Growth stalls. The reflex is more budget.
Every ecommerce brand hits the wall at some point. Sales flatten, ads get more expensive, and the monthly numbers stop moving the right way.
The reflex is almost always the same: spend more. A bigger ad budget, a new agency, another app, another channel. More activity, in the hope that more activity means more growth.
It rarely works for long, because spend was never the real problem. Most brands are busy doing. Very few stop to optimise.
So let me be clear about what this isn’t. I’m not here to shout about how great my results are, or to put a rocket ship growth emoji on every post. How To Optimise is about problem-solving. That’s what optimisation does: it solves ecommerce problems without throwing more money into Meta or Google.
Optimisation isn’t a junior job
In most businesses, optimisation happens at the bottom. A junior marketer tweaks subject lines. An agency runs a few A/B tests. Someone updates a product page when they get a spare minute.
That’s the mistake. When optimisation is delegated to the most junior person in the room, it stays small: isolated tweaks, no joined-up thinking, and no connection to the numbers that actually run the business.
Real optimisation is a decision about how the whole business works. Which lever matters most this quarter. Where the margin is leaking. What to stop doing altogether. Those are not junior decisions.
Optimisation starts at the top
The brands that win treat optimisation as a mindset, set from the very top. The founder knows the unit economics, asks what the data says before every big call, and expects every part of the business to get a little better every week.
In practice, that looks like this:
- The founder knows the numbers: contribution margin, lifetime value, acquisition cost, payback and repeat rate.
- Every decision starts with the data: “What does it tell us?”, not “What did we do last year?”
- Nothing is left to sit: not the website, the emails, the ads or the search strategy.
- One question, every week: what’s the one small change that would make the biggest difference?
I’ve worked as a practitioner for 28 years, across conversion, SEO, email and ads. Every one of those disciplines needs constant optimisation. You don’t build something and leave it.
Small changes, compounding
Growth only comes from four places: traffic, conversion rate, average order value and retention. Revenue is those four multiplied together, so small gains on each don’t add up. They compound.
| Gain on each of the four levers | Combined revenue impact |
|---|---|
| 1% | +4.1% |
| 5% | +21.6% |
| 10% | +46.4% |
You don’t need one big breakthrough. You need small changes, backed by real customer data, made consistently. And unlike a bigger ad budget, those gains keep paying back long after the work is done.
Don’t take your agency’s word as gospel
Agencies have their place. But their incentives are rarely the same as yours. More spend often means a bigger fee. A new campaign looks like progress; fixing a leaking checkout rarely makes a case study.
If you don’t understand optimisation yourself, you can’t question what you’re told. You can’t tell whether a recommendation is your biggest gain or just the easiest thing to sell.
The good news: it has never been easier to run this in-house, even as the founder. Building lean means making full use of what you already have:
- Shopify does far more than most brands use.
- AI, used well, does in an hour what used to need an agency.
- Your own data, from your store, your customers and your channels, tells you exactly where to look.
- The right tools, set up properly, turn that insight into action.
The only way to win for the long haul
A bigger budget can buy growth for a while. Optimisation is what makes it last. It builds a brand that’s profitable, sustainable and far less dependent on paying for every new customer.
That’s what these How To Optimise articles are for. Each one takes a real optimisation challenge from the brands I work with and shows the working: the lever, the challenge, the process and the tools. So you can understand it, question what you’re told, and run it yourself.
Most brands do. The best ones optimise.
Not sure where to start? Take the free Optimisation Audit to find your biggest marginal gain.
Ian
