Optimising digital growth with Meta Ads

1 Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your background and what led you to create Eflow?

My name is Arnaud Poullin and I have a cross-disciplinary background in digital. I started out in IT, but the highly technical aspect didn't appeal to me. I then moved into digital marketing as a project manager in a web agency in Boulogne-Billancourt, at a time when agencies were still very focused on creating websites. This role gave me a global view of the projects and the different professions involved.

After moving to Switzerland, I held a position as Marketing Manager for a company offering football lessons and camps for children, with a strong focus on acquiring and generating registrations. I then joined a watchmaking start-up as Content & Automation Manager, where I managed content creation and marketing automation in a context of strong lead acquisition. This experience came to an end with Covid and was the trigger for my launch as a freelancer.

This is how E-FLOW. At first I offered fairly broad digital support, before realising that specialisation was essential to create value. Today, Eflow is an agency specialising in Meta Ads campaigns, mainly for e-commerce sites in France and Switzerland. I help my clients design advertising strategies tailored to their identity, objectives and resources, with a clear objective: to optimise their investments and achieve sustainable profitability.

2 Meta Ads is now a key lever for many companies. What do you think are the most common mistakes you see when managing Meta Ads campaigns?

The main mistake I see with Meta Ads is that it's seen as a miracle solution. In reality, Meta Ads is first and foremost an indicator of the quality of a company's marketing. When an offer is clear, well positioned, with a coherent brand identity and a properly functioning site, campaigns become a powerful accelerator. Conversely, if the fundamentals are not in place, advertising quickly highlights weaknesses.

The most common mistake is to invest in advertising when the site is not ready to receive traffic. On Meta, users scroll through the site, which is highly volatile: they often click through without having read it in detail. If the landing page is confused, slow or poorly structured, performance plummets. In the majority of cases, the problem lies not with the ads, but with the site and the offer. Once these elements have been optimised, in particular through conversion work, campaigns become much more effective and very profitable.

Finally, many entrepreneurs launch a product thinking that its quality will be enough to sell. This is rarely the case. Without solid upstream marketing, Meta Ads simply accelerates a model that is not yet ready.

3. What key indicators do you monitor to measure the effectiveness of Meta Ads campaigns and adjust your customers' digital acquisition strategy?

There are a lot of metrics on Meta Ads, and the main risk is to drown in the data. For my part, I organise the management around a logical path that goes from advertising to registration or purchase, following the different stages of the buying tunnel.

I start with the upstream indicators: the outbound click-through rate, which measures the attractiveness of the ads served, with an average of around 1 %, and the cost per click. Next, I pay particular attention to indicators that are often underestimated, such as the page arrival rate. If the site takes too long to load, a significant proportion of clicks are lost before they are even displayed. The aim is to achieve at least 70 % of visitors actually arriving on the site.

For e-commerce sites, I then look at the cost per addition to the basket, which for me is a key indicator of the match between the offer, the advertising and the landing page, with benchmarks generally between 3 and 8 CHF / € for consumer products. Finally, I analyse the conversion rate and return on investment, which remain the ultimate performance indicators.

In addition, depending on the business model, I can monitor secondary indicators such as the cost of subscribing to the newsletter, particularly for offers that require an education phase. I also monitor the ad repetition rate: with cold audiences, too high a rate is often a sign of poor creative performance and a need to adjust the strategy.

4. Email marketing remains a powerful tool in the customer journey. How do you combine Meta Ads and email marketing to maximise conversion and loyalty?

The combination of Meta Ads and email marketing depends very much on the volume and maturity of the brand. The most established structures can use Meta Ads to build loyalty with audiences already in their email base, while for others Meta Ads becomes primarily a lead generation lever.

For my part, I often use traffic campaigns, which are fairly underestimated, to feed email marketing. The cost per click is lower, provided that the ads are sufficiently qualified. The idea is to clearly state who you are, what you are offering and who you are targeting, so as to avoid «accidental» clicks. This traffic is then redirected to dedicated landing pages, designed to capture attention and collect registrations, for example via content or competition mechanisms.

Once contact has been established, email marketing takes over. The challenge is to respect the initial promise, maintain a balanced rhythm of communication and work on long-term commitment. Finally, an important part of my role is to help my customers clarify their message and their marketing angles. There are several ways of telling the same story, and testing these angles helps to identify those that resonate best with the target audience, while remaining true to the brand's identity.

5. Finally, what advice would you give to companies that want to boost their digital growth in 2026 without multiplying their advertising investment ineffectively?

To boost digital growth Without unnecessarily multiplying advertising investment, I recommend above all putting yourself in your target audience's shoes and challenging the user journey from start to finish. Each stage, from advertising to conversion, must be coherent: visuals, message and landing page must correspond to the advertising promise. This continuity is reassuring and facilitates progress towards the desired action, whether it's a purchase or signing up for a newsletter via a lead magnet.

It is also essential to test different marketing and creative approaches: product angle, visual presentation, storytelling... Certain atypical campaigns, known as «ugly ads», can even generate more authenticity and capture attention in a saturated feed.

Finally, with the recent Meta updates, targeting is becoming less precise and creativity is becoming the real driver of performance. Diversifying visuals and videos, and producing content that reflects the brand's identity while remaining testable over short periods, is now the key to maximising impact and conversion.

If you're a company that invests in advertising on Meta and want to optimise your campaigns, I offer an audit to quickly identify your performance levers. Free and without obligation, contact me here on LinkedIn