How Plug cut CPA by 60% by automating Meta ad creative with Photoroom's API

Plug, a social advertising agency, integrated Photoroom's background removal API to automate image editing across client product feeds for Meta ad campaigns. By processing thousands of product images in bulk instead of manually, the agency achieved a 2.1x increase in click-through rates, a 60% reduction in cost per acquisition, and saved over five hours per week on image review alone.

Life before Photoroom

• Manual background removal across large product feeds

• 5+ hours per week spent reviewing edited images

• Campaign timelines squeezed by editing bottlenecks

• Creative concepts limited by production capacity

Life with Photoroom

• 2.1x increase in CTR across Meta ad campaigns

• 60% reduction in cost per acquisition

• 2x reduction in cost per click

• 5+ hours saved per week on image review

• API integrated in less than a day

"Photoroom's API has not only elevated our creative output but has also driven tangible business results. The results it brings to our operations have been a key factor in achieving our clients' goals, which has translated into significant revenue growth and client satisfaction."

— Farrukh Feroze, Partner, Plug

Plug is a social advertising agency built to run high-performance campaigns on Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. Working alongside Adaptv360, their creative partner, the team designs and deploys ad campaigns across large client product catalogs, the kind that refresh daily and span thousands of SKUs.

For an agency whose entire model depends on producing ad creative fast enough to keep pace with platform algorithms, image editing was always going to become a bottleneck. To turn a product catalog into ad creative, every product image needs its background removed and placed on a branded template before it can run as an ad. And with client catalogs updating daily as inventory changes, the editing never stopped.

Thousands of product images, no way to edit them fast enough

Plug's clients run Meta ad campaigns powered by product feeds, catalogs of hundreds or thousands of items that update as inventory changes. Each product image needs a clean shot with the background removed and the image placed on a branded template before going live on the ad platform.

Graphic designers were spending hours cutting out backgrounds by hand, but the catalogs kept updating with new products and the backlog kept growing. Creative ideas that required new visual treatments got shelved because there was not enough editing capacity to execute them.

"We found ourselves at a crossroads where the need for high-quality, creative ad content clashed with the realities of manual image editing. The situation called for a solution to help us unlock our creative potential without sacrificing speed or cost efficiency."

— Farrukh Feroze, Partner, Plug

This was becoming a bigger problem as Meta continued automating targeting and bidding through features like Advantage+. With the algorithm handling more of the audience selection, the creative itself has become the primary lever agencies can control to improve ad performance. Agencies that can test more visual variations, faster, get better results from the algorithm. Plug needed to move from editing images one at a time to processing entire catalogs automatically.

From manual edits to processing entire catalogs automatically

After researching and testing multiple photo editing vendors, Plug’s team found Photoroom's background removal API, which processes thousands of product images in bulk, removing backgrounds with the precision and consistency that manual editing had struggled to deliver at scale.

Using Photoroom's documentation and basic scripts, Plug integrated the Photoroom API into their existing process in under a day. The team’s new workflow includes:

• Plug pulls images from a client's product catalog and sends them through Photoroom's API for bulk background removal.

• The cleaned images are stored in Google Drive, where their links feed into Smartly, the MarTech platform that places each cut-out product onto a branded ad template.

• The finished creative then flows directly into the client's product feeds on Meta.

What used to take a graphic designer hours of manual work now runs automatically, and the team can test visual treatments across an entire catalog that would have been impractical to produce by hand.

"The integration of Photoroom's API into our workflow allowed us to automate and scale our creative production, transforming thousands of images with speed and reliability we hadn't seen before."

— Farrukh Feroze, Partner, Plug

Better ad performance at lower cost

Since integrating Photoroom's API, Plug has seen:

• 2.1x increase in click-through rates (CTR) across Meta ad campaigns, driven by higher-quality, more varied creative.

• 60% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA) for test drive campaigns, meaning significantly more conversions for the same ad spend.

• 2x reduction in cost per click (CPC), cutting the cost of driving traffic by half.

• 5+ hours saved per week on image review time alone, freeing the team to focus on creative strategy rather than production.

• Thousands of dollars in cost savings from the combined effect of lower CPAs, reduced editing time, and the ability to produce creative concepts that previously required outsourcing or manual production.

• New creative concepts now possible, visual treatments that were previously too costly or time-consuming to produce across full product catalogs are now standard.

Photoroom processes millions of images for agencies, marketplaces, and e‑commerce brands, including Smartly, the ad automation platform that has seen an 18% increase in return on ad spend and a 73% increase in click-through rates since integrating Photoroom's API across its client campaigns. Photoroom’s production-grade system enables teams to produce professional ad creatives at scale without manual editing.