Grow Past the Performance Plateau
Book a fit call and we start your free growth audit — a comprehensive, founder-level read of your full business: the P&L and contribution economics, the ad accounts down to individual pieces of creative, the website and conversion path, the growth stack and measurement, and retention/LTV. Run personally by exited operators who built a $100M+ brand, not a junior analyst with a checklist. You keep everything we find, whether or not we work together.
Marathon Engine builds brands — and proves the build pays. The audit starts with the core question: where can Marathon Data prove incremental revenue beyond what performance channels are already capturing? Then we look for the same demand showing up in new customer acquisition, brand search, website revenue, retail or marketplace lift, retention cohorts, LTV, and customer quality.
It is also a founder-to-founder conversation about the transition itself: how to invest in brand without losing performance discipline, how to answer board and finance questions, how to coordinate your internal team and agencies, and how to avoid quitting the plan during the soft months when most brands get nervous.
The full business, not just the ad account
Most agency audits are a media-buyer's checklist built to sell you media. This is the audit a founder-operator CMO and a CFO would run together — top-level strategy down to the individual ad — because it's the same lens we use to operate the brands we grow.
The full P&L, modeled
Contribution margin by channel, gross-to-net, CAC and LTV, payback windows — plus a growth model and forecast built the way a CFO and CEO would pressure-test it, so every recommendation ties to contribution dollars.
Down to the individual ad
Account structure, budget allocation against marginal return, audience overlap, and creative diagnosed unit by unit — judged on downstream business impact, not platform-reported ROAS.
Site, offers, and CRO
Landing pages, merchandising, and offer architecture — with the conversion opportunities ranked by revenue impact, drawn from the same CRO program that produced our rolled-out winners.
Where reported ROAS lies
Tracking, attribution gaps, and incrementality blind spots — where reported performance diverges from real contribution, and what it would take to prove incremental revenue with Marathon Data.
Customer quality, not just volume
Cohorts, repeat and subscription economics, and where acquisition spend is creating durable customers — or quietly destroying them.
A plan you could take to your board
Everything synthesized at the altitude a founder or CMO actually operates at: where to push, where to pull back, and the sequenced priorities for the next 90 days.
From first call to partnership
We move forward together, one step at a time — and only when it's a fit on both sides. No pressure, no long pitch decks.
Fit call — your free growth audit starts here
A founder-to-founder conversation to understand what's interesting to you and whether there's mutual fit — and we scope your free growth audit on the spot: what we'll look at, what access it needs, and the questions that matter most for your business.
Your free growth audit, delivered
A comprehensive walk-through of what we found — across the P&L, ad accounts and creative, site, growth stack, and retention — alongside exactly how we'd fix it, with the case studies behind the approach. The findings are yours to keep either way.
Our operating & measurement framework
The fractional CMO-style operating, measurement, and decision-making framework we use when we partner with a brand — how we decide where to push, pull back, and reallocate, how your team or agencies plug in, and how we prove incremental return.
Meet your team
An introduction to the senior operators you'd actually work with — all of whom have built brands themselves. You meet the people, not a sales rep.
Commercial terms
Only once it's clearly a fit on both sides do we talk about how to structure working together.
What Actually Happens Before a Dollar of Spend Moves
Nothing in your account changes on day one. The first weeks are measurement, modeling, and alignment — agreeing on what good is, setting the guardrails, and reading the business — before any budget is reallocated. Every early move is reversible, and you see the first read on what's working within the first month.
Tied to business outcomes, not media volume
We have no incentive to grow your budget for its own sake — every recommendation to push, pull back, or reallocate is judged by the same contribution-dollar math you are.
One call, six levers, one operating system
These aren't six separate services — they're one behavioral funnel we build and objectively measure end to end: brand demand at the top, branded search and site conversion in the middle, retention and LTV at the base — every stage judged by incremental contribution dollars, not platform ROAS. The goal of the call is to find the highest-impact place to act in that funnel, then decide whether Marathon Engine should operate it with you or guide your existing team and agencies through the same decision system.
Where paid media should push, pull back, or reallocate
We look at whether the account is being optimized to contribution margin, incremental revenue, and customer quality or just platform ROAS. Lower reported ROAS can be the right trade when total profit grows.
What to make, why it should work, and how to measure it
Creative volume only matters if the strategy, testing, and business readout are strong enough to improve the next round.
The site work that makes every media dollar more efficient
Revenue per session is a growth metric. A stronger site lets the same media tactics scale faster and more profitably.
Where customer quality, repurchase, and lifecycle strategy change the growth math
We connect first-order acquisition to repeat behavior so media, offers, product priorities, email/SMS, and merchandising are not optimized in separate silos.
The measurement reads that decide what deserves more capital
GA4, Shopify, COGS, cohort behavior, and Marathon Data should turn into operating decisions: what to fund, stop, test, fix, and explain.
How brand, performance, site, retention, and inventory compound together
Monthly and quarterly planning should account for payback, customer quality, demand creation, seasonality, and where the next marginal dollar, next team focus, and next agency ask belong.
The Overlooked Lever That Fights Rising Ad Costs
Web merchandising and CRO are often treated like e-commerce maintenance. For a paid-media-dependent brand, they are one of the cleanest ways to improve the economics of every acquisition channel.
Homepage revenue per visitor, at 97% confidence
For a subscription CPG brand, Marathon Engine ran a hero A/B test on the most-trafficked page end to end. Revenue per visitor increased from $3.98 to $5.08, and the winning experience is live to 100% of traffic.
Who This Is For
$20M to $200M consumer brands
Brands large enough that media, creative, retail, marketplace, retention, and site economics can compound materially.
The channel mix is no longer simple
Meta, Google, TikTok, CTV, retail media, Amazon, wholesale, or store support are already part of the growth plan.
Measurement needs to get better
GA4, Shopify, COGS, retention cohorts, and LTV data need to connect into decisions, not just reports.
You want operators, not advisors
Marathon Engine is a brand + performance operating system powered by Marathon Data, the measurement software platform — the operators who proved brand + performance beats performance alone, and measured it. Founded by the team that built and exited Chubbies, we guide the decisions and can run the work with your team.
The full picture, if you want it first
The fit call is short on purpose. If you'd rather go deep before we talk, here's the high-level version of what we do, how the method works, and the proof behind it — each linked to the full page.
The full profit-growth stack, run as one system
- Fractional CMO judgment, brand media, performance media, creative, CRO, retention and LTV, and forecasting — run as one connected system, not seven disconnected dashboards.
- Every budget, channel, and operating decision made on incremental contribution dollars through one measurement core: Marathon Data.
- Operators who built and sold their own brand, guiding your team and agencies toward business outcomes — not a percentage of your media spend.
Brand + performance, measured to the dollar
- Performance captures the ~5% who are in-market now; brand reaches the 95% still deciding who to trust. You need both, run as one system.
- Brand is funded by reallocating your least-efficient performance spend — not adding budget — so there is no short-term trough to defend to the CFO.
- The Brand Value model predicts a campaign's incremental revenue before you spend, then validates it against a geo-holdout — brand ROI in dollars, not awareness points.
The pattern shows up in the P&L
- A premium apparel brand: +60.4% contribution dollars year over year post-engagement, up from +12.6% before.
- A ~$75M performance-apparel brand: +32% contribution dollars, +39% revenue, +37% new-customer revenue — with no trough.
- An automotive brand: +20.1% contribution-margin dollars year over year, on rising revenue.
We're fortunate that more brands want to work with us than we can take on at once. We run the work ourselves — senior operators, not handed to juniors — so we take on a limited number of new partnerships at a time, and we're building the team with the best people in the industry to protect that experience.
Thank you for your patience. If you think there's a fit, the fastest path is to book a call. The brands that do move to the front of the line.
Get Your Free Growth Audit
Every call kicks off your free growth audit: a founder-level read of the few levers most likely to move you past the performance plateau — the P&L, brand media, measurement, retention and LTV analytics, creative throughput, site revenue, total profit, and the leadership narrative required to keep going when the old playbook pushes back.
Get Your Free Growth Audit →