DTC · Beauty
Retargeting was paid twice for the same customer.
This marketing & margin audit identified $31k in wasted annual spend in a DTC / Ecommerce business — evidenced, senior-reviewed, and delivered in 5 days.
The business
A beauty DTC brand ran retargeting on Meta and Google simultaneously, with each platform managed by a different freelancer who reported independently. Neither ever compared audience definitions with the other, and each showed a healthy return in isolation, so retargeting as a whole was treated as one of the most efficient, unquestioned lines in the media budget.
What triggered the audit
Blended retargeting numbers looked strong, but total retargeting spend had crept up noticeably faster than repeat revenue over several quarters. The obvious suspect was overlap between the two platforms chasing the same people, but with separate reports nobody could see it. The audit was asked to either prove the overlap existed or rule it out for good.
What the audit found
The two retargeting programs were, in effect, fishing in the same pond without knowing it. The same warm, high-intent shoppers sat inside both the Meta and the Google retargeting pools at the same time, so when one of them purchased, both platforms recorded and claimed the conversion — and both freelancers were rewarded and re-funded for it. The brand was therefore paying twice to influence a single customer who, in most cases, was already on their way back to buy. Because each report looked reasonable on its own, the duplication was completely invisible at the account level. Summed across the year, this double-counting represented roughly $31k of spend chasing conversions the brand was effectively buying twice.
What we changed
De-duplicated the two retargeting audiences and set platform-level exclusion windows, so a given shopper is actively retargeted in only one place at a time rather than both at once.
Consolidated reporting into a single source of truth, so any individual conversion can be credited exactly once instead of being claimed in parallel by two separate platforms.
Capped total retargeting frequency across both platforms combined, ending the over-serving of the same buyer from two directions and improving the customer experience.
Reallocated the freed budget into prospecting, where it reaches genuinely new customers instead of repeatedly re-touching people already coming back.
The result
$31k a year removed with zero loss of repeat revenue — a 5× return on the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. What should worry any marketing lead running multi-platform retargeting: both accounts looked efficient in isolation, so the duplication was invisible at the account level and had been billed twice for months. If two platforms retarget the same warm buyers, you are paying twice for customers already coming back — and no single report shows it. It takes a cross-platform audit to see the overlap, exactly the view in-house dashboards are not built to give you.
From kickoff to signed-off findings: 5 days — inside our fixed 5–7 day window.