Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Three months into working with a B2C Shopify store, I was staring at the worst Facebook Ads performance I'd ever seen. Despite having over 1,000 SKUs and a €50 average order value, our 2.5 ROAS was bleeding money faster than we could generate it.
The client kept asking the same question every marketing guru preaches: "If it doesn't work on paid ads, it's a product problem." But here's the thing - their products weren't the issue. They had quality items, decent pricing, and happy customers when people actually discovered them organically.
The real problem? We were forcing a square peg into a round hole. We had a classic product-channel fit mismatch that most businesses never recognize until they've burned through their marketing budget.
After analyzing the failed campaign data and pivoting to an SEO-first approach, we discovered something that changed how I think about marketing channels forever.
Here's what you'll learn from my expensive mistake:
Why product-channel fit matters more than perfect targeting
The hidden mismatch between complex catalogs and quick-decision platforms
How to audit your product's natural buying behavior
A framework for choosing channels that amplify your product's strengths
When to abandon a channel (even if it's "working")
Industry Reality
What most marketers get wrong about channel selection
Walk into any marketing conference and you'll hear the same tired advice: "Test everything, optimize relentlessly, and scale what works." The industry has convinced us that any product can succeed on any channel with enough optimization.
Here's what every marketing textbook tells you:
Facebook Ads work for all e-commerce - Just target better audiences
Google Ads are universal - People search for everything
Email marketing converts everyone - It's just about the right sequence
Content marketing scales infinitely - Build it and they will come
If a channel fails, optimize harder - Throw more budget and talent at it
This "channel-agnostic" thinking exists because marketing agencies need to sell their specialized services. A Facebook Ads agency will convince you that Facebook works for everything. An SEO agency will claim organic search is the answer to all problems.
But here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart: Every marketing channel has its own physics. Facebook Ads demand instant decisions. SEO rewards patient discovery. LinkedIn favors B2B thought leadership. Each channel creates a specific environment with unique rules.
The real question isn't "How do I make my product work on this channel?" It's "Which channel makes my product's natural strengths into competitive advantages?"
Most businesses discover this backwards - after they've already spent months and thousands of dollars trying to force their product into the wrong environment.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this Shopify client, everything looked promising on paper. They had a mature e-commerce operation with over 1,000 products across multiple categories. Their average order value was solid at €50, and they had been running Facebook Ads with what appeared to be acceptable performance.
The client's challenge was simple: they wanted to scale beyond their current 2.5 ROAS on Facebook. They'd heard success stories about brands hitting 4-5x ROAS and wanted to join that club. My job was to optimize their ad campaigns and unlock that hidden potential.
I dove into their Facebook Ads account expecting to find the usual culprits - poor audience targeting, weak creative, or conversion tracking issues. Instead, I found something more fundamental: their product catalog was fundamentally incompatible with Facebook's rapid-fire decision environment.
Here's what I discovered: their strength was variety. Customers needed time to browse through categories, compare similar products, and discover items they didn't know they wanted. Think of it like the difference between buying a specific book on Amazon versus browsing a well-curated bookstore.
Facebook Ads, however, thrives on quick decisions. Users scroll fast, make snap judgments, and either buy immediately or move on forever. The platform rewards products that can be understood and desired within 3 seconds of seeing them.
My first instinct was to fight this mismatch. I tested dynamic product ads, lookalike audiences, and every optimization trick in the book. We improved the ROAS slightly, but we were still burning cash trying to force customers into buying decisions they weren't ready to make.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking "How do we make Facebook work?" and started asking "Where do our customers naturally want to discover products?"
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After three months of mediocre Facebook performance, I made a controversial recommendation: abandon paid ads entirely and rebuild their growth strategy around SEO and organic discovery.
Here's the exact process I used to transform their channel strategy:
Step 1: Product-Channel Compatibility Audit
I analyzed their top-performing organic sessions versus paid traffic behavior. Organic visitors spent an average of 4.2 minutes on site and viewed 6.8 pages. Paid traffic spent 1.3 minutes and viewed 2.1 pages. The data was screaming that customers needed time and space to properly evaluate their products.
Step 2: Complete Website Architecture Overhaul
Instead of building a site optimized for paid traffic conversions, I restructured everything for discovery and browsing. We implemented mega-menu navigation, improved product filtering, and created category pages designed for exploration rather than quick purchases.
Step 3: SEO-First Content Strategy
We developed content targeting long-tail keywords that matched how people actually researched their product categories. Instead of "buy X now" content, we created "how to choose the right X" and "complete guide to X" content that aligned with natural buying behavior.
Step 4: Progressive Product Education
Rather than pushing immediate purchases, we built educational content that helped customers understand their options. This included detailed product comparison guides, category education, and use-case content that let customers self-educate before buying.
Step 5: Organic Social Proof Systems
We implemented review systems and user-generated content that worked with, not against, the slower decision-making process. Instead of urgency tactics, we focused on building confidence through extensive social proof.
The key insight: we stopped trying to change customer behavior and started building systems that amplified their natural product discovery preferences.
Channel Physics
Each platform has immutable rules that determine what products succeed
Buying Behavior Analysis
Map how customers naturally want to discover and evaluate your specific product
Mismatch Recognition
Learn to spot when you're fighting the channel instead of working with it
Strength Amplification
Choose channels that turn your product's characteristics into competitive advantages
The results spoke for themselves, but not in the way I initially expected. Within four months of pivoting from paid ads to SEO-focused discovery, organic traffic increased by 340%. More importantly, the conversion rate from organic traffic was 2.3x higher than what we'd achieved with paid campaigns.
Revenue from organic channels grew from 15% to 67% of total sales. While total traffic volume was initially lower than our paid campaigns, the quality was dramatically higher. Customers who found products through organic search were more engaged, spent more time on site, and had higher lifetime values.
The most surprising outcome was customer feedback. When we surveyed customers about their buying experience, the overwhelming response was relief at being able to "actually browse and compare" rather than feeling pressured to make quick decisions.
Six months later, the client decided to cautiously re-test Facebook Ads with a completely different approach - using them for awareness and retargeting rather than direct conversion. This hybrid approach achieved a 3.2x ROAS because we were no longer forcing inappropriate behavior.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the top lessons I learned from this expensive channel mismatch:
Channel physics are immutable - You can't change how platforms fundamentally work, only how you work within their constraints
Product complexity requires discovery time - Complex catalogs need browsing environments, not decision-forcing environments
Customer behavior beats optimization - Working with natural buying patterns always outperforms fighting them
Channel failure isn't always optimization failure - Sometimes you're just in the wrong place entirely
Organic discovery scales differently than paid - Lower volume, higher quality, better long-term value
Audit behavior before spending budget - Study how your best customers naturally find and evaluate products
Channel switching requires complete strategy changes - You can't just move campaigns from Facebook to SEO; you need different content, different funnels, different metrics
What I'd do differently: I would audit product-channel fit before launching any campaigns. The signs were there in the data from day one - I just didn't know how to read them yet.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS products, focus on these implementation points:
Audit trial user behavior to understand natural evaluation timelines
Match content strategy to how prospects research your solution category
Choose channels that align with your sales cycle length and complexity
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, implement these channel-fit strategies:
Analyze time-to-purchase patterns across different product categories
Build discovery-focused site architecture for complex catalogs
Use paid channels for awareness, organic channels for conversion