From marketplace-dependent to owned demand
Ninety-one percent of revenue sat on a marketplace that kept raising take rates. We rebuilt the owned funnel — search, paid, site and lifecycle — until direct became the larger channel.
Growth that looked healthy and wasn't.
The brand was growing revenue while losing margin. Ninety-one percent of sales came through a single marketplace that had raised its take rate three times in eighteen months, and there was no reliable way to tell what a customer acquired through owned channels actually cost.
Three problems compounded each other. Marketplace dependency meant pricing and customer relationship were controlled by someone else. Tracking on the owned store was broken badly enough that reported and actual revenue diverged by a wide margin. And paid media was being optimised to platform-reported ROAS, which said the account was profitable when the contribution margin said otherwise.
- 91% of revenue concentrated on one marketplace with rising fees
- No server-side tracking — a material share of conversions unattributed
- Media optimised to ROAS with no visibility of true contribution margin
- Organic search contributing under 6% of sessions
Measurement first, then media, then demand.
We ran the engagement in the same four stages we apply everywhere — but the sequencing mattered more than usual here, because every decision downstream depended on trusting the numbers.
Stage 01 — Diagnose
A full audit of the store, ad accounts and order data. We built a contribution margin model per SKU so we could establish what a profitable acquisition cost actually was — a number the brand had never had in writing.
Stage 02 — Architect
A 90-day roadmap that deliberately held media spend flat while tracking was rebuilt. Scaling an account you cannot measure just increases the size of the mistake.
Stage 03 — Deploy
Server-side tracking through Meta's Conversions API and Google Enhanced Conversions, deduplicated against browser events and reconciled against order data. Only then were accounts restructured across a full funnel and content clusters shipped against category-level search demand.
Stage 04 — Compound
Weekly optimisation against margin rather than ROAS, monthly reviews, and a quarterly re-plan that progressively moved budget toward owned channels as they proved cheaper.
"They rebuilt our tracking before touching a single campaign. That one decision changed how we make every budget call now."
Twelve months on.
Direct became the larger channel within nine months. Blended ROAS reached 4.1x against a margin-based target, blended acquisition cost fell 37%, and the share of revenue running through the marketplace dropped from 91% to 32%.
The more durable change was structural. Because organic search and lifecycle email now carry a meaningful share of revenue, the business is no longer exposed to a single platform's fee decisions — and each additional month of content and retention work lowers blended acquisition cost further rather than holding it flat.
- 4.1x blended ROAS measured against contribution margin, not platform-reported return
- 68% of revenue now direct, up from 9% at the start of the engagement
- 37% reduction in blended CAC across all acquisition channels
- Organic sessions up 4.8x, now the second-largest acquisition channel
Account led and reviewed by Gopal Krishna Jha, Founder & CEO, SearchXMedia. Figures verified against the client's order data for the twelve months to .
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