From "performance doesn’t work" to 6X revenue growth in just 5 months.

About Bon Fiction

Bon Fiction had been burned enough times to believe performance marketing simply did not work for them. Online sales were a trickle, mostly limping through WhatsApp orders, and paid media had been written off as an experiment that failed. The Shizz took the bet they had given up on and built the D2C engine from scratch: the right audience, the right creative, the right funnel, in that order.

The category gave no cover. It is a premium craft product in a market with high churn and fierce competition, where a soft ROAS is not survivable. Five months later, revenue was up over 6x, five new states were performing, and digital had gone from a channel the founders doubted to one that turns a profit.

The challenge

Bon Fiction arrived with broken tracking and attribution nobody could trust, which is the quiet root of most failed paid programmes. If the numbers cannot say which campaign, product or geography produced a sale, every optimisation decision is a coin toss, and the account gets worse the longer it runs. Meta ads were failing with zero clarity on what sold where.

Underneath that, the business was quietly dependent on WhatsApp orders, so revenue moved at the pace of manual conversations rather than a funnel. And the category offered no forgiveness: high churn, fierce competition, and no margin to absorb a soft ROAS. The conclusion that performance "doesn't work" was a fair read of the evidence. The evidence was the problem.

What we corrected

The slate was wiped and the fundamentals came first: who exactly to target, and which SKUs deserved the spotlight. Those two decisions do more for a struggling account than any bidding change, because a premium product sold to the wrong audience will always look like a channel failure. Campaign objectives were rebuilt so the platform optimised toward the outcome the business actually wanted, and a proper full-funnel structure was laid in, separating people meeting the brand for the first time from those already close to buying.

Creative was rebuilt to do justice to the craft behind the brand, which a discount-led ad never does. Then Google Ads was switched on, completely untapped until then, and turned into a serious sales lever.

Our approach

The strategy leaned into what makes Bon Fiction special: premium, narrative-led campaigns built around indulgence, gifting and craft, rather than price. Targeting aimed at tier-1 cities and affluent non-metros, and unlocked five new performing states in the process. Demand for premium gifting outside the metros is routinely underestimated, and it is usually cheaper to reach. Constant creative testing kept fresh angles in market before the existing ones fatigued.

Audience layering separated cold prospecting from warm retargeting, so each was measured and funded on its own terms. Disciplined budgeting across Meta and Google kept the whole thing lean and converting hard, with Google catching intent and Meta building the desire that creates it.

The results

In five months, online revenue grew over 6x, entirely on paid media, with no COD crutch propping up the numbers. Prepaid revenue is real revenue, without the return and cancellation leakage that inflates a COD-heavy top line. ROAS targets were hit consistently rather than once. Google went from unused to a top sales driver, which is the clearest evidence that the earlier failure was structural and not a verdict on the channel.

Reach widened by five new states, giving the brand demand outside its original base. D2C moved from an experiment the team doubted to a profitable channel they are willing to bet on, and the numbers could finally say why.

Attribution debt: the reason paid media gets written off

A brand that says performance marketing does not work is usually describing a measurement failure, not a channel failure. When tracking is broken, sales still happen but nobody can see where they came from. Optimisation then runs on noise, and budget drifts toward whatever the last dashboard happened to credit. The second common cause is structural. One campaign asked to do prospecting, retargeting and retention at once cannot be read, because cheap conversions from warm audiences flatter the expensive ones from cold.

The fix is unexciting and reliable: repair the tracking, split the funnel into stages measured separately, and give each stage its own objective and budget. Only then does the channel report the truth.

What we ran

On Bon Fiction, The Shizz ran Meta Ads, Google Ads and Amazon Ads, with retention marketing plus creative and CRO consultation.