Facebook ads for a mushroom grow kit brand

An ecommerce brand doing around half a million a month left a large agency after ROAS fell to break-even. It went to 3x while continuing to scale.

James, Mushroom grow kits. Recorded October 2023.

James oversees ecommerce for a mushroom grow kit brand selling direct to consumers as well as through retailers and distributors. They entered the category about two years ago and became the leading online seller, growing 10 to 20 percent month over month, with roughly half a million a month across Shopify and Amazon.

His experience of large agencies was a pattern rather than a one-off. Plenty of attention at the start, then performance falling away, and fewer touch points the bigger the agency was. By the time we spoke, return on ad spend was hovering around 1x — meaning that after costs, the ads were losing money.

He changed approach and hired specialists directly instead: one person for Meta, one for Google, both hyper-focused rather than spread across a client roster. He interviewed roughly fifteen people before making the decision.

The account was rebuilt and, once through the learning period, ROAS went from about 1x to 3x — a roughly 300 percent increase — while spend continued to grow. That combination is the difficult part. Improving return by shrinking budget is easy; holding it while scaling is what actually grows a business.

At half a million a month the assumption is usually that you need a large agency to handle it. James’s conclusion after living through both is the opposite: what matters is whether the person running the account is genuinely focused on it and whether the numbers are tied to what the business actually needs.

For any ecommerce brand sitting at break-even ROAS with an agency, that is worth sitting with. The account is not usually failing for want of resources. It is failing for want of attention.

In James’s words