Growth Mate took over paid media on a brand spending $1,000 to $2,500 a day at a $300 to $500 CPA, and spent five months proving the money was leaking somewhere no ad account could reach. The best-selling product had a cost per conversion above $100 and retailed at $99. And the same 10-piece stainless set sold for $139 on Amazon against $199 on the brand’s own site, with buttons on its own product pages sending the highest-intent traffic there.
Key results.
These are diagnostic findings, not performance gains. The account never cleared its own 2.0x break-even on a blended basis in any window on file.
Challenge
Growth Mate was subcontracted by EMME Solutions, the agency of record. The incumbent partner had been running Google and Meta at a sub-2.0x ROAS and owned the Meta ad account, so nothing transferred. We built a new account, pixel and catalog from zero and took the learning reset at $1,000 to $2,500 a day.
The numbers needed to steer that spend did not exist. Margin information was unavailable, so we were asked to set a target CPA and ROAS without knowing the client’s costs. AOV ran $115 to $140 against a $200 goal. The account was also working against itself: the best seller was the cheapest product, and $24,000 had gone into an Immersion Blender at a cost per conversion above $100 on a $99 item, pulling store AOV to $99 against a roughly $125 baseline.
One thing has to be said plainly. The site was relaunched around the time we arrived, and account ROAS fell from 2.3x before that relaunch to about 1.3x by late October. The 2.3x belongs to the previous agency and the old website. The client experienced the drop on our watch and said so on the call.
Solution
Step #1 Fix what the ad accounts could actually fix.
Performance Max was rebuilt and search restructured with tighter keyword segmentation. Brand search turned out to be a leak. The brand held 30% impression share on its own name at $100/day, with no organic listing of its own, so people searching for it landed on Instagram, Wikipedia and competitors. We took that to $300/day on traffic returning about 400%. On warm search at 12% impression share the constraint was the bid, not the budget, so max CPC went from about $2.00 to $3.50, picked so a target ROAS of 2 held even if every click hit the ceiling. Google blended 266% by 2 December and above 3.0x by 9 December, and the budget followed.
Step #2 Build the measurement that was missing.
Microsoft Clarity went back on and IntelliGems onto duplicated Shopify themes, so page-level tests could return statistical winners. Four product lines were tested, product page against landing page. The Immersion Blender PDP beat its landing page and the new Laser Titanium page beat control. The new Stainless Steel page, which was ours, lost to control. Ceramic was called insufficient data rather than pushed into a verdict.
Step #3 Say the expensive thing.
On 28 October Simon told EMME he would advise the client to cut the ad budget and put the money into website work and content instead, and on 23 December a reduction was formally requested. Through November the client’s priority was spending its allocated budget rather than chasing return, so we scaled Meta to $2,000/day on that instruction while saying on the record that Google was the better channel.
Results
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