We run growth for brands doing $5-50MM, and build the measurement underneath it, so you can tell which wins are real. Here's what that turned up at one brand.
A cheaper first-order offer cut CAC and lifted conversion. The dashboard was right about both. What it couldn't show was what those customers did next.
What a customer was worth, by the size of their first order
Customers whose first order cleared $250 were worth two and a half to three times as much, and came back almost twice as often. We raised the offer back up, and LTV:CAC improved.
The TV plan that was on schedule
The brand had a $1MM connected TV plan running through its agency, and spend was pacing to plan.
$300k spent, almost no revenue that wouldn't have happened anyway$700k reallocatedEach square is $100k.
Incrementality testing and a media-mix model showed the first $300k had produced almost nothing. The remaining $700k went to channels that were working.
The traffic that wasn't anyone
Paid sessions were climbing, which usually reads as good news. Out of every 100, 45 were real people.
45 real people55 bots
The bots skewed cost per visit, conversion rates and every paid-versus-organic comparison built on them. From then on, paid was measured on real visitors.
The other half: growing it
Finding what's wrong frees up budget. The same brand then grew on three fronts.
Prospecting moved off the brand's own account to creator content built around the product, and 15-second cuts beat 30. A structured testing program on landing pages, offers and checkout tripled subscription conversion. Rebuilding failed-payment recovery cut that churn nearly in half. Winback conversion rose 20% on top of it.
Where else this hides
These are the usual places at brands this size. Each one runs for months because no single tool is positioned to see it.
Where
What runs unnoticed
Why the dashboard misses it
Acquisition
Paying for branded clicks you'd get free. Creative wearing out.
Platforms take credit for buyers who were already coming.
Conversion
A checkout step losing orders. Abandoned carts never chased.
A site-wide conversion rate hides the one step that breaks.
Retention
Buyers with no second order. Subscription churn from failed cards.
A failed payment looks like a customer choosing to leave.
The numbers
Platform numbers that don't reconcile. Orders nobody can attribute.
Each tool grades its own homework.
Profit
Returns eating margin. Profit by channel never calculated.
Revenue reporting stops before costs.
Start with a free audit
We bring all your sources into one view, run them against a list of common issues based on industry research and our experience, then look for what's specific to your brand.
Free auditRead-only access to your data. You get what the numbers say, including if it's nothing.
You decideWhether the findings are worth acting on, and whether you want help doing it.
$10k a monthThree-month minimum, then month to month. The first quarter fixes the list and builds the measurement. After that come the decisions that recur, and a quarterly lift test.
It's built in your accounts, on standard tools. When we're done, you can keep it, hand it to your team, or move to a vendor, and we'll tell you which makes sense. No agency, no media commission, no referral fees. How the audit and the engagement work.
One person runs the growth and builds the measurement.
Alton Phillips was SVP of Growth at Clique Brands and VP of Ecommerce, Media & Growth at Avaline, and earlier led audience development at NBC News. His PhD from NYU is in quantitative and qualitative research methods. Hiring someone to do both halves of this job usually means $250-400k and a six-month search.