8+ years growing brands on KPIs, now with AI
Grow Your BigCommerce Store's ROAS
Feed-level precision, MER-anchored strategy, and AI-driven creative, built for how BigCommerce actually works.
8+ years of performance marketing · Google, Meta & TikTok · AI-powered execution
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The Challenge
BigCommerce gives you more native power than almost any platform. That's also exactly why generic agencies keep failing you.
You chose BigCommerce for real reasons: zero transaction fees on every supported payment gateway, native B2B features your Shopify competitors have to bolt on with expensive apps, and a multi-storefront architecture that lets you run separate brand or regional experiences from a single Control Panel. You're not on a beginner's platform.
But that power comes with surface area most agencies never map. Your Stencil theme pushes through the CLI: any CRO test or landing page change that a Shopify agency would do in an afternoon requires a dev deploy on your stack. Your BigCommerce checkout fires conversion events GA4 can't read cleanly out of the box, so every smart-bidding decision your campaigns make is working from incomplete signal. And your default product feed exports exactly the fields Google ignores or penalizes, meaning your Shopping campaigns are losing impression share before the auction even starts.
On top of that, you're watching your GMV against plan thresholds. If you're approaching the Pro plan's $400K annual cap, every dollar of growth also brings you closer to a forced upgrade and an extra $150/month for every $200K beyond it. Growth that isn't margin-positive isn't growth; it's a cost.
Meanwhile, your Channel Manager is surfacing feed disapprovals across Google, Meta, and marketplaces. Your Price List assignments need to cascade whenever ERP pricing changes. And you're supplementing BigCommerce Analytics with Triple Whale or Northbeam because you know the native attribution picture isn't complete enough to make confident MER calls.
An agency that doesn't know the difference between Cornerstone and Catalyst, that has never rebuilt a BigCommerce feed with custom labels and GTIN enrichment, and that can't wire Enhanced Conversions through your checkout properly, that agency is going to cost you money while appearing to spend it.
The Opportunity
Your zero-transaction-fee headroom is a real reinvestment lever. Most BigCommerce brands aren't using it.
Here's the math your Shopify competitors can't do: at $300K in annual revenue, you're saving roughly $6,000 a year in transaction fees compared to a Shopify Basic merchant using a third-party processor. That's real ad budget sitting in your pocket that a competitor is handing to Shopify every month. The operators who recognize this and redirect it into paid media with disciplined ROAS targeting are compounding an advantage that only widens over time.
The feed opportunity is equally concrete. Merchants using Feedonomics Surface (now native inside your Channel Manager, free for up to 100,000 SKUs) saw 24% higher YoY GMV growth in November 2025 compared to peers not using it. Most BigCommerce operators are still exporting bare-minimum feeds. Rebuilding yours with supplemental feeds, variant-level attribute mapping, and custom labels that signal high-margin SKUs to Google's algorithm is one of the highest-leverage moves available to you right now, and most of your competitors haven't done it.
If you're running or evaluating Multi-Storefront (separate DTC and B2B storefronts, or distinct regional experiences), you have channel segmentation that most platforms can't touch. The operators who pair MSF architecture with properly segmented paid campaigns and Price List-aware audience targeting are running a fundamentally different playbook than single-storefront competitors.
And if your team is evaluating a move from Stencil to Catalyst (the Next.js headless path with Native Hosting coming to open beta this summer on Cloudflare), that migration is also a conversion rate opportunity. Faster Core Web Vitals scores translate directly into better Quality Scores on Google, lower CPCs, and higher organic rankings. The brands that make that move with performance marketing wired in from the start will pull away from those that migrate for dev reasons alone.
What Most Get Wrong
What BigCommerce brands and their agencies keep getting wrong
Running campaigns on a broken conversion signal
GA4 plus Enhanced Conversions wired into BigCommerce's checkout requires custom implementation: the out-of-the-box event firing is unreliable for smart bidding. Agencies that don't fix this first are training Google's algorithm on garbage data. Your campaigns optimize toward the wrong actions, CPAs inflate, and you have no idea which channel is actually driving revenue versus which one is claiming it.
Exporting the default BigCommerce product feed and calling it done
The default feed exports fields Google ignores or penalizes. No custom labels, no GTIN enrichment, no variant-level attribute mapping, no supplemental feed for high-margin SKUs. The result is lost impression share before the auction starts, higher CPCs on the impressions you do win, and Shopping campaigns that can never reach their ceiling no matter how much budget you push through them.
Letting faceted navigation create crawl bloat without a remediation plan
BigCommerce's faceted navigation, category depth, and URL parameter patterns can generate thousands of low-value URLs that dilute crawl budget and fragment ranking signals. Agencies without Stencil-specific SEO experience (who don't understand how variant canonicals, Page Builder content zones, and Multi-Storefront hreflang interact) will run generic SEO audits that miss the platform-specific issues costing you organic traffic.
Measuring ROAS channel by channel and ignoring MER
A channel showing a strong in-platform ROAS can be cannibalizing organic, inflating numbers through view-through attribution, or masking a contribution margin problem once COGS and fulfillment are factored in. Operators who don't track MER (total revenue divided by total ad spend, blended) are optimizing a part of the picture and missing the whole. This is how brands scale spend and shrink profit simultaneously.
Hiring an agency that doesn't know Stencil or Catalyst
Generic ecommerce agencies get fired from BigCommerce accounts for not understanding Handlebars templates, the Stencil CLI deploy workflow, or the difference between Page Builder limitations and what Catalyst unlocks. Every CRO test that requires a dev deploy and gets delayed by a week is a week of conversion data you didn't collect. Platform fluency isn't a nice-to-have; it's table stakes for execution speed.
Why Now
The window is open right now, before your competitors fix their feeds and their tracking
Most BigCommerce operators are running campaigns on broken conversion signals, exporting default feeds, and measuring success with in-platform ROAS numbers that overstate reality. That's a competitive gap you can step into, but it closes as platforms mature and more operators get disciplined about attribution and feed quality.
The AI inflection makes this more urgent, not less. Google's Shopping algorithm is increasingly weighting feed completeness and conversion signal quality in auction decisions. An operator with a properly enriched feed, clean Enhanced Conversions data, and AI-assisted bid management running on accurate signal is playing a different game than a competitor still on a default export and last-click attribution. The gap between those two operators is widening every week.
Feedonomics Surface is free inside your Channel Manager right now: up to 100,000 SKUs at no cost, with AI-powered product categorization built in. The operators who rebuild their feeds this quarter and wire in proper conversion tracking before the next peak season will own impression share their competitors can't reclaim without months of work.
And if you're on Stencil and your Core Web Vitals scores are dragging your Quality Scores down, Catalyst with Native Hosting on Cloudflare is entering open beta this summer. The brands that move with a performance marketing partner already embedded in the migration will compound the speed gains into lower CPCs and higher organic rankings from day one. The window to be early is measured in months, not years.
The Mechanism
Where AI creates a real edge on BigCommerce, and what it actually does
Real productivity, not AI theater. Here's where it actually moves a number for bigcommerce brands.
Analytics and Attribution
What AI does: AI-assisted MER modeling layered on top of GA4 and your BigCommerce Analytics data, reconciling channel-reported ROAS against blended revenue to surface where spend is actually profitable versus where it's claiming credit it didn't earn.
The result: You stop optimizing toward in-platform ROAS numbers that overstate reality and start making bid and budget decisions anchored to contribution margin: the number that tells you whether growth is actually profitable after COGS, ad spend, and fulfillment.
Why it matters here: BigCommerce's native analytics dashboard gives you orders and AOV. It does not give you a clean MER picture across Google, Meta, TikTok, and your marketplace channels simultaneously. Operators supplementing with Triple Whale or Northbeam know this gap: AI closes it faster and flags attribution anomalies, like a misfiring pixel inflating a channel's numbers, before they compound into a budget misallocation.
Digital Ads and Feed Management
What AI does: AI rebuilds your BigCommerce product feed from the default export into a fully enriched feed with custom labels, GTIN population, variant-level attribute mapping, and supplemental feed layers, then monitors Channel Manager for disapprovals and bid signal quality continuously.
The result: Shopping campaigns recover lost impression share, CPCs drop on the impressions you win, and smart bidding algorithms have clean enough signal to actually optimize, instead of training on incomplete checkout event data.
Why it matters here: Feed quality is the silent ROAS killer on BigCommerce. The default export costs you impression share before the auction starts. An AI-rebuilt feed with proper enrichment is one of the highest-leverage moves available on this platform, and Feedonomics Surface, now native in your Channel Manager, makes the connection to Google and Meta in seconds. The AI layer monitors it at a cadence no human team can match.
Conversion Optimization
What AI does: AI-driven CRO that works within your Stencil or Catalyst architecture, identifying conversion leaks in your Open Checkout flow, flagging Core Web Vitals issues that are dragging Quality Scores, and running structured tests without requiring a full Stencil CLI deploy for every hypothesis.
The result: Higher conversion rates on the traffic you're already paying for, better Quality Scores that lower CPCs across your Google campaigns, and a faster feedback loop on what's working, measured in days, not the weeks a traditional dev-gated test cycle produces.
Why it matters here: On BigCommerce, every CRO test that touches the Stencil theme requires a dev deploy. That friction kills testing velocity. AI-assisted CRO identifies the highest-impact changes first, so the deploys you do make are the ones worth making, and on Catalyst, the Next.js architecture opens the door to faster iteration that Stencil simply can't match.
Creative
What AI does: AI-assisted creative production and testing across Google Performance Max, Meta, and TikTok, generating and rotating more ad angles per week against your product catalog, with creative performance fed back into feed-level decisions about which SKUs to push and which to suppress.
The result: Five to ten creative angles tested per week instead of one or two per month, finding the message that drives purchases faster, and retiring underperformers before they drag blended ROAS down.
Why it matters here: BigCommerce's Channel Manager connects your catalog to Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and Microsoft through Feedonomics Surface. The operators who pair clean feeds with high-velocity creative testing are running a compounding advantage: better creative improves CTR, which improves Quality Score, which lowers CPC, which improves ROAS. That flywheel only spins if you're testing fast enough to find the winners.
SEO
What AI does: BigCommerce-specific technical SEO that addresses faceted navigation crawl bloat, variant canonical logic, Stencil versus Catalyst architecture trade-offs, Multi-Storefront hreflang configuration, Page Builder content zone indexability, and native schema implementation, with AI monitoring crawl health and ranking signals continuously.
The result: Crawl budget focused on your highest-value category and product pages, not thousands of parameter-generated URLs. Organic rankings that compound over time instead of fragmenting across duplicate and near-duplicate pages.
Why it matters here: Generic SEO audits miss BigCommerce-specific issues entirely. Faceted navigation URL sprawl, the way Stencil handles variant canonicals, and the hreflang complexity of Multi-Storefront are platform-native problems that require platform-native fixes. Better organic rankings also mean lower dependence on paid traffic for the same revenue, which improves MER across the board.
Ready to see what this looks like for your bigcommerce brands business?
No obligation. A senior strategist will show you exactly where the wins are.
The Strategy
How performance marketing should actually be run on BigCommerce
The strategy starts with the foundation, not the campaigns. Before a single dollar of ad spend is optimized, your GA4 Enhanced Conversions implementation needs to be custom-wired through BigCommerce's checkout so smart bidding is training on real purchase signal, not the incomplete event firing that ships out of the box. Your product feed gets rebuilt from the default export into a fully enriched feed with custom labels, GTIN population, and variant-level attributes that earn impression share instead of losing it before the auction starts.
Once the foundation is clean, the channel strategy follows your catalog and your customer structure. For most BigCommerce brands, Google Shopping and Performance Max run on your enriched feed with bid strategies anchored to target ROAS, but target ROAS at the SKU group level, not blended across your entire catalog, so high-margin products get the spend they deserve and low-margin SKUs don't drag your contribution margin down while inflating your order count.
Meta runs creative-led prospecting against lookalike audiences built from your BigCommerce customer data, with retargeting segmented by product category and purchase intent signal, not a single blanket retargeting audience. TikTok is evaluated by category: if your products have a visual or demonstration angle, TikTok's catalog ads connected through Feedonomics Surface are a legitimate incremental ROAS channel, not an experiment.
If you're running Multi-Storefront (separate DTC and B2B storefronts, or distinct regional experiences), campaigns are segmented to match. B2B audiences with Price List assignments get different creative, different landing experiences, and different bid logic than DTC prospecting. Running them together in one campaign is how you get blended numbers that look acceptable and hide a B2B channel that's either over- or under-funded.
SEO runs in parallel, not in sequence. BigCommerce-specific technical remediation (faceted navigation, canonical structure, Core Web Vitals on Stencil or Catalyst) compounds over 6 to 12 months and reduces your cost-per-acquisition on paid by increasing the organic baseline. The brands that treat SEO as a cost center separate from paid are leaving MER improvement on the table.
MER is the governing metric across all of this, not channel-reported ROAS in isolation. Every budget decision is validated against blended revenue divided by total ad spend, with contribution margin as the profitability check. If a channel is showing strong in-platform ROAS but MER isn't moving, something is wrong with attribution, and we find it before it compounds.
The one number that governs this
Governing KPI: Blended ROAS and MER (total revenue ÷ total ad spend across all channels), validated against contribution margin, not channel-reported ROAS in isolation.
How We Help
Here's exactly what we'd do for your BigCommerce store
We start where the money is leaking, not where it's easiest to show activity. For a BigCommerce brand, that means fixing your conversion tracking and feed before touching campaign structure, because every optimization built on broken signal compounds the error. Here's how an engagement actually runs.
Conversion Tracking and Attribution Audit
Custom GA4 Enhanced Conversions implementation through BigCommerce's checkout, reconciled against your MER picture in Triple Whale or Northbeam, so every bid decision is working from accurate purchase signal, not the incomplete event firing that ships out of the box.
Product Feed Rebuild and Channel Manager Setup
Full rebuild of your BigCommerce feed from the default export (custom labels, GTIN enrichment, variant-level attribute mapping, supplemental feeds for high-margin SKUs) connected through Feedonomics Surface to Google, Meta, and TikTok. Feed health monitored continuously for disapprovals and quality degradation.
Paid Media Management: Google, Meta, TikTok
Shopping and Performance Max campaigns anchored to target ROAS at the SKU group level, not blended catalog-wide. Meta creative-led prospecting with customer-data lookalikes and intent-segmented retargeting. TikTok catalog ads evaluated and activated where your product category supports it. B2B and DTC campaigns segmented to match your Multi-Storefront structure if applicable.
BigCommerce-Specific SEO
Technical SEO remediation built for the platform: faceted navigation crawl bloat, variant canonical logic, Stencil or Catalyst architecture trade-offs, Multi-Storefront hreflang, Page Builder content zone indexability, and native schema, with AI monitoring crawl health and ranking signals on an ongoing basis.
Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO scoped to your Stencil or Catalyst architecture: Open Checkout flow analysis, Core Web Vitals remediation that improves Quality Scores and lowers CPCs, and structured testing prioritized by impact so dev deploys are reserved for the changes worth making.
AI-Assisted Creative Production and Testing
High-velocity creative testing across Google, Meta, and TikTok, more angles per week, faster identification of winners, and creative performance data fed back into feed-level decisions about which SKUs to push in Shopping campaigns.
MER Reporting and Contribution Margin Tracking
Blended MER dashboard reconciling channel-reported ROAS against total revenue and contribution margin, so budget decisions are grounded in profitability, not in-platform numbers that overstate reality. Reviewed with you on a cadence that matches how fast your business moves.
Who's Behind This
Who we are, and what makes us different
Sagum is a performance marketing agency founded in January 2017 in St. George, Utah. We've spent 8+ years growing real brands and being judged on KPIs, not vanity metrics.
We deliberately limit how many clients we take so each one gets senior attention. We treat your numbers like our own, we never run generic playbooks, and your strategy is built for your business, because shouldn't your brand's marketing be custom to your brand?
Sagum.ai is our AI arm: the same proven operators now build AI into the work wherever it creates real edge, not as theater, but as leverage applied with discipline.
- 8+ years growing brands on performance KPIs, not vanity metrics
- Limited client roster, with senior attention on every account
- An extension of your team; your success is tied to ours
- Custom strategy per brand, never a generic playbook
- AI built in where it moves a number; judgment over hype
“Sagum is a performance marketing agency that's spent 8+ years growing brands by treating their numbers like our own. We take on few clients, never run generic playbooks, and now build AI into the work wherever it creates real edge, not hype. Your strategy is built for your business, and our success is tied to yours.”
“After six years, Sagum is our most important partner: trusted, communicative, and caring about our business as if it's their own.”
Proof
Reversed 3 years of decline to 237% YoY
Bisaddle
Challenge
Bisaddle had watched three consecutive years of declining revenue: a compounding problem where underperforming campaigns, a slow site, and an email program punching well below its weight were all dragging the business down simultaneously. The kind of multi-front decline that's easy to misdiagnose as a product or market problem when it's actually a marketing execution problem.
What we did
Sagum rebuilt the site (improving load speed dramatically and lifting conversion rates), restructured paid campaigns with proper attribution and creative testing, and took over email to turn it into a real revenue channel. Every lever pulled was measured against the same profitability standard: is this moving the number that matters?
Result
Bisaddle reversed three years of decline and reached 237% year-over-year growth. The site redesign doubled speed and lifted conversion 122%. Email grew to account for 48% of total revenue: a channel that had been an afterthought became the largest single revenue driver.
Your BigCommerce store is more powerful than your current marketing results suggest.
No obligation. We'll look at your feed quality, attribution setup, and channel mix, and tell you exactly where the gap is. Built around your store, your margins, and your goals.
Sagum · January 2017 · St. George, Utah · 8+ years