Turn clicks
into customers.
Online, the winners aren't the brands with the best product, they're the ones who show up in Shopping and the feed, turn the click into a sale, and bring the customer back. Profitable growth lives in the math: your margins, your ROAS, and what a customer is worth after the first order. That's what we build to.
Where the next
sale is won.
When someone searches "running shoes" or scrolls their feed, your product sits in a grid against a dozen others. This is where the click, and the sale, is won or lost. Here's where we put you.
Google Shopping & Performance Max
The product grid at the top, around 85% of e-commerce ad clicks. Won with a clean, fully-optimized product feed and margin-aware bidding. Usually the single highest-leverage channel we build.
Search ads
The "Sponsored" text slots for high-intent queries and brand defense, so you capture the buyer already typing your product, or your name, into Google.
Paid social, Meta & TikTok
Where demand is manufactured, not captured. Creative-led campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok put your product in front of people who weren't searching yet.
Email & SMS retention
The most profitable channel you own. Welcome, abandoned-cart, and post-purchase flows turn first orders into repeat revenue, where about 60% of DTC sales come from.
Why e-commerce
is a margin game.
Online, customers discover you in a product grid and a social feed, not a phone book. Google Shopping drives roughly 85% of e-commerce ad clicks, while Meta and TikTok manufacture demand for products people weren't even searching for. Winning means showing up across Shopping, search, and the feed with the product, price, and reviews that earn the click, in a grid where you're one tap away from a dozen competitors.
But e-commerce is a margin game, and the number that decides whether an ad is profitable isn't ROAS in the abstract, it's ROAS against your gross margin. Break-even ROAS equals 1 ÷ your margin: a 50%-margin brand breaks even at 2×, a 30%-margin brand needs about 3.3×. A "good" 4× ROAS is excellent at 60% margin and a slow bleed at 20%. With acquisition costs up 40 to 60% since 2023, there's no room to spend to a vanity benchmark. We set targets to your unit economics, not someone else's average.
Traffic is the easy part; the leak is on-site. Around 70% of carts are abandoned, most stores convert only 2 to 3% of visitors, and a 0.1-second delay can cost roughly 8% of conversions. You can't out-spend a broken funnel. Faster pages, cleaner product pages, fewer checkout fields, and abandoned-cart recovery turn the traffic you're already paying for into revenue, often the highest-ROI work we do all quarter.
And the first order rarely makes money once you subtract acquisition, shipping, and returns, the profit lives in the second and third. About 60% of DTC revenue comes from returning customers, a repeat buyer spends meaningfully more, and a 5% lift in retention can raise profit anywhere from 25 to 95%. Email and SMS flows, subscriptions, and a real reason to come back are what turn a one-time buyer into lifetime value. We build acquisition and retention together, because that's the only way the math actually works.
It depends entirely on your margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ gross margin, so a 50%-margin brand breaks even at 2× and needs more to profit. We set targets to your economics, not a generic number.
All three do different jobs: Shopping and search capture people already looking; Meta and TikTok create demand. Most brands need a mix, weighted to margin and to whatever is producing profitable orders.
Yes, but creative and measurement matter more than ever after the privacy changes. We lean on first-party data, strong creative, and blended ROAS rather than trusting platform-reported numbers.
Returning customers, about 60% of DTC revenue. We build retention (email, SMS, subscriptions) alongside acquisition so the second and third orders carry the profit.
What a customer
is really worth.
A $70 acquisition cost looks expensive until you do the math on a customer who reorders. Drag the sliders to see your customer's lifetime value, the ROAS you need to break even, and what you can actually afford to spend.
Illustrative model, your real numbers depend on category, margin, and retention. The point: once you know a customer's lifetime value and your break-even ROAS, you stop guessing at "good" and start spending to a number you can defend. That's the math we manage to.
Built for your
niche.
We work across e-commerce niches, and no two run the same. A supplement that reorders every month is a different business than a sofa someone buys once. Before we touch a campaign, we map how your niche actually makes money, then build the strategy around it.
Margin profile.
What you can afford to pay for a customer, and where the real profit sits. It sets the ceiling on every bid and the target on every campaign, so the spend stays tied to what an order is actually worth.
Buying cycle.
Impulse or considered, one decision or many. A quick add-to-cart and a weeks-long research-and-compare purchase need different creative, different channels, and a different definition of a good lead.
Retention curve.
Whether revenue compounds through repeat orders and subscriptions or has to be re-won every time. It decides how much goes into acquisition versus the flows that bring customers back.
Competitive pressure.
How crowded the auction and the feed already are. The more contested your niche, the more the work shifts to creative, reviews, and offer, the things that make a listing the one people actually click.
How we scale
your store.
Audit & unit economics.
We start with your margins, AOV, CAC, and retention to find your real break-even ROAS and where the profit actually is, so every dollar is measured against the only number that matters.
Build the channels.
We stand up the right mix: Google Shopping and Performance Max, brand and non-brand search, and paid social on Meta and TikTok, structured by margin, with feed and creative built to win the click.
Fix the funnel.
Traffic is wasted on a leaky site. We tighten product pages, speed, and checkout, and turn on abandoned-cart recovery so the visitors you're already paying for actually convert.
Retain & scale.
The profit is in the reorder. We build email, SMS, and subscription flows that lift lifetime value, then scale spend to your target ROAS as the unit economics prove out.
Common
questions.
How much should an online store budget for ads?
It depends on your margins, average order value, and growth goals, but here's a realistic frame. Each channel needs enough budget to gather conversion data, Google's smart bidding wants roughly 30+ conversions a month to optimize well, and Performance Max needs about $50 to $100 a day to work. In practice that often means at least a few thousand dollars a month to start, scaling with your target order volume. But budget is the wrong starting point. The right one is your break-even ROAS, the revenue-to-spend ratio needed just to cover the cost of goods, which equals 1 ÷ your gross margin. A 50%-margin brand breaks even at 2×; a 30%-margin brand needs about 3.3×. We size spend to the ROAS your margins can support and the lifetime value of the customers it brings in, then scale as the numbers prove out, rather than to a figure pulled from a benchmark.
What's a good ROAS for e-commerce?
There's no universal "good" ROAS, because the only honest answer depends on your gross margin. Break-even ROAS equals 1 ÷ your margin, so a brand with 50% margins breaks even at 2×, while a 25%-margin brand needs 4× just to cover costs. That's why the same 4× ROAS can be very profitable for one store and a slow bleed for another. As rough channel context in 2026, Google Shopping and search tend to run highest because intent is clear, Meta and TikTok lower because they create demand rather than capture it, and email and SMS far higher because the audience is already yours. We set a target ROAS above your break-even, weighted by channel and by customer lifetime value, and manage to that, not to a number you saw in a case study.
Google Shopping, search, or Meta and TikTok, where should I spend?
Most stores need a mix, because each channel does a different job. Google Shopping and Performance Max put your product, price, and reviews in front of people actively searching to buy, Shopping alone drives the large majority of e-commerce ad clicks and is usually the highest-leverage place to start. Search ads capture high-intent queries and defend your brand name from competitors bidding on it. Meta, Instagram, and TikTok do the opposite of search: they manufacture demand, putting your product in front of people who weren't looking for it yet, which is how you grow beyond existing search volume. The right split depends on your category, margins, and creative, a high-AOV considered purchase leans more on search and Shopping, while a visual, impulse-friendly product can scale hard on social. We build the mix around your economics and shift budget toward whatever is producing profitable orders.
Do Meta and TikTok ads still work in 2026 after the privacy changes?
Yes, but they reward different things than they used to. Since the iOS privacy changes and the broader loss of third-party tracking, platform-reported ROAS has become less reliable, and the brands that win are the ones leaning on strong creative, first-party data, and blended measurement rather than trusting in-platform numbers alone. Creative is now the primary lever on social: the ad itself does the targeting work the pixel used to do. We build campaigns around a steady flow of testable creative, use server-side and first-party tracking to recover lost signal, and judge performance on blended ROAS and new-customer cost across the whole business, not on what a single platform claims it drove. Done that way, Meta and TikTok remain two of the most powerful demand-generation channels in e-commerce.
How do you handle conversion tracking and attribution?
Carefully, because broken tracking is where most ad budgets quietly leak. Default attribution, especially Performance Max's 7-day-click, 1-day-view window, tends to over-credit Google and under-credit everything else, which leads brands to misallocate budget. We set up server-side tracking and first-party data to recover the signal lost to privacy changes and ad blockers, deduplicate conversions across platforms, and lean on blended metrics, total revenue against total spend, and new-customer acquisition cost, as the source of truth rather than any single platform's self-reported numbers. The goal is a measurement setup you can actually trust to make budget decisions, so you scale what's genuinely profitable instead of what merely claims the credit.
How do you grow revenue beyond just acquiring new customers?
By treating retention as half the business, because that's where the profit is. The first order on most stores barely breaks even once you account for acquisition, shipping, and returns, the margin lives in the second and third purchase, and roughly 60% of DTC revenue comes from returning customers. We build the retention engine alongside acquisition: email and SMS welcome, abandoned-cart, and post-purchase flows; subscription and replenishment options for consumable products; and a genuine reason for customers to come back, since a repeat buyer spends meaningfully more and even a small lift in retention can move profit dramatically. We also do the on-site work, faster pages, cleaner product pages, fewer checkout fields, that lifts conversion on the traffic you already pay for. On timing, paid channels can produce sales within the first week or two, with real optimization over the first 30 to 60 days; retention and SEO compound over months and steadily lower your blended cost to acquire.