01 · The challenge
What was holding growth back.
Modified Tot creates personalized nursery décor, custom wallpaper, furnishings, and keepsake collections. Founder Holly Alfton had built a devoted Etsy following, while the brand’s own website played a supporting role.
Early paid returns swung from 0.8x to 3.2x, campaigns competed with each other, and the seasonal business needed to scale without giving away efficiency.
02 · What changed
One system, built in layers.
Stopped the campaigns competing
Overlapping Performance Max and brand-search campaigns consolidated into one feed-segmented structure.
Put the budget behind the margin
We fixed the feed, stopped advertising what never sold, and put budget behind the margin.
Turned Meta back on beside Google
Meta relaunched alongside Google, with budgets raised in deliberate 10–20% steps only when performance held.
Fixed the store pages and search listings
A mobile product-page testing roadmap, canonical and redirect cleanup, and a full metadata rewrite based on keyword research.
This work, on the shelf: Paid Ads · SEO & AI Search
03 · The results
The receipt.
Return per ad dollar went from 2.2x in 2025 to 4.1x in H1 2026 — an 86% improvement — while monthly spend scaled 8x. Across the 14 months, paid returned 3.8x blended, and six figures in attributed revenue.
By late February 2026, trailing-30-day sales were up 143% year over year. February month-to-date was 20% above January, historically the brand’s biggest month. Organic search clicks grew another 30% between May and July 2026 after the metadata overhaul.
H1 2026 paid performance
- Return per ad dollar
- Ad spend vs. January
| Month | Ad spend vs. January | Return per ad dollar |
|---|---|---|
| January | 1.0× | 4.53x |
| February | 1.2× | 4.47x |
| March | 1.5× | 4.20x |
| April | 1.8× | 4.47x |
| May | 2.1× | 4.28x |
| June | 2.1× | 3.07x |
| H1 2026 | — | 4.09x |
“We’re up 20% from January—and January is usually my biggest month. I don’t usually go up from there. That’s really cool to see.”
— Holly Alfton, Founder, Modified Tot · February 2026
04 · Why it worked
The system behind the number.
We ran paid, the site, and SEO as one system. When a catalog ad dominated spend without converting, we restructured it that week. When margins varied by category, budget followed profit.