Cutting Ad Spend Waste on a DTC Skincare Brand

The situation

A direct-to-consumer skincare brand was running paid social at a steady clip. Reported ROAS looked healthy. Margin did not — and nobody could say exactly why.

What we found in the audit

Blended metrics were hiding the real story: a handful of high-spend campaigns were winning on paper by chasing discount-motivated one-time buyers, while the campaigns actually building repeat customers were starved of budget because their surface-level ROAS looked worse.

What we changed

We rebuilt the campaign structure around actual customer lifetime value segments instead of broad lookalike audiences, cut three ad sets that were propping up vanity ROAS at the expense of margin, and fixed a broken checkout step the audit surfaced along the way — unrelated to the original request, but costing real revenue every day it stayed broken.

This is a sample case study included to show the shape of our work — not a verified real-client result. It will be replaced with real, attributable outcomes as they’re delivered.

"This is a sample case study — illustrative of how we approach a DTC traffic engagement, not a real client result. Replace with a verified outcome before publishing."

Illustrative example — Not a real client