The Situation
Pals Health is a supplements brand that came to us after a previous agency left the Meta and Google Ads accounts in a state no one could trust. Spend was going out the door. Nothing about the reporting, the targeting, or the results could be taken at face value.
The initial ask was modest: rebuild the accounts cleanly and set them up in a way the internal team could eventually manage themselves. Midway through the rebuild, the client kept us on for ongoing management, which removed the simplification constraint and let us build the account we would have built if performance had been the scope from day one.
Key Outcomes
- 50% reduction in customer acquisition cost shortly after launch
- 35% increase in customer volume over the same period
- Full Shopify and Klaviyo integration with real-time data alignment
- Campaign structure built around proven product-level demand, not evenly distributed spend
The Primary Challenge
The previous agency had left behind a system that looked functional on the surface, broken underneath. Tracking was misaligned with actual conversions. Audiences were pulling from stale data. Campaigns were structured around assumptions instead of performance. Fixing it was not a tune-up. It was a teardown.
The original engagement added a second constraint. The account had to be simple enough for internal handoff. Every simplification came at the cost of performance headroom. The system would work. It would not run as hard as it could. When the scope shifted to ongoing management, that constraint came off and the rebuild changed shape.
Our Approach
Shopify and Klaviyo, Wired Together
The foundation was data flow. We fully integrated Shopify with Klaviyo so that customer behavior, purchase history, and lead activity stayed synchronized across the stack in real time. That integration is what made everything downstream work. Targeting reflected real customers. Exclusions caught actual buyers. Audiences updated as the business updated. The previous setup had been working from stale snapshots. This one worked from live signal.
Spend Where the Demand Already Was
Most account rebuilds distribute spend evenly across a product catalog and let the platform figure out where the demand lives. That approach wastes the first several weeks of budget rediscovering demand the client had already proven. We pulled Shopify data to identify the highest-margin, highest-converting products and structured campaigns to prioritize them from the first day of spend. The learning phase started already pointed at demand instead of hunting for it.
A Top-of-Funnel Layer for Everything Else
Product-focused campaigns capture existing intent. They do not create it. We added an educational campaign layer designed to engage buyers earlier in the consideration process and capture leads before purchase intent was fully formed. Without this layer, the account could only harvest the demand that already existed. With it, the account started generating the next wave.
Why This Worked
Most rebuilds get judged on whether they look clean. This one was judged on whether the plumbing underneath was actually flowing the right data to the right place. Real-time integration replaced stale snapshots. Product prioritization replaced even distribution. A top-of-funnel layer replaced pure intent harvesting. The account stopped working from assumptions and started working from signal.
A 50% drop in acquisition cost does not come from better creative or smarter bidding. It comes from fixing the plumbing underneath.
Strategic Takeaway
Handoff-ready and performance-optimized are different builds. A system simple enough for an internal team to operate will always leave headroom on the table, and a system built to extract every point of efficiency will always need someone who knows where the wires go. Both are legitimate. The decision worth making upfront is which one you actually need.
