The Brief.

“Agencies always give me excuses why we can’t scale.”

Having worked with agencies for the last few years, this leading Australian wall art brand was a bit stuck. They were craving scale like he’d seen me deliver at TradeMutt. So they came to me specifically.

“Let’s grow.”

AUDIT & Agency handover.

Inheriting Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, and Klaviyo email marketing responsibilities from agencies was a broad job. There would be, of course, an adjustment period. Before getting stuck into the day-to-day work of running their Shopify store, I delivered an audit of the business to identify opportunities to overhaul what needed to change fast.

What I found was:

Ad account structure & creative.

The Facebook ad account was all over the place. It was working okay, with a sustainable and profitable MER, but it was hard to understand what was happening, why particular pieces of creative were where, and what parts of the account were scaleable.

Whole campaigns had $30 a day budgets. Ad sets had CPA targets higher than their daily spend. Ads had no naming conventions or creative strategy. Ultimately, what was working was dynamic product ads (DPAs) that were just feeding the online store’s inventory through from Shopify.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is when they’re scattered ad-hoc throughout the account, advertising to Australia and to New Zealand.

To fix this, I rebuilt our ad account over a few weeks. The goal was to keep performance where it needed to be daily revenue while keeping change moving at a pace that meant we saw where we were headed arriving closer every day.

The changes in question:

1. Created a top of funnel (TOF) prospecting campaign each region (AU, NZ, UK).
2. Created a ‘super MOF’ retargeting campaign for each region.

Both campaigns were more generous than they probably needed to be as far as exclusions and targeting went (TOF not strict enough and MOF too broad) but they work and it’s a work in progress as we layer Advantage+ and bid cap campaigns in over the top, especially in AU and the UK.

Then:

1. Each of these campaigns has separate ad sets (which is the main reason we’ve not used Adv+ across the board) defined by creative type — either DPA or non-DPA.

The non-DPA campaigns have one simple job: find what kind of ad creative delivers performance while building the brand. Whether it’s stills, video, Collections, UGC, or carousels, we’re looking to find ad types that we can emulate with different hooks/iterations/categories to find performance at scale. We know DPAs work. That’s why they get their own ad sets with ad set budget optimisation (ABO) so they get their own budgets with which to perform.

But in the meantime we need to build brand.

So far so good.

Then:

1. Once we knew which kinds of non-DPA creative worked in both TOF and MOF for each region, I duplicated them into an Advantage+ campaign each — at least, in AU and the UK so far. NZ we’re keeping spend more limited.

So far so much better.

I’ll write separately about the Bid Cap campaign but it’s working well in Australia and it’s not spending super aggressively though we’ve had to jump our bid from Meta’s initial projections by 14% to get performance out of it.

Google.

Also quite simple.

We’re Performance Max-heavy and always have been. Again, the inventory is a key seller of course and we’re lighter on brand than I’d like to be at this stage. First things first: installing the WebSavvy PMax Script (use the free one to start) to see your placement breakdowns. Then we make decisions.

Luckily, we skewed pretty heavy on Shopping placements so there weren’t tons of optimisations there. Optimisations here on Google as a result were smaller:

1. Optimise search copy based on the asset breakdown report inside each asset group.
2. Remove brand from general regional PMax campaigns.
3. Adjust target ROAS (tROAS) down to accommodate for new customer prospecting as much as possible.
4. Create new branded PMax campaigns that captured search with modest budgets and aggressive tROASes.

I’ve run some Google scale tests too across largely the Australian PMax and seen good results but, as with all things PMax, these need much more time to learn, settle, and do their generous attribution before you can work out what’s changed — as a general rule of thumb, I like to get every major PMax change 14 days to assess.

Email overhaul.

Looking back at the 12 months before I started working with this brand, there was a clear pattern — the more emails we send, the more money we made. So why did we only email once a week (four times a month…) through January?

One of the first changes I made BAU was to start emailing three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Mondays because it’s easy to break through the start-of-the-week blues with some beautiful interiors inspiration. I picked Saturdays because the business performs well across the board on weekends but I didn’t want to double-tap customers’ inboxes with Sundays and then Mondays. Wednesdays were a happy medium.

I also overhauled our email designs to simplify them. I:

1. Built an email header that’s clickable to different categories.
2. Experimented with consistent thin headers reminding customers about BNPL options and free shipping. These work well during sale periods.
3. Opted for visually-interesting images right there above the fold that were clickable straight to our email destination (whether that was a landing page with a discount autoapplied).
4. Plus made sure to insert product grids with relevant collections into each email.

Our Flows inside Klaviyo were already working well so there was no need to reinvent the wheel (credit to the old agency where credit’s due).

SMS.

Especially during our Afterpay Day sale — more on that below — we began again to roll out SMS marketing through Kudosity (formerly Burst) in Australia. Hard recommend if you haven’t started using this platform already.

It doesn’t sync with Klaviyo unfortunately but list exports are pretty straightforward… though you can end up with a messy list of static audiences if you’re not careful.

UK Expansion.

Because the brand had a lead on a production partner in the UK through whom we could print, frame, and ship artwork locally without having to send all of our inventory straight over from Australia with huge shipping costs, it made a lot of sense for us to test the UK as a market.

My brother once told me that, “What works in Australia works in the UK.”

He was right.

With oddly specific taste — Brits love one print much much more than the rest of the catalogue — it was really easy for us to duplicate our new TOF and ‘Super MOF’ prospecting/retargeting combination of campaigns overseas with DPA creative plus UGC that was performing here in Australia.

The UK quickly overtook New Zealand’s spot as a second focus region and through its second month it continues to handle both Meta and Google ad scale super well.

Afterpay Day.

The wall art customer is price-conscious. Looking around at competitors, cost is a huge point of contention. The whole category is constantly putting forward some sort of offer. Take Drool for example. They’re the most well-known wall art ecommerce pure player and they have an offer of up to six (!) free prints right now and they’re on sale for 50% off.

So taking the opportunity to follow up our BFCM and Boxing Day success with an Afterpay Day sale was a no-brainer.

In truth this was where I learned the most: yes, customers flocked to the website because they were keen on great prices on other expensive products. But, especially relative to Boxing Day, Afterpay Day in ’25 was on a random Thursday. Boxing Day ’24 was a Thursday too but everyone’s hungover and/or tipsy still and/or again, flush with a bit of Christmas cash, in limbo somewhere between December 21st and January 6th, and happy to shop online.

Afterpay Day was a bit different.

We still managed to pull over six figures out of the five-day sale without hugely sacrificing MER though we didn’t manage to bring the whole thing in under spend targets or over (frankly aggressive) revenue targets.

In summary: lots of good, some bad, and a lot that’s informed our upcoming Easter sale. Stay tuned.

Results.

+75% revenue in March ’25 over February ’25.

+68% revenue in March ’25 over March ’24.

Third biggest revenue month of all time, behind November and December ’24.

Three agency retainers consolidated into one consultancy retainer.

Scale achieved — and continuing to grow.