How a Performance Marketing Agency Helped 4 eCommerce Brands Grow Their Revenue By Overcoming Challenges

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Every eCommerce brand faces its own unique challenges when trying to reach the next level. For some, it’s dealing with the ebbs and flows of their different selling seasons or trying to maintain efficiency while scaling. For others, it can be choosing to take their marketing in a new direction or finding clarity that can only come from better data insights. No matter the marketing challenge, a skilled performance marketing agency should always know which levers to pull across all their marketing channels.

These agencies are defined by their ability to continually improve their clients’ programs and produce bigger, better results. At ADM, we’ve helped clients through all manner of marketing challenges while traveling the road to new revenue. In this blog, we’ll lay out 4 common examples of these challenges and demonstrate how we strategized to help clients solve them.

• A YouTube Ads Campaign Helped Tracksmith Offset Seasonality
  • The Challenge: Finding New Athleticwear Sales in Winter
  • The Solution: A Video Reach Test
• Better Marketing Insights Fueled Continual Revenue Growth for johnnie-O
  • The Challenge: Increasing Revenue By 10%
  • The Solution: Isolating Indicators and Deploying Custom Scripts
• A Social Pivot Skyrocketed Maui Nui’s Social Purchases
  • The Challenge: From Subscriptions to Snacks on Paid Social
  • The Solution: A Full-Scale Social Realignment
• Smarter Social Retargeting Unlocked New Revenue at Scale for ASRV
  • The Challenge: Diminishing ROAS When Scaling Social Spend
  • The Solution: A Robust, Segmented Retargeting Strategy
• Choosing the Best Performance Marketing Agency for Your eCommerce Goals
  • Relevant Client Experience
  • Excellence Across Their Service Offerings
  • Agency Philosophy and Culture

A YouTube Ads Campaign Helped Tracksmith Offset Seasonality

Consistent testing is the bedrock of good marketing. Performance marketing agencies are consistently ideating and executing tests for their clients to help them find new opportunities. Tests can be as simple as an A/B comparison of two different SEM ad copies or as ambitious as a full channel expansion. A particularly valuable test that ADM ran recently involved YouTube ads and specific geographic targeting. 

The Challenge: Finding New Athleticwear Sales in Winter

One of our longtime clients, Tracksmith, is a premium running apparel brand. For many athleticwear and outdoor companies, it can be a struggle to maintain sales momentum in the cold winter months. Tracksmith was looking for a way to mitigate seasonal downturns while raising awareness in key markets for their products—and a YouTube test turned out to be the answer.

The Solution: A Video Reach Test

ADM chose to deploy Video Reach campaigns—a Google Ads offering meant to raise awareness through various YouTube advertising—in a small group of major cities across North America and the UK. 

We used some of Tracksmith’s more cinematic video ad creative to relay the premium nature of the brand and targeted the test campaigns at top-performing GA4 audiences, in-market running and health & fitness segments, and custom intent audiences based on running clothing keywords. To ensure we were only reaching new audiences, we excluded all past purchasers and website visitors from these campaigns, which launched in February of 2024.

The result was an impressive boost in revenue from both paid and organic search. The test markets saw a nearly 38% increase in purchases and a 12% increase in revenue from paid search compared to the control markets where these campaigns did not run. Test markets also reflected a 45% increase in revenue per day organically, indicating that the campaigns were raising substantial awareness about the brand. The success of these campaigns led Tracksmith to expand similar initiatives in new markets later in 2024—and resulted in ADM receiving a Google Ads Agency Excellence Award.

Better Marketing Insights Fueled Continual Revenue Growth for johnnie-O

Analytics and data insights are another foundational element of performance marketing. It’s important for eCommerce brands to partner with agencies that have a robust marketing analytics offering that finds insights that other agencies can’t. At ADM, we pride ourselves on having a dedicated theme that delivers those insights—and knows how to build custom solutions for specific business goals. 

This is especially important as digital marketing becomes increasingly dominated by AI. Campaign types like Google’s Performance Max lean on complex algorithms to deliver better-than-ever marketing results, but remove some granular control from advertisers and can present as a black box at times. This can make it a challenge to determine what exactly is leading to success so those insights can be applied to other campaigns and marketing channels. Challenging, but not impossible. 

The Challenge: Increasing Revenue By 10%

johnnie-O is a successful apparel brand and longtime ADM client. When a performance marketing agency is competing against its own strong past results, it’s an enormous challenge to quickly drive substantial jumps in performance without dramatically scaling budget. When johnnie-O wanted to increase its revenue by at least 10% year over year, we knew we’d need all the data we could—and we knew how to get it. 

The Solution: Isolating Indicators and Deploying Custom Scripts

ADM presented johnnie-O with a cross-channel plan that included CRO recommendations, campaign strategies, audience targeting, ad copy updates, new Facebook ads initiatives, and additional budget allocation adjustments. Particularly key to this overall effort was a meticulous strategy for getting more insights out of Performance Max campaigns by carefully duplicating and segmenting them to detect specific audience signals. 

Performance Max campaigns are notable because they’re capable of deploying ads across the entire Google ecosystem. In addition to our robust recommendations and Performance Max segmentation approach, we also deployed a script in Google Ads that helped illuminate which ad formats and channels were driving the best results. This allowed us to identify which asset groups could be broken out into their own campaigns so we could further capitalize on their efficiency. 

The result was a massive Q4 that contributed to substantial year-over-year revenue growth for johnnie-O, including a 14.9% increase in ROAS and a 21% increase in revenue—more than double the client’s original goal. 

A Social Pivot Skyrocketed Maui Nui’s Social Purchases

When business challenges force eCommerce brands to pivot their focus, they need to have a steady hand steering their marketing. A good performance marketing agency doesn’t just excel at helping its clients do what they were already doing a little better: It should be equipped to help its client partners chart new paths when change comes calling. 

The Challenge: From Subscriptions to Snacks on Paid Social

Maui Nui is an impressive company: It sells a unique food product (venison) with an ecological mission (controlling Hawaii’s invasive Axis Deer population). Historically, the brand had focused its paid social advertising on the box subscription side of its business. But when the brand partnered with ADM, it was staring down a double-edged sword: Demand for its butcher boxes was so high that supply couldn’t keep up. To continue its revenue growth, Maui Nui needed to suddenly shift its social media focus from selling subscriptions to selling standalone snack products.

The Solution: A Full-Scale Social Realignment

For ADM’s paid social team, the initiative was to help an established brand enter a whole new realm in its social advertising—and fast. That included new audiences, new creative, and new strategies.

ADM’s first priority was to generate demand on Meta Ads. We started by identifying three key audience segments based on Maui Nui’s snack attributes: Healthy Eaters, Active Lifestyle, and Parents/Caretakers. To tailor messaging, we analyzed customer reviews to find real-world endorsements aligned with each audience’s priorities—ethical sourcing, high protein content, and convenience.

Using these insights, we developed ad copy and creatives for each segment. Prospecting campaigns were built around interest-based targeting, broad audiences, and lookalikes. Retargeting efforts focused on users who had added products to their carts, past purchasers, and social media engagers.

The result was a colossal new opportunity that brought Maui Nui’s great products to brand new audiences. After just 40 days under its new paid social strategy, Maui Nui saw a 49% increase in add-to-cart conversions, a 193% increase in purchases, and a 58% decrease in customer acquisition cost.

Smarter Social Retargeting Unlocked New Revenue at Scale for ASRV

eCommerce performance marketing doesn’t always focus on net new audiences. Re-engagement can turn past visitors and customers into new revenue if your product lines maintain their appeal and your strategies are optimized to reach the right audiences with the right messages. Expert performance marketing agencies know how to find new revenue streams from existing audiences.

The Challenge: Diminishing ROAS When Scaling Social Spend

Diminishing returns are a common issue that brands encounter when scaling their channel investments. ASRV, a premium men’s sportswear/streetwear brand, has seen impressive growth since partnering with ADM—but before they did, they were struggling to maintain ad efficiency when increasing spend. ASRV turned to ADM to find new efficiencies in its paid social marketing so they could scale their revenue alongside their spend.

The Solution: A Robust, Segmented Retargeting Strategy

When looking for new revenue, ADM looked to old site visitors and customers and went to work aligning their account with our preferred retargeting structure—segmenting audiences while consolidating campaigns. ADM restructured audience segmentation to ensure warm and cold audiences were completely distinct. We then refined the retargeting strategy by tailoring ad sets based on specific user behaviors (such as page and post engagement, website visits, and cart abandonment), delivering messaging that aligned with each stage of the customer journey.

With these optimized audiences in place, we consolidated all retargeting efforts into a single, dynamic campaign. This streamlined approach allowed for more precise performance tracking, real-time ad adjustments, and better budget allocation—maximizing impact while driving ASRV toward its ROAS target.

The result was a noticeable improvement in ASRV’s paid social performance and revenue at scale. Despite scaling retargeting spend by over 100%, ROAS didn’t dip—it actually improved modestly. Meanwhile, revenue from Meta Ads retargeting efforts rose by 52% while total purchases increased by a stunning 146%.

Choosing the Best Performance Marketing Agency for Your eCommerce Goals

eCommerce brands have a lot to consider when choosing the agency—too many for this conclusion. But for now, here are three key elements to keep in mind when seeking a quality performance marketing agency.

Relevant Client Experience

There are a lot of aspects to that, as well: On a higher level, there’s the broad category of your business, whether it’s apparel, homegoods, electronics. 

But there are other ways an agency can prove they’re a fit. For instance, an agency that primarily deals with luxury homegoods may be as good of a fit for a luxury apparel brand as an apparel-focused agency that primarily deals in casual clothing. That’s because, while they may not deal in the exact same product categories, they may have excellent insight into shared budget and audience challenges across luxury items. 

Excellence Across Their Service Offerings

For eCommerce businesses to flourish, they need comprehensive digital marketing coverage across all the platforms their audiences use. From the social media platforms they use to the content they love—podcasts, connected TV shows—to…well, everyone uses Google. 

Find out not just what an agency offers, but what it excels at. Plenty of agencies have an offering across countless digital marketing channels, but its team needs to display expertise at each to truly help your brand make the next step. Seek out case studies and referrals—and see to it that you can talk to the channel experts themselves during the vetting process 

Agency Philosophy and Culture

The best performance marketing agencies reject cookie-cutter strategies and generic reporting. To form a true partnership, an agency needs to be willing to mold its approaches around your business’s specific goals and needs. 

Some agencies treat their service offering almost as software—the same templated report across all their clients, pull one of a few general levers whenever they need to adjust your performance, and speak only when scheduled. For true growth, you’re looking for a nimble, innovative, creative marketing partner that’s willing to build custom reports and maintain open, honest communication about your performance.

Ultimately, you choose a performance marketing agency based on your belief that the agency can overcome your challenges and achieve your goals. If you’re currently on the hunt for a new marketing partner, don’t hesitate to reach out to the ADM team below—let’s find out if we’re a fit!