Case Study · Ecommerce · Google + Meta
A US women's fashion brand on Shopify Plus doing six figures a week, running Google and Meta, and a founder who read the numbers every morning. Here is what we built around the ad account, and why the ads got better because of it.
00 / Snapshot
Client
US women's fashion retailer. Online only. About 1,400 SKUs.
Platforms
Google Ads (Performance Max, Shopping, Search) and Meta Ads (catalog + lifestyle).
Stack we built into
Shopify Plus, Google Merchant Center, a managed product feed, Meta Commerce Manager, the client's own margin spreadsheet.
Engagement
Founder-led. Ten months. Weekly reporting on the founder's numbers, not ours.
01 / The Situation
The founder tracked one blended efficiency number every day and a weekly sales target. She was analytical, cash-flow sensitive and right to be. Inventory was the binding constraint, so "spend more" was never the answer. Budget could not scale unless stock did.
02 / What We Built
Tracking and reporting were table stakes and stayed that way. The work was everything on top.
1
A daily job scores every product by variant availability. Single-size products qualify if in stock. Multi-size products need at least half their sizes in stock. The output is a Meta product set and a matching Merchant Center label, refreshed every morning. Roughly a third of the active catalog was excluded on day one.
2
The primary feed moved off the native Shopify push onto a managed feed. GTIN coverage went from 0% to 99%. Out-of-stock items in the feed went to zero. Supplemental feeds layer on performance buckets and, for the AI shopping surfaces, conversational product attributes. Over 80% of the catalog is approved for agentic checkout.
3
Contribution margin computed from real cost of goods, on the founder's own methodology, validated to within a point of her spreadsheet. Sales come from the store, not from analytics. The weekly report uses her table, in her order.
4
Three gates (margin %, efficiency against a seasonal bar, weeks of sellable supply) produce one daily verdict: PUSH, HOLD or PULL. Steps are capped and limited to one move per campaign per week. The verdict sits on her dashboard, so budget conversations start from the same page.
5
Every active lifestyle ad is scored for fatigue against the two pause rules we agreed with the founder. A weekly creative review grades the account on refresh cadence, stale share, lifestyle vs catalog, creator lift and promo alignment. A promo generator reads her calendar and opens a Meta task and a Google task for every promo day, the day before. Result: lifestyle cost per purchase down 27% and ROAS up 36% in the weeks after it went live, and both creative dry spells caught and fixed within two weeks.
6
A daily crawl of the competitors she named, every ad classified by hook type and ranked by how long it stays live, with a gallery on her dashboard. She asked "where can I see it?" and gave her content lead access the same week. It showed that the creative competitors kept funding for six weeks or more led with fit, identity or category ownership, not an offer, while her account was over-weighted to new-drop messaging, its worst angle in August. The September creator brief moved that way. Practical styling hooks went from 6 active ads to 14, and two of them were the best new lifestyle ads of the month at one and a half to two and a half times the lifestyle average.
Inside the Tracker
Eleven competitors, crawled daily from the Meta Ad Library since late June. Every ad is classified by hook type and ranked by how long it stays live, because nobody keeps funding a creative for six weeks that is not paying. The panel below is a live cut of that data, competitor names removed.
03 / What Changed
0% to 99%
GTIN coverage across the Google feed. Products that used to show as "eligible, limited" now match.
Hundreds to 0
Out-of-stock items in the Google feed. Every paid click lands on something that can be bought.
About 1/3
Of the catalog pulled from paid social until sizes restock, automatically, every morning.
1 per week
Maximum budget moves per campaign, gated daily on margin, efficiency and supply instead of argued weekly.
Every Monday
Creative pause-rule breaches listed by ad, so the rules we agreed in an email are the rules the account runs on.
0 lapsed
Promo days without coverage since the generator went live. It schedules next month's calendar task itself.
27% cheaper
Lifestyle cost per purchase after the fatigue monitor went live, with ROAS up 36%. The two weeks it flagged stale creative above 50% were the two worst lifestyle weeks of the year. Both recovered within two weeks of a refresh.
0 to 25
New lifestyle creatives per fortnight, once the review started reporting refresh cadence and stale share every Monday.
6 to 14
Active practical-styling ads after the competitor read showed durable creative leads with fit and identity, not offers. Two of the new ones were the best lifestyle ads of September.
04 / The Week It Paid for Itself
In mid-June, before the monitor existed, more than half of lifestyle spend was running on ads older than six weeks and cost per purchase sat above the eight-week average. Nobody saw it until the month closed. That week is why the fatigue monitor got built, and it was switched on the following Monday.
In early August it happened again. The creative pool ran out: no new ads in 14 days, 58% of spend on stale creative, cost per purchase 20% above the baseline. This time the Monday review flagged it that week. Her creator pipeline delivered the refresh, and within two weeks cost per purchase was 30% below the baseline. By September the account was running 25 new lifestyle ads a fortnight, and stale share has stayed under 20% since.
The first time it took a month to notice. The second time it took until Monday.
05 / What to Take From It
In Her Words
“Colby and his team understand the overall business and the impact that ad and budget decisions have on key metrics. This is very rare to find in an agency since most apply one size fits all approaches to ad strategies and then blame the creative or some other metric when things don’t go as planned. Colby and his team look at business metrics like NCA and “REAL” return on investment. I would highly recommend him and his team to anyone looking for an alternative to the large agencies that don’t give your business the type of personal attention it deserves. Having someone that is an extension of your own team managing your ads is invaluable.”
CEO, US women’s fashion retailer
For businesses spending $10k or more a month on Google or Meta, or ready to. Founder-led, capped roster, Google and Meta plus the systems around them.