Reduced ad spend by 16% whilst increasing profit by 59%.
Objective
Consolidate data across advertising and marketing platforms to optimise spend.
Obstacle
A lack of standardised tracking and fragmented data meant multiple versions of the truth.
Outcome
Clarity on marketing performance led to a 24% increase on ROAS.
Background
Pawfy is a fast-growing DTC pet wellness brand, selling natural supplements to dog owners across the United States. With rapid growth in paid acquisition through Google and Meta, the team struggled to understand which campaigns drove not just first orders but long-term value. Pawfy brought in 173tech to build a scalable data stack, automate reporting, and empower their team with deeper customer insights.
Challenges
Attribution: The main challenge was marketing attribution. Campaigns were optimised in Google and Meta on platform-reported conversions, which did not reflect actual downstream revenue. Without accurate UTM tracking, channel and campaign performance could not be tied directly to orders in Shopify.
Blindspots: Pawfy recognised that recurring revenue was key to growth and could help to maximise their marketing budget. This was unfortunately a blind spot though. KPIs like churn, retention, MRR, and subscription take rate were not automated or visible in one place. Teams had to rely on ad hoc reports and manual reconciliation, slowing decisions.
Solution
Data Pipeline: 173tech centralised Pawfy’s core data sources; Shopify, Recharge, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and GA4 into BigQuery and built a robust modelling layer in dbt. Fact and dimension tables for orders, subscriptions, and marketing performance created a consistent foundation for all reporting.
Predictive analytics: Our 12-month LTV projection model shifted Pawfy’s focus from short-term ROAS to long-term customer value. It combined each new customer’s first purchase with the observed repeat-purchase behaviour of similar cohorts, projecting how much revenue that customer was likely to generate in their first year. This gave the team a forward-looking view of profitability, allowing them to identify campaigns that attracted higher-value customers and make smarter budget allocation decisions.
The Proof Is In The Numbers...
16%
59.6%
81.5%
Implementation
Clarity: In just 14 weeks, Pawfy moved from fragmented, siloed reporting to a single source of truth for marketing and retention. Teams could finally measure true ROI, adjusting spend towards campaigns with higher downstream value rather than relying on inflated platform metrics. The new dashboards revealed hidden performance drivers e.g. which campaigns brought in subscribers with higher retention rates, and which creatives correlated with repeat purchase behaviour.
Subscription: Our analysis emphasised the importance of creating campaigns specifically targeted at subscribers and bundling of product and this was fed into live campaigns. Comparing January to September, they saw profit from new purchasers increase by 20.92% and in subscribers by a massive 81.45% all whilst reducing ad spend.
Profitability: By focusing their ads on high value customers, Pawfy were able to actually reduce advertising spend by 16% whilst increasing overall profit by 59.68% between January to September. This was all thanks to data that was locked away from the UI, showing how important it is take data outside of your platform!
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