When Cyber Monday offers were still showing to shoppers in April, Christy knew nobody was watching the account. We rebuilt her paid social from scratch, cleaned up the Shopify setup behind it, and audited the storefront so the traffic had somewhere good to land.

The Situation

Olive Branch Farmhouse is a small home decor brand built and run by Christy, who hand-designs and produces every piece herself. After decades of selling on Etsy with steady success, she watched the platform shift in ways that took control out of her hands and compressed her sales. Paid ads were the path she chose to rebuild that control on her own storefront.

She hired an agency to help her get there. Six months in, the relationship had broken down. The account was running on autopilot, refusing to test new audiences and making the kind of operational mistakes that erode trust quickly. Cyber Monday discount codes were showing to prospects in April. Winter promotions were running into spring. Christy reached out to us with the account still live and the ads still misfiring.

We shut everything down and rebuilt it from scratch.

Key Outcomes

• Gross profit improved week over week from launch, with the trajectory still climbing instead of flattening
• Order volume scaled with spend while net sales ROAS held steady at 1.86, even as the budget grew from test spend into real acquisition spend
• First-time buyers became the dominant purchase mix, confirming the rebuild was reaching fresh audiences rather than re-mining existing customers
• The account stopped making the brand look unmanaged, with expired promo codes and wrong-season offers pulled from circulation

The Primary Challenge

The previous agency was managing the account in a way that looked active but was actively eroding the brand’s relationship with its audience.

The structural problems were clear. Prospecting campaigns sent traffic to the homepage rather than best-selling products, which meant every cold visitor had to figure out what to buy on their own. The audience strategy never expanded beyond what had been launched on day one, regardless of how performance shifted. There was no retargeting set up to re-reach interested shoppers because the Shopify catalog had not been configured to support it. Creative was generic and stale.

The operational problems were worse. Ads with seasonal promo codes were left running months past their relevance window, so prospects were being served Cyber Monday discounts in April and winter offers as the weather warmed up. Beyond making the brand look careless, those ads created a trust problem. A prospect who clicks a Cyber Monday code in April knows immediately that nobody is watching the account.

For a small operator with a modest budget, both problems were expensive in different ways. The structural issues capped what the budget could produce. The operational issues quietly damaged how the brand showed up in front of every person it reached.

The Goal

Rebuild the account from the ground up so every dollar of Christy’s modest budget had a clear job, then hand her a prioritized audit so she could close the conversion gaps the traffic was hitting.

Our Approach

The fix had to happen in three places at once. The ad account, the website, and the Shopify infrastructure underneath both.

Tear down and rebuild the ad account. We shut down every active campaign and started over. Prospecting was rebuilt around Christy’s best-selling products rather than generic homepage traffic, giving cold audiences a clear point of entry into the catalog. Creative was produced from scratch using her raw product photography and footage, replacing the stale generic ads with something that actually represented her work.

Run a full CRO audit of the website. A modest paid budget makes conversion rate the highest-leverage variable in the system. We ran a deep audit of her store and delivered a prioritized checklist of fixes and improvements. The audit focused on the conversion leaks most likely to hurt a small catalog. Unclear product paths, weak above-the-fold hierarchy, trust signals, mobile friction, and product-page clarity.

Clean up Shopify to enable dynamic retargeting. Her catalog had not been set up in a way that supported dynamic product ads, one of the most efficient retargeting formats available to a small ecommerce brand. We worked through the Shopify cleanup needed to make dynamic ads possible, then built the retargeting structure to use them.

Results

The launch produced a clear week-over-week improvement curve across gross profit, order volume, and new-buyer acquisition.

Gross profit improved each week after launch, and the most recent reporting week was the strongest in the period rather than a short-lived launch spike. Order volume scaled in step with spend, and net sales ROAS held at 1.86 even as the budget grew into a real acquisition spend. The mix of buyers tells the rest of the story. The launch window skewed heavily toward first-time buyers rather than returning customers, which is the right ratio for a brand that needed to expand its reach rather than re-mine the same shoppers.

The operational reset is showing up in the numbers, but it is also showing up in something the dashboard cannot capture. The account is no longer running ads that contradict the season, the calendar, or the brand. Every campaign is doing what it was built to do.

Why This Worked

A small Shopify operator usually does not need a more complicated ad strategy. They need a clean account, clear product paths, and someone paying attention.

Before the rebuild, those pieces were not working together. The rebuild gave her all of them at once. A clean account, products front and center in the prospecting structure, retargeting enabled by the Shopify work, a CRO checklist that gave her a clear path to closing the conversion gaps, and creative that represented her actual work. None of those moves were exotic. The leverage came from doing them all in coordination on a budget where every dollar had to count.

Strategic Takeaway

For small ecommerce operators, the agency relationship often fails in operational ways before it fails in strategic ones. Wrong-season promo codes, untouched audiences, generic creative, and homepage-only traffic are not just strategy problems. They are signs nobody is actively managing the account.

The rebuild proved what the same budget was capable of producing once attention was applied evenly across the ad account, the website, and the infrastructure underneath both. The trajectory has improved week after week, and it is still climbing.