Real stories from the trenches of performance marketing. How massive Amazon overspend and Email/SMS tracking chaos can spiral into major business problems if not caught early. This is what happens when you're managing clients holistically and discover critical issues across multiple channels.
The Amazon Overspend Crisis
During a routine weekend check, we noticed a huge overspend on Amazon ads. To manage this overspend and detect the point of diminishing returns, we applied new metrics—specifically marginal ROAS—to observe how the Amazon agency handling this area for our client was performing.
This way, we were able to detect that they were hugely overspending during the last few weeks, and we had data-driven proof for that. The overspend wasn't just a weekend anomaly—it had been building for weeks without proper monitoring from their side.
Prime Day Preparation Gone Wrong
We were preparing for Amazon Prime Day initiatives, and during Prime Day itself, we noticed another huge overspend during that period. The client was struggling with business efficiency because we had to adjust our spend accordingly to get back into profitable ROAS territory.
That huge overspend within the Amazon area also affected other channels because we had to readjust our daily budgets in almost all areas—considering top, middle, and bottom of the funnel campaigns across the entire marketing mix.
The Email/SMS Tracking Disaster
Apart from Amazon issues, we conducted long-term traffic insights and discovered massive problems in email and SMS communications. Looking at Google Analytics 4 data based on source/medium, we found huge discrepancies in email and SMS tracking.
One year ago, the client had changed their email provider from Klaviyo to Braze. Starting from that transition, we noticed issues with UTM parameters—inconsistencies across several months where they were using different UTMs for nurturing, different UTMs for campaigns, and there was a huge mess within UTM tracking in the Braze tool.
The 90% Traffic Drop Nobody Noticed
During the last several months, we noticed there was an issue with traffic from nurturing automated sequences. From quite a huge volume of traffic driven by nurturing paths within Braze, we noticed that during the last two months, the traffic was significantly lower—by over 90%.
Nobody else had noticed this. Our assumption was that it might be connected with some tests that were led by another agency. We think there might be some miscommunication between the team handling Braze and the team handling SEO activities.
The SMS vs Email Traffic Anomaly
We also noticed that the volume of SMS communication traffic was almost 10 times higher than traffic from email marketing. This is quite strange because from our experience, it's usually quite the opposite.
Probable causes are that those UTMs might be set in the opposite way, or there might be some issues within email communications and tracking UTMs. This definitely impacts conversion rates and, consequently, the volume of revenue.
The Holistic Approach: Why This Matters
When you handle a client relationship in a very holistic way and you've been in touch with that client for a long time, you notice these deviations and discrepancies. We're not just managing our specific areas—we're also advising when we see issues in other channels and traffic sources.
A lot of issues require taking a very close look when handling clients and advising them if we notice any deviations or discrepancies from standard activities. This proactive approach is what separates strategic growth consulting from simple campaign management.
Challenging Seasonality: The Counter-Trend Strategy
Despite these challenges, we're also very aligned to classical seasonality trends. From our experience in previous e-commerce activities, we've been challenging seasonality during periods when almost all other advertisers pull back from their spend.
We actually had the best results during the "nose season" period of time. At this moment, we're challenging classical seasonality and we're not pulling back our spend—in fact, we're pushing more aggressively. We're observing very closely CPMs and all other metrics within specific areas.
Starting from July, in many of the areas we're handling—for example, Reddit and TikTok—we're observing significantly lower CPMs. This gives us the assumption that we can push even harder and cover the placements that our competition is not covering.
The Results: 45% Year-Over-Year Growth
It's an opportunity to challenge classical seasonality trends and manage to drive better results. For example, at this moment in the D2C affiliate side of the business, we're driving 45% year-over-year growth, which is pretty impressive given all the challenges we've had to navigate.
We're using different tools and trying to advise the client on research possibilities for how to leverage those tools. We're also advising which tools to stop using or to introduce to their business to better assess the data and run incrementality tests to verify how incremental specific channels are.
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Zero Fluff Digital Team
Strategic growth consultants specializing in performance marketing, data analytics, and incrementality testing. We help businesses cut through the noise and focus on what actually drives growth.