+362% online sales. £6.70 back for every £1.
How a Yorkshire farm-to-bag crisp brand turned Meta Ads from a cost line into a sales channel, by finding the one creative lever that moved cost per order and building the whole account around it.
A brilliant story, told generically.
Listers had the rarest thing in food: a true origin story. One farm, three generations, every potato grown on site.
The ads were not telling it. Creative led with product shots and generic offers, the account was split into more ad sets than the budget could feed, and cost per order sat at £8.16 against a £26.81 average order. Ads were selling crisps, but not at a margin that made scaling worth the risk.
The brief: make online a real sales channel, at a return the business could reinvest.
Found the lever, then built around it.
Every campaign from June 2023 to July 2026 pulled apart by creative, audience and cost per order. One pattern stood out: narrative, headline-led creative beat everything else. £5.63 per order against £8.16 for generic.
Fifty-four headline concepts across four buyers: the quality-obsessed foodie, Yorkshire pride, the family lunchbox and the match-day host. Shot in-house on iPhone, on the farm, to a brief that kept the brand’s dry, confident tone and none of the usual “hand-made” clichés.
One consolidated always-on campaign with budget set at campaign level, plus a separate seasonal football campaign. Scaled 30 to 40% every two to three days while cost per order held, with a £5 ceiling as the hard stop.
Alongside the ads, we began moving the store from WooCommerce to Shopify so the checkout could keep up with the traffic.
“£8.16 to £5.63 per order. Same product, same audience. The only thing that changed was the story on the ad.”Cost per order · generic creative vs narrative headline creative, Listers Crisps Meta account
The data picked the creative, not the other way round.
Most accounts test what the team likes. This one tested what the last three years said the customer bought, and put every pound behind it. Cost per order fell by a third, which is the same as a third more budget for free, and the return held at 6.70× while spend went up rather than collapsing the moment it did.
More client resultsStraight answers, before the call.
What did NEO do for Listers Crisps?
Full Meta Ads management: a forensic review of three years of campaign data, a new creative system led by narrative headlines, a consolidated always-on campaign structure, an in-house iPhone content shoot and a scaling method tied to cost per acquisition rather than reach.
What were the results?
Online sales up 362% year on year in 2025 at a 6.70× return on ad spend, with narrative-led creative bringing cost per order down from £8.16 to £5.63.
What kind of brand is Listers?
A Yorkshire farm-to-bag crisp brand. Every potato is grown on a single third-generation family farm at Skelton, near Goole, and sold online direct to consumer alongside retail.
Could this work for my brand?
If you sell a product with a story and a repeat customer, yes. The method is the same: find the creative lever in your own data, build the account around it, and scale only while the cost per order holds. Book a call and we will tell you what is realistic.
Want to know your real creative lever?
Apply for a discovery call and we will review your ad account and unit economics before we speak.
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