Get in touch
Log in
Executive summary:
This case study explores how NXTRND, a rapidly growing football gear brand, optimized its marketing mix by uncovering the causal impact of its advertising spend. By adopting Funnel’s measurement capabilities, the company successfully bridged the data gap between its Shopify storefront and Amazon sales channel. The results were achieved through rigorous holdout testing, which the finance and marketing teams used to eliminate wasted ad spend, quantify the cross-platform "halo effect" of top-of-funnel campaigns, and reallocate their budget toward highly incremental brand awareness initiatives.
Key results:
- Uncovered the cross-channel impact of top-of-funnel marketing, proving that paid social campaigns drove 20% of overall revenue.
- Eliminated wasted advertising spend without impacting top-line revenue by identifying that some media campaigns were cannibalizing organic sales.
- Maximized overall marketing efficiency, reallocating recovered budget into proven brand awareness initiatives to drive growth.
Company profile:
NXTRND is a premium American football equipment brand, with its primary customer base located in the US and Canada. Having sold gear to over 1 million athletes, NXTRND initially built its success through their own e-commerce and Amazon, and has recently expanded its retail footprint into major sporting goods stores.
The challenge: Connecting siloed e-commerce data
For consumer brands operating across multiple platforms, measuring the true impact of marketing is a notoriously difficult task. If you drive top-of-funnel demand via Meta, it will likely have an effect on both your direct website sales and your Amazon storefront. However, tracking that cross-platform impact and understanding exactly how big it is becomes complex when the data lives in separate silos.
This was the exact challenge facing NXTRND. The company knew intuitively that their Meta ads were driving broader brand awareness, but ad platforms are often cavalier about attribution, making it difficult to justify budget allocations. Félix Rémillard, Head of Finance at NXTRND, recognized the need for objective, data-backed proof. Coming from a finance perspective, he needed to ensure the company's largest expenses were actually driving incremental growth.
"Marketing expense is a really big line item for us in the financials. We wanted to dig deeper into that, see how efficient it was, and see how we could improve," explains Rémillard. "Everything was really siloed back then. Meta was linked to Shopify, Amazon Ads was linked to Amazon sales. We weren't really tracking it as a whole."
Without a centralized view or a reliable way to measure incrementality, it was impossible to know where to confidently place the next marketing dollar.
The solution: Moving from dashboards to measurement
To solve this, NXTRND's first mission was to break down the silos and establish a single source of truth. They began using Funnel's core data aggregation capabilities to pull their disparate marketing and sales data into centralized dashboards. This gave the team, and the company's founders, a clear, high-level view of daily ad spend, overall revenues, and baseline KPIs.
However, simply seeing the data together wasn't enough to prove causality. To validate exactly how their channels were interacting, NXTRND layered on Funnel’s measurement capabilities to run dedicated holdout tests. For a finance leader focused on bottom-line impact, testing provided the exact type of concrete evidence needed to challenge ad platform reporting.
"The first step was just to gather all the data, make great dashboards, and start to understand our economics. Once we had that in place, then we had the data to feed the attribution side of Funnel," notes Rémillard. "Where we saw the most value added for us was really in the testing. It's hard to believe when you only see the numbers on a dashboard, but when we did the holdout test, we noticed that what the model was saying was actually true."
The results: Revealing a 20% halo effect
The insights generated from the holdout tests completely transformed NXTRND’s budgeting process. The first major revelation came from Amazon. The testing proved that because NXTRND was already ranking as a top organic result for their category, their heavy Amazon ad spend was mostly cannibalizing organic sales rather than generating new ones.
"We were able to significantly reduce the ad dollars spent on Amazon without impacting sales. What the model was saying was true. We were eating our organic sales and just burning money," says Rémillard.
Simultaneously, the team ran tests on their Meta campaigns. Previously, they had only measured Meta's efficiency against direct Shopify sales. Funnel's incrementality testing revealed the cross-platform impact: Meta was actually responsible for 20% of the company's total overall sales, driving a massive "halo effect" on Amazon that had previously gone uncredited.
"After the test, we were able to see that Meta wasn't only responsible for sales on our website, but for 20% of overall sales, including our sales on Amazon. That changed our whole way of calculating efficiency," Rémillard explains.
Armed with this validated data, NXTRND could confidently shift their marketing mix. They took the wasted budget recovered from Amazon and reinvested it into Meta, funding new top-of-funnel initiatives, localized campaigns in college states, and NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) athlete sponsorships. By moving away from siloed reporting and embracing incrementality, NXTRND aligned its marketing strategy with true financial impact.
