Sports nutrition retailer · Ecommerce · Google Ads
NutritionFaktory started in 2017 when founder Mike Bires couldn't find the supplement brands he wanted in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, so he opened his own store. Organic demand took the company from 0 to 12 stores in 18 months, and when COVID-19 hit, a pivot to e-commerce turned into a core growth driver. Across thousands of SKUs with very different margin profiles, Google Ads became the business's main growth lever, and the thing standing between record months and losses.
NutritionFaktory burned through four agencies over several years, each following the same pattern: strong for the first six months, then stale. Reporting stayed high-level, spend and revenue, with no real read on profitability once shipping, credit card fees, and labor were factored in, and no agency ever looked at the overall product mix across thousands of SKUs with wildly different margins. In one particularly painful stretch, what looked like a record month turned out to be the business hemorrhaging money on free shipping and heavy energy drinks, with the agency still pushing the same high-spend, low-margin products despite repeated warnings.
The first meeting covered shipping cost structures by product type, margin analysis across categories, inventory considerations, and which products could serve as profitable loss leaders, groundwork no previous agency had done.
Granular visibility into product-level performance and true profitability, replacing the high-level spend-and-revenue reporting NutritionFaktory got from every previous agency.
Where a typical agency makes 5-20 manual changes a month, MAI's system runs 500+, with real-time visibility into what's driving sales and what isn't.
ROAS now regularly clears 4x. NutritionFaktory had its best July ever in 2025, then beat it in August, a full reversal from a run where they were down 10-30% year over year before MAI.
"We've literally tripled our ad spend. Our ROAS is at 4x plus on a regular basis. So not only have we had record revenue months, but we've had record profitability months."
