESS Healthfoods managed account strategy and brand direction.

The test isolated the impact of generative AI creative and Advantage+ automation by holding all other variables constant — same products, same audiences, same budget level — giving a clean read on what AI-driven creative and optimisation contributed to campaign performance.

Results

The Advantage+ AI-driven campaign delivered a 40% increase in product sales compared to the traditional campaign running in parallel during the same period.

Cost per purchase dropped by 33%, meaning PRESS Healthfoods acquired significantly more customers at a lower unit economics cost — directly improving marketing ROI without any increase in total ad spend.

The ads created by Meta's generative AI features drove the steep decrease in cost per action, enabling the brand to scale spend confidently knowing each pound spent was generating more return than before.