How I Turned a DTC Founder’s Growth Marketing Audit Into £250k Per Month in Profit

Today I want to talk about a growth marketing audit that added £250,000 in extra profit per month. For context, I was part of a team. The result was not down to me alone, but I played a key part in it. I’m going to talk about what I did when I joined this client. The aim is to help you understand how to hire a fractional growth marketing consultant.

I’ll cover what I did on my first day, then what I did from day two to day five. Then I’ll cover the growth marketing audit and how we put it into action. Finally, I’ll share the lessons I learned.

On my first day, I focused on one thing: getting access. I sat in a room with the key stakeholders in this DTC ecommerce business. I made sure I got access to everything. Slow access to tools and marketing platforms delays results more than almost anything else. With larger clients, I have waited two or three weeks to get into Google Analytics and other key tools.

So if you’re a DTC founder bringing in an agency or a consultant, set up all their access from day one. In this case, I got access to Google Ads, Meta Ads, Google Analytics and all the external reporting platforms. I also got access to Search Console, and to both Google and Bing Merchant Center.

If you run an ecommerce store, make sure this access does not sit with your agency alone. I’ve seen many DTC founders who don’t have access to most of the tools I’ve listed. So ask yourself this. Do you have access to your Google Ads, your Meta Ads and your Google Analytics? Most importantly, do you have access to your Search Console?

Some founders don’t even know what Search Console is. We focus so much on performance marketing that we ignore it. Google Search Console tells you about the health of your website from Google’s point of view. Plenty of SEO tools will show you how your website performs. None of them gives you the truth the way Search Console does. As a DTC founder, you need to check it often.

If you run an ecommerce store, you also need to look at Google Merchant Center. It takes your product information and shows it to Google. If you run Google Shopping ads, your Merchant Center feed is what powers them. The same goes for Bing Merchant Center. Many businesses keep a close eye on Google Merchant Center, but they pay far less attention to Bing.

The next thing I got access to on day one was the heat map and session replay tool. This is a big part of how I helped add £250,000 per month in profit. I needed to understand how people behaved on the website.

Google Analytics tells you what happened. It shows which page people landed on and which channel sent them there. It doesn’t tell you why. A session replay tool records how customers move through your website. Many DTC stores have one, but they hardly ever look at it.

I used this tool to study visitor behaviour. I wanted to know how people came into the website and who they were. So I grouped the visitors I studied. I looked at first-time buyers. I looked at return buyers. I filtered for people on mobile and for people who came from organic search. It shows you how your customers move through your website.

I spent many days on this from the start. I looked at the problems on the website, what happened when people reached the cart and what they clicked on. This gives you rich detail on why an ecommerce store is not converting.

This tool is like a car. Everyone can drive a car, but some people are Formula One drivers. They are experts. The tool is good, but you still need someone who knows how to use it. The way I use a heat map and session replay tool will differ from how you use it as a founder. It will also differ from how your in-house marketing team uses it.

I also got access to the A/B testing tool on day one. There are many A/B testing platforms. Some are cheap and some are expensive. Some have AI features and some don’t. I spoke with the platform vendors too. When you use an A/B testing tool, talk to the vendor about the new features on the way. That keeps you on top of new ideas in the market. Finally, I got access to the email and SMS platforms.

So by the end of day one, I had access to everything I needed. Nothing was blocking me.

Day two was about understanding the customer. Many DTC founders make the same mistake. They want someone to come in and hand them solutions. Say you hire a consultant or an agency. If they offer solutions without asking about your customers, you have a problem. That person has an answer before they understand the problem.

Every business I’ve worked with is different. Every customer is different. Even on the same website, customers for each product behave differently. That’s why you need to understand your customer.

On my second day, I sat down and read the website end to end. This was one of the things that helped add £250,000 a month in profit. If you’re a DTC founder, ask yourself this. When did anyone in your team last read your website cover to cover? Has anyone ever done it?

As a founder, take the time to read your whole homepage and your product pages. You’ll be amazed at the problems you find. On many websites, I see product pages showing a 2.1 star review. You control your own website. You can remove that review. If someone lands on that page from a paid ad and sees a 2.1 star review, nothing else you say will make them buy. I see this a lot. So read your whole website as often as you can. It’s what makes you money. Why wouldn’t you read it?

Next, I spoke with the internal stakeholders and the back office team to find the best sellers. Many businesses spend heavily on products that bring in few sales. Each product on your website has its own cost per acquisition. The problem is that we group everything together. So from day two to day five, I found the best selling products and the products with very low sales.

Then I met with the fulfilment team and the customer service team. I wanted to learn about the problems with the products and how things had changed over the years. Working with DTC ecommerce brands over many years has taught me something. Not all the information you need is on the website. Not all of it sits with the CEO or the founder. And no one person in the business has it all. So I needed to talk to people across the business to find the hidden pockets of knowledge. I learned a lot from the fulfilment and customer service teams.

Then I studied the competitors. There were different types of competitor. I made sure I understood their prices, their positioning and their products. I looked at how their products appealed to customers. I compared them with my client’s products.

I also used AI to gather a large number of reviews. AI is useful when you want to understand customer behaviour outside your client’s website. But AI only shows you the patterns. It can’t always pick up the emotion. So you need to take the time to read those third-party reviews yourself. We know some people fake reviews. Some competitors even post negative reviews about you on third-party review sites. But there is still a treasure trove of insight into how customers feel.

All this work showed me three things. It showed me which best sellers I needed to convert better. It showed me which weak sellers I needed to understand. And it showed me how customers behaved. I learned what people complained about on review sites and read between the lines. I saw what the competitors did really well and what customers disliked about them. So I didn’t just analyse my client’s reviews. I analysed reviews for every company in the category.

The next step was the audit. An audit is about finding quick wins. First, I used Google Analytics to find every high-traffic landing page on the website. The homepage was one of the busiest pages. The sales page was another. Some product listing pages also had very high traffic. I added every page that received campaign traffic in the last 12 months.

I wanted to understand what the conversion rates of those pages were really telling us. I quickly saw that some pages had conversion rates of up to 15%. The conversion rate also changed with the seasons. When I dug deeper, I found other pages converting at less than 1%. So some pages converted at 12%, 13% or 15%. Others converted at 0.5%.

That showed me that not every page on the website is built equally. Not every page gets the same quality of traffic. Some pages got more paid traffic. Others got more organic traffic. These conversion rates showed me where the money was leaking.

I also analysed the revenue from each landing page over the last three, six and 12 months. That gave me a clear picture of which pages to fix for the biggest revenue gain. I also looked at the average order value for each landing page.

I went further with the conversion analysis. I looked at how people behaved on these pages on each day of the week. I tracked how conversion rates changed across the week. These pages bring traffic into the website. So I then looked at how each page fed into the rest of the funnel.

I see the same pattern everywhere. In ecommerce, the biggest drop-off is almost always the product page. Next comes the cart page, then sometimes the checkout. This helped me narrow down where I could find quick wins and grow profit.

On those pages, I also checked the share of new visitors and returning customers. I checked the average order value for each group. Then I broke down the conversion rate of each high-traffic page by channel. I did this in Google Analytics.

I can use Google Analytics this way not because I’m special. It’s because I used to be a Google Analytics certified expert. That training helps you understand what is working and what isn’t.

The session replays also showed me that the mobile navigation and site structure were weak. I found quick wins there too, and we used them to improve the website as a whole.

The audit also showed problems with the branding. I’ve seen many websites in my career, and I see the same problem every time. Brand marketing and performance marketing don’t work together. Brand marketing has drifted so far from performance marketing that few people value both. So with every client, I see the same thing. Founders often ignore brand because they don’t know how to link it to their ads. That was another finding from the audit.

I also found technical problems on the website. And the website was getting very little visibility in AI search. The audit revealed all of this.

The next step was putting it into action. First, I presented my findings to every team I worked with. That meant the stakeholders, the email team, the web team and the acquisition team. I showed them the problems on the homepage, the product pages, the cart page and the category pages. I showed them the big gap between the brand strategy and the performance marketing. I showed them the problems in Meta Ads, Google Ads and the organic channels. The aim was to explain the problems and the quick wins we could act on straight away. The email journey was also disconnected. The business had no dedicated email landing page.

This was in late 2025. The client is a big brand, and it has made real waves in the last 12 months.

I start the same way with every client. I work on the paid channels first and cut all the waste. This is where we got the most value. I’ve worked with clients where waste was burning 40% to 50% of their profit. That’s why I always start here. Google Ads, Meta Ads and even TikTok audits are where I always get the best results.

I completely rebuilt the Google Ads account. I added negative keywords to cut out the searches that wasted money, and I fixed the targeting. Some people clicking the ads were not ready to buy yet. I filtered every one of them out. More than 50% of the money we saved from paid waste went straight to profit.

Then I put strategies on the website that trigger the emotions that make people buy, and buy again.

I work hands-on with paid search. In agencies and in-house teams alike, paid search often gets handed to junior staff. They don’t always understand the psychology of online sales. They don’t know how to use words to trigger buying emotions. So I rolled up my sleeves and focused on improving the paid channel.

I also worked on the landing pages. The website was going through a redesign. It had new navigation and new categories, and there was a new product launch. We had no time to A/B test these changes, so we built them into the new website as it went live. I worked closely with the web team to get every new landing page right. I also worked closely with the UX team.

This was a global business. I focused on the UK market, so I worked with teams in other regions. I took lessons from the German market and others and used them to improve the UX of the website. That work played a big part in the profit growth.

After that, I A/B tested many high-value landing pages. Some saw conversion uplifts of up to 7%. Together, this work added £250,000 in extra profit per month for this client.

If you’re a DTC founder and you want me to walk you through this process for your business, this isn’t me just saying what I can do. If you’ve listened to this episode, you’ve seen that there is a process and a system. There are parts I didn’t cover today, and I can help you put them in place.

My name is Femi Olajiga. I help DTC ecommerce founders cut customer acquisition cost by 25% while growing profit by 20%. I do it by cutting waste, then scaling the paid ads that make money and bring in high-converting customers.

Book a 30-minute session with me https://calendly.com/femi-olajiga/new-meeting. I’ll walk you through the full growth marketing audit process I used to help this client add £250,000 a month in profit.