01
What it is
Overview
End-to-end paid acquisition program for a DTC brand on Google and Meta: tracking infrastructure, creative testing cadence, and scaled spend across the full funnel.
DTC paid acquisition
Multi-platform Google + Meta funnel for a DTC brand. Tracking infrastructure, creative testing, and scaled spend.
Brand
DTC
Year
2023
Role
Lead
Field notes
I — III
Discovery
What we found before writing a line of code — three observations that defined what this project would, and wouldn’t, become.
02
Why it matters
Challenge
Spend was scaling but ROAS had stalled.
Tracking was unreliable post-iOS14, creative testing was ad-hoc, and weekly reporting lagged buying decisions by days, so spend kept flowing into ad sets that had already cooled off.
03
What we built
Solution
Rebuilt server-side tracking to recover signal lost to ATT, ran weekly structured creative tests with explicit hypotheses, and shipped a near-real-time spend dashboard so allocation decisions matched current performance, not week-old data.
Strategy
Where the spend was actually leaking
Audited 90 days of Meta and Google data. ROAS had stalled at 1.8 and finance was nervous. Two things became visible: ATT-driven signal loss meant the platforms were optimising on incomplete attribution, and creative refresh cadence had dropped to once a month while the winner-loser gap had widened. Strategy was rebuilt around those two failure modes: fix the signal first, then ship more shots on goal.