What happened when a six-year marketing system was turned off, then expanded.

The Situation

When American Discount Foods came to us in 2018, the business was running off a single coupon PDF.

That was the entire digital operation. A one-page site that loaded a PDF of the week’s coupons. No website beyond that. No email program. No advertising on any channel. No analytics. No tracking. No content. No way for new customers to find the stores online, no way for past customers to be reactivated, and no infrastructure connecting any marketing activity to actual revenue.

The two-location grocery business had been in decline for the prior two years. The owners knew the digital side of the business needed to exist, and they knew it didn’t. The engagement started as a full ground-up rebuild.

Key Outcomes

Performance Results

• 121,868 leads from Meta Ads at a $1.40 blended CPL across $170k in spend
• 21,234 TikTok conversions at $1.56 cost per conversion
• 546 Google Ads conversions at $4.37 cost per conversion from a search foothold campaign
• 100,000+ email subscribers built from zero

Business Outcomes

• Revenue grew in every full year of the engagement except 2021, the year paid advertising was paused
• +28% revenue growth in the year TikTok was added as the second paid channel, the strongest year on record
• +20% YoY revenue and +15% YoY customer count in Q1 2025 vs. the same period in 2024
• Combined business nearly doubled from the 2018 baseline
• The smaller of the two store locations grew nearly 4x across the engagement

System Built

• Full website rebuild replacing the single coupon PDF
• Email program built from zero to 100K+ subscribers, with lifecycle automation
• Meta, TikTok, and Google Ads built into a multi-channel acquisition system
• Meta account rebuilt after shutdown, with the new structure outperforming the original
• Custom coupon strategy and cross-channel tracking built to connect digital activity to in-store revenue

For ADF, a lead was a customer entering the coupon and email ecosystem, not a generic form fill. Each lead gave the business a recurring way to bring that customer back into the store rather than relying on one-off visits.

The Primary Challenge

ADF was not a “needs better ads” engagement. It was a “needs an entire digital operation” engagement.

There was nothing to optimize because nothing existed. Every channel had to be built from zero. Every system had to be designed around what a small grocery operator could realistically maintain. Every dollar of paid media that would eventually run had to land on infrastructure that had not been built yet.

The harder layer underneath that was attribution. Grocery is a foot-traffic business. Most of the revenue happens in person, at the register, when a customer walks in with a coupon they got somewhere. Without tracking that connected the digital activity to the in-store transaction, every channel built on top would produce activity without evidence.

The Goal

Build the full operation from zero, design it so each channel could be measured against actual store revenue, and produce growth that compounded year over year rather than spiking once.

Our Approach

We built in sequence, not in parallel.

The website came first because every channel downstream needed somewhere to send people. Email came second because paid acquisition without retention is a leaky bucket. Tracking came third because nothing else mattered without the ability to measure it. Paid media came fourth, into infrastructure that was already built to receive it. Coupon strategy was redesigned to function as an attribution mechanism, not just a promotional tool.

Doing it in any other order would have produced channels that ran for a year without anyone being able to prove they worked.

Execution Highlights

Website and Email Built First

The single-page coupon PDF was replaced with a full website designed around the realities of a foot-traffic grocery business. Store locations, weekly ads, product categories, and coupon distribution all became trackable rather than static.

A Mailchimp email program was deployed in parallel with full domain authentication, deliverability monitoring, and a welcome sequence. The list grew from zero to over 100,000 subscribers across the engagement, becoming a primary driver of repeat foot traffic.

Meta Ads Launched, Scaled, Then Rebuilt

Meta became the primary volume channel for lead acquisition. Across two ad accounts, the program produced 121,868 leads at a $1.40 blended CPL.

After the original account was shut down by Meta, we rebuilt the campaign structure from zero in a new account. The rebuild outperformed the original, with the main prospecting campaign producing leads at $1.25 compared with $1.69 in the first account.

That mattered because the rebuild was not just a campaign reset. By then, the website, email program, coupon strategy, and tracking infrastructure had matured, which gave the new campaigns a stronger system to run through.

TikTok Added as the Second Paid Channel

TikTok was added to expand reach into a different audience segment and platform. The program produced 21,234 conversions across $33,219 in spend at a $1.56 cost per conversion. For a regional grocery brand on a platform most regional grocery brands ignore, that is meaningful efficiency.

Google Search as a High-Intent Layer

A small Google Ads program was layered in to capture local search intent. It ran efficiently at $4.37 per conversion across a modest budget, serving as a search foothold rather than a primary acquisition channel.

Coupon Strategy Rebuilt as Attribution Infrastructure

The original coupon PDF was a single document distributed without any way to know who used it, where they came from, or which promotion drove the visit. We redesigned the coupon strategy as a tracked acquisition mechanism, distributed through email, paid media, and the website with attribution baked in.

This is the layer most grocery marketing operations skip. ADF could see exactly which channel drove which redemption and which redemption produced which sales, which is what made every other layer of the system measurable.

The Year the System Got Tested

2020 was the strongest growth year of the engagement to that point. Revenue grew 27% year over year. Customer counts climbed alongside it.

It was also a complicated year to interpret. COVID drove unusual demand into the grocery category, and from the inside it was reasonable to wonder how much of the growth was the marketing system and how much was the broader category lift. The operators at ADF wanted to know the answer to that question, and they made a decision a thoughtful operator might reasonably make: pause paid advertising for the year and see what the business did on its own.

We advised against a full pause and recommended measuring incrementally instead. The client chose the more definitive test and paused paid advertising for 2021.

The result was unambiguous. Revenue declined 6% year over year. It was the only year of decline in the entire engagement.

In 2022, the client reactivated paid advertising and asked us to add TikTok as a second platform, expanding the program rather than just restoring it. The result was the strongest growth year on record: revenue grew 28% year over year. Customer counts grew over 21%.

The client themselves ran the test. The data answered the question.

Results

Across the engagement, every paid channel hit cost-per-acquisition figures that most grocery operators would consider strong. Meta produced 121,868 leads at $1.40 CPL. TikTok produced 21,234 conversions at $1.56. Google produced a smaller but efficient layer at $4.37 per conversion. The email list grew from zero to over 100,000 subscribers.

The business outcomes are what matter most. The combined business nearly doubled from its 2018 baseline. The smaller location grew nearly 4x. Customer counts climbed alongside revenue every year except the year ads were paused.

In Q1 2025, the system continued accelerating. Same-period revenue grew 20% year over year against Q1 2024, and customer counts grew 15%.

Why This Worked

Most agency engagements are channel-deep. A paid social agency optimizes paid social. An email agency optimizes email. A web agency builds a site and hands it off. Each one delivers their slice and exits, optimizing for the channel they own without visibility into how that slice connects to the business underneath it.

ADF needed all of those layers to operate together, with every campaign attributable to the actual revenue it produced. The website gave the email program somewhere to send people. The email program gave the paid media a retention layer. The coupons gave the in-store transactions a path back to their acquisition source. The tracking gave the operators visibility into what was working.

When the client paused paid advertising in 2021, they were testing whether the marketing was actually producing the growth or whether the growth was happening anyway. The pause answered the question. The reactivation in 2022, paired with TikTok expansion, demonstrated what happened when the program ran at full capacity again.

Strategic Takeaway

The hardest claim for any marketing engagement to make is that the work itself drove the business outcome. Most agencies cannot make that claim cleanly. The data is too entangled. Other variables are too active. Causation gets buried under correlation, and the client is left taking the agency’s word for it.

ADF’s engagement made the claim unusually clear because the client themselves ran the test. The work was on, the business grew. The work was paused, the business declined. The work came back expanded, the business grew faster than ever.

That is the difference between marketing that looks active and marketing the business can actually measure.