Case Study: Turned $1,200 Into $14,500 in 30 Days for a Luminus
Most wedding brands I used to talk to have the same problem with Facebook ads. They boost a few posts, maybe spend $100-200 on ads to get a couple of likes, but don't get any real bookings. They eventually considered “Facebook ads don't work for them.” But it’s not true. Let’s explore the way GDT Agency helps the Luminus brand achieve impressive growth and turn $1,200 into $14,500 monthly revenue in 30 days.
What We Start With Luminus
Luminus is a wedding and portrait photographer based in Northern California with more than 2 years of experience. Though they have solid work and strong reviews, their lead flow was completely unpredictable, and they reached out to us in mid-2025 with the strong desire to improve.
Challenges with Luminus Before Working With Us:
The problem with this brand is that they almost entirely rely on referrals and word of mouth. Though there are times they’d book 8 - 10 sessions, there are also months they have nothing.
Sometimes they boosted some posts on Instagram and Facebook for $20-$50, but they never saw real bookings come through. They don’t even know their cost per booking or which marketing strategy can bring back the revenue.
No tracking setup. No pixel. No conversion API and no retargeting audiences. Though the wedding season can make their booking highly elevated, they didn’t have a system to maintain their business during the slower months.
What Luminus Really Wants?
After sharing about the current status, to helps us understand their challenges. They continually talk about the marketing goal they want to achieve when collaborating with us. Kristina - The CEO of Luminus Brand, shared with us about her expectations that:
“In Luminus, we have talented photographers. We really want to have a predictable lead flow every month, more wedding bookings for the 2025 and 2026 season, and a system to help us run without constantly changing marketing.”
What GDT Agency Do To Help Luminus Boost Its Revenue?
After gathering clear information about Luminous, together, we have analyzed and built a complete system instead of just running some ads. Here’s exactly what we do:
1. Fix the Tracking Foundation and Account Structure
The first thing we do is to fix their technical setup and move them to the Facebook Agency ad account.
Switch to Facebook Agency Ad Account
With the Facebook agency ad account access, it’s much easier to run campaign rather than the previous personal ad accounts that Luminus often used. With an agency ad account, Luminus immediately had these benefits:
Unlimited spending limits from day one (no slow warm-up period)
Better account stability and lower risk of sudden restrictions
Access to agency-level support from Meta when issues arise
Shared learnings from our other 3,500+ accounts running simultaneously
Faster approval times for ads and lower rejection rates
For Luminus, having these benefits was a game-changer. They could scale their budget during peak booking weeks without the account getting flagged or hitting a spending limit. Essentially, the agency ad account removed the technical 'bottlenecks' and gave Luminus a stable environment to focus on testing creatives and driving conversions.
Fix Tracking Foundation:
After switching to the agency account, we help the Luminus brand fix the tracking foundation:
Meta Pixel: We installed Meta Pixel correctly on their website to track page views, form submissions, and bookings.
Conversion API (CAPI): We connected their booking system directly to Meta to track conversions even when iOS users block the pixel.
Custom Events: We set up specific tracking for some key actions like inquiry form submission, booking page visit, and phone number click.
Custom Audiences: After custom events, we support them to build audiences from website visitors, video viewers, and engaged users for retargeting.
Lookalike Audiences: The last final setup is created by lookalikes based on their past clients of Luminus (about 80 past customers to work with).
This foundation is very crucial because this setup allowed Meta to find more people just like Luminus’s past clients, ensuring every dollar spent was optimized based on real actions rather than just random clicks.
2. Build a Three-Stage Funnel
Running one type of ad to one type of audience seems to be the most common mistake that any photographer often makes, and of course, it doesn’t work. Therefore, we guided them to build a 3-stage funnel based on the ACC (Awareness-Consideration-Conversion) principle:
At The Top of Funnel - Awareness
We set an objective to get attention and build warm audiences, and use formats such as short video clips, reels showing the moments in the real wedding, and emotional storytelling through images.
At this stage, we're building an audience of people who've watched the videos or engaged with the content, instead of the leads. We focus on the feeling, like joy, emotion, and authentic moments, with the budget allocation being 40% of the total spend.
At The Middle of Funnel - Consideration
In the middle of the funnel, we set an objective to generate qualified leads. Using carousel ads to show portfolio highlights, testimonials from past clients.
We used Facebook's native lead forms here with only 3-4 fields: name, email, phone, and wedding date. With the message "Are you getting married in 2025? Let's capture your story. Limited dates available" and only with 40% of the total spend, we have gotten a lot of lead form submissions.
Bottom of Funnel (BOF) - Conversion
The last funnel is focused on converting warm traffic into bookings. Retargeting audiences almost have the lowest cost per lead and the highest conversion rate because these are people who already know you and just need a reminder or final push.
With the direct response ads to people who've already engaged. We use the last 20% of total spend to target the audience as video viewers, website visitors, and lead form openers who didn't submit by the strong CTA focused on urgency: "Only 3 dates left in June. Book your consultation this week."
3. Targeting Strategy
For me, Facebook's targeting is an incredibly powerful tool, especially when you know what to use. We create 3 targeting strategies for each period:
Primary Cold Audiences: We targeted people who recently engaged (past 3 months), people whose anniversary is within 6 months, and people who have the same interests as Wedding planning, bridal magazines, or wedding dress brands.
Warm Audiences for Retargeting: We targeted people who watched 50%+ of our video ads or visited website in the last 30 days, people who opened but didn't submit lead forms, and profile visitors and engagers.
Lookalike Audiences: At this period, we targeted with 1% and 3% lookalike of the past client list and the lookalike of website visitors.
The life event targeting was especially powerful. When you can reach someone within weeks of getting engaged, you're catching them exactly when they're looking for vendors.
4. Creative Direction That Actually Worked
In 2025, engagement-driven creative gets better delivery and lower costs from Meta's algorithm. Here's what we focused on:
Carousel Ads:
Carousels consistently got us 1.8-2.3% CTR, which is strong for this vertical.
We used 5-7 images to tell a story. It could be about getting ready, the ceremony, portraits, or reception. In which, each card has its own short caption describing the moment. On the final card, we used a clear CTA like "Book your 2025 wedding photography."
Short Video Clips:
You can create short video clips with just 15-30 second highlight reels from real weddings, focus on emotional moments like first look reactions, vows, or first dance, and put them in vertical format for Reels and Stories moments.
You don’t need to edit too much or cinematic slowmo, though it looks beautiful. It doesn’t perform as well as authentic moments. These videos built our retargeting audiences fast and got engagement rates 3-4x higher than static posts.
Single Hero Images:
One powerful moment from a wedding is usually an emotional reaction or a beautiful portrait. You can take the picture of this precise moment and then post it with a simple text overlay: "Capturing your story, naturally." These worked especially well for retargeting.
5. Budget and Ad Structure
Here is the detailed budget and ad structure via the 30-day process:
About Budget:
The total monthly budget we spend is $1200, with $40 daily budget. We distribute for 3 campaigns with the formula 4-4-2:
40% to TOF = $480
40% to MOF = $480
20% to BOF = $240
We started with this distribution and adjusted based on what performed. By week 2, we shifted slightly more budget to retargeting because those leads were converting to bookings at a much higher rate.
Campaign structure:
We have 3 campaigns (TOF, MOF, BOF), with 2-3 ad sets/campaign for testing different audiences. For each ad set, we have 3 to 4 creatives. We monitor the performance regularly, and we killed underperforming creatives after 3-4 days and scaled what worked. This is critical.
The Results: What Happened in 30 Days
It Wasn't Perfect From Day 1
To be transparent, the first week was not easy with us. Our initial "Cold Audience" targeting was bringing in leads at $25 each (way too high for our budget).
We realized the broad "Wedding Planning" interest was too noisy, so we shifted to Life Event targeting (people engaged in the last 3 months) and moved more budget into the retargeting phase. By week two, the lead cost dropped significantly as the algorithm began to learn from our custom audience data.
After 30 Days
Here are the exact numbers Luminus got:
The retargeting numbers are especially important. People who engaged with our content first had a 2.3x higher booking rate than cold leads. This proves the funnel approach works.
Conclusion
This result is not about a lucky month or a viral ad. What happened with Luminus was the result of building the right system with proper data, structure, and creativity that finally made Facebook work the way it is supposed to.
Luminus is now positioned to scale into the 2025 and 2026 wedding seasons with confidence, not hope. Even during slower months, they now have a system that continues to attract, nurture, and convert the right clients instead of hoping referrals will come in.
If you want Facebook ads to become a real growth channel for your photography business, this is exactly how it should be done. For additional help or any questions related to the agency ad account, feel free to contact us. Our expert team is always ready to help.