Smart Sweets Case Study

The Situation

The goal was to optimize the digital marketing funnel to drive DTC growth on SmartSweets.com and incremental retail lift across MULO channels, both at high ROAS. To get there, the brand needed to understand the distinct roles of Brand versus Purchase campaigns: how media awareness translated into web traffic, and how those digital touchpoints were influencing high-volume physical retail sales.

Strategy

We built a bifurcated media architecture to answer that question definitively, then profit from the answer.

• Brand Awareness Campaigns: Optimized for reach and engagement to introduce the brand to new audiences and establish a site visit as a natural next step in the customer journey.
• Purchase-Focused Campaigns: Targeted consumers ready to convert, maximizing immediate online revenue while testing true incrementality against both DTC and physical retail benchmarks.
• Rigorous Test vs. Control Framework: We measured marginal ROAS and incremental revenue across exposed vs. unexposed markets. The halo effect on brick-and-mortar wasn't a hypothesis. It was a number.

Results

Separating brand and performance budgets produced two things at once: tighter efficiency and a retail multiplier most brands never think to measure.

• Site Traffic at Scale: Brand campaigns drove visitors to SmartSweets.com at just $3.18 per incremental session, proving that awareness spend was doing real conversion work downstream.
• Elite Online ROAS: Purchase campaigns delivered a combined marginal online ROAS of 1,220%, confirming that conversion-focused media was capturing high-value transactions with precision.
• Proven Retail Halo: Digital purchase campaigns drove a measurable 3.8% incremental increase in MULO revenue: $188.5K in additional in-store sales at a marginal ROAS of 1,160%. Consumers who saw the ads bought in stores too.