01Situation
A North American CPG brand in the adult toy sector with $7–8 million in annual sales faced severe visibility challenges. The CFO and marketing teams had to manually pull performance indicators from Shopify, Amazon, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and QuickBooks into spreadsheets. This weekly process was prone to permission errors, poor visualization, and high latency, preventing rapid adjustments to ad spend. With customer acquisition costs rising and margins tightening under aggregator cuts, the company needed real-time, professional-grade data integration to optimize marketing spend and stabilize unit economics.
02The work
- 01 Multi-source data pipeline automation. Wired a unified data pipeline using Power My Analytics and Data Slayer to pull transaction, inventory, and ad-spend data from five distinct sources directly into Google Sheets, eliminating manual export tasks.
- 02 Real-time unit economic calculation. Re-engineered the reporting sheets to calculate blended Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) automatically every 12 hours.
- 03 Netlify and Claude-integrated dashboard build. Developed and deployed a secure, high-fidelity live dashboard hosted on Netlify, presenting clean, decision-support visualizations for the executive team and board.
- 04 Dynamic marketing budget reallocation. Instituted a daily review process using the dashboard to identify underperforming regions and campaigns, allowing immediate reallocation of spend to high-MER channels.
03Result
Within ninety days of implementation, the real-time visibility allowed the brand to optimize its marketing allocation, resulting in a 125% increase in new customer acquisition. The brand recorded its highest sales month in two years, hitting $550k in peak monthly revenue. The automated pipeline cut administrative reporting time by 15 hours per week, allowing the finance team to shift from historical reconciliation to forward-looking strategic planning. The dashboard remains the core decision artifact for weekly board meetings.
04Lessons
- Spreadsheet sprawl kills marketing agility. Integrating ad-spend and sales data into a unified, high-refresh dashboard is a prerequisite for scaling modern D2C and CPG brands.
- Blended metrics like MER and blended CAC are the real operational truth. Channel-isolated attribution is a vanity exercise that hides margin leaks.
- Cloud-hosted, automated visualization dashboards build trust with investors and boards far more effectively than manual, static reports.