What should the first 90 days with a DTC growth agency look like?

What does a good first 90 days actually deliver?

A good first 90 days delivers a documented learning system: a baseline, a list of tests run with results, and a clear answer to 'what do we scale next quarter'. It does not always deliver a profit jump, and any agency promising one in month one is guessing.

Days 1 to 30: audit, tracking and the first tests

The first month is about finding the binding constraint and making sure the numbers you will judge the agency on are real.

1. Access in your name. The agency gets partner access to your ad account, Shopify, analytics and email platform. You keep ownership.
2. Tracking reconciliation. Compare Meta-reported purchases to Shopify orders for the same period. Check the pixel, the Conversions API setup and UTMs. If platform and Shopify disagree badly, fix that first, because every later decision depends on it.
3. Funnel audit. Break the last 90 days into sessions, conversion rate, AOV, cost per session and new vs returning revenue. This tells you whether the constraint is creative (traffic cost), the page (conversion), the offer (AOV and subscription take rate) or retention.
4. Claims audit (supplements). Review ads and landing pages for disease claims, unsupported efficacy claims and testimonials without typical-results context. The FTC judges the net impression of all ad elements (FTC).
5. Scorecard. Agree on the metrics: we use MER, new-customer CAC, contribution margin after marketing, revenue per session and cost per session, with platform ROAS as a secondary view.
6. First tests live. By the end of week four, the first new concepts should be spending and at least one landing page or offer test should be running.

Days 31 to 60: a steady testing cadence

Month two is where the agency proves it can learn: new concepts should build on what month one's tests showed, and the landing page work should target the specific leak found in the audit.

• Creative volume matched to spend. One creative agency guide estimates 15 to 25 new concepts a month at $50,000 monthly spend (Apex Brands). Whatever the number, it should be in writing.
• Angle-matched landing pages. If cold Meta traffic lands on a generic PDP, test a page that matches the ad's angle and awareness stage. Skaleit maps unaware and problem-aware traffic to advertorials or quizzes and product-aware traffic to the PDP (Skaleit).
• A test log. Each test should record the hypothesis, the audience, the budget, the result and the decision.
• Weekly numbers against the baseline, reported from Shopify, not screenshots from Ads Manager.

Do not judge month two on a single week. New campaigns are volatile while data accumulates. Judge it on whether the tests were well designed and whether the team can explain what they learned.

Days 61 to 90: find repeatable winners and decide what to scale

By the third month the agency should be able to name the angles, pages and offers that win repeatedly, and scale only where the economics hold against your contribution margin.

1. Consolidate winners: move proven concepts into scaling campaigns and retire losers.
2. Roll out winning landing pages or offers to more traffic, and keep a holdout if you can.
3. Check scale against margin: does MER hold as spend rises? Does new-customer CAC stay under your allowable CAC?
4. Write the next-quarter plan: which constraint is next, which tests, what output, what targets.

When should you realistically expect results?

Expect early signals in two to six weeks, a credible read on paid acquisition at around 90 days, and retention and LTV improvements over three to six months or more.

The retention row matters for supplements. Zygo Consulting's benchmarks put the biggest single drop between the first and second renewal, with months one to two producing roughly 30% to 45% of a cohort's total churn (Zygo Consulting). You cannot see whether a retention fix worked until cohorts pass those renewals. Similarly, Eightx puts typical supplement CAC payback at three to six months (Eightx).

Which metrics belong on the 90-day scorecard?

The scorecard should measure business outcomes from Shopify first and platform metrics second, so the agency cannot look good while you lose money.

Set the allowable CAC from your margin before the first test. As a reference point, Eightx cites a 3:1 LTV:CAC minimum for supplement brands and blended CAC around $80 to $130 (Eightx), but your own numbers decide the target.

How we run the first 90 days at Succession

We run the first 90 days as diagnosis first, then tests, then scale decisions, measured against your own Shopify data.

1. Before day one: the audit call. Our first call is an audit, not a pitch. We pull the ad account and funnel apart live, and the senior operators on that call are the people who then run the account.
2. Week one: unit economics. We pull CAC, first-order vs repeat revenue and cohort LTV with ShopifyQL before recommending any spend change. A brand where few customers come back cannot buy its way out with more spend, so this decides whether the quarter is about acquisition or retention.
3. Weeks one and two: the funnel, split properly. US first, since mixed international traffic drags every rate down. Then per landing page and per device: cart rate, cart-to-checkout and checkout completion, each divided by the step before it. We read checkout completion before touching design, and we exclude Meta review-crawler sessions (bursts after ad edits, near 100% bounce, zero add to carts) from new pages.
4. By week three: the scorecard. Sessions, cost per session, conversion rate and revenue per session sit next to ROAS, and we compare volume-matched days, because conversion moves when spend and traffic mix move.
5. Month one: first tests and a compliant setup. New concepts pass our Schwartz gates (mass desire, awareness, sophistication, headline, body) before production. Copy stays at structure/function level, the landing page is reviewed as part of the ad, and we set up a parallel account structure so one disabled account does not take the brand dark.
6. Month two: page tests read on conversion rate. We run page tests in Intelligems as split redirects between full page variants and do not call a result before the sample supports it. See Intelligems vs Shoplift for the traffic this needs.
7. Month three: scale only what the economics carry. Winners move into scaling campaigns when CAC and cohort LTV support it. Our guide on Meta account structure for scaling covers how.

Two different page templates with the same offer often land at almost the same conversion rate. When that happens, the next quarter's lever is the offer, the checkout or the traffic, not more design. We work month to month with no setup fee, so the day-90 review below is a real decision for you.

How should you run the day-90 review?

Run the day-90 review against the baseline and scorecard you agreed in month one, and decide on three options: scale, correct, or exit.

• Scale if the scorecard improved against baseline and the test log shows repeatable winners.
• Correct if learning is real but results are flat: agree a written plan with specific tests and a 30-day checkpoint.
• Exit if you mostly got excuses, no test log, or reporting that never reconciles to Shopify. Month-to-month terms make this a clean decision.

We run engagements this way: a free growth audit before any contract, the first tests live in month one, and month-to-month terms with no setup fee so the day-90 review is a real decision. See the red flags guide for what to watch along the way.

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