Shane Jackson’s Journey

Shane Jackson didn’t set out to be a marketer.

A former golf pro and All-American golfer, he bought PureOne Golf, a struggling golf training-aid company in Scottsdale, Arizona, in November 2024. What he got was less a business than a pile of parts: some inventory, a trademark and a website that, by his own estimation, “wasn’t very good.” The founder had been selling the clubs from the trunk of his car at driving ranges.

Jackson redesigned the club, then added a molded grip on a whim inspired by the handle used by Scottie Scheffler, one of the world’s top-ranked golfers.

The original marketing plan was pretty simple. Between his own golf pedigree and a grip styled after Scheffler’s, Jackson figured the product would sell itself, plus he’d find a local agency to put it on the internet; done and done.

But that plan didn’t work. For a long time he couldn’t tell why.

In the Rough

The agency, which Jackson didn’t name, set PureOne’s ad campaigns on autopilot and told him he was doing great.

But conversions on the website hovered at 0.2% to 0.3%. The explanation he was given was that shoppers were browsing there and buying on Amazon.

“Nothing ever seemed to add up,” Jackson said. “It was excuse after excuse, and we were flying by the seat of our pants. Something had to give.”

Eventually, a brand consultant pointed him to Digital Position, a growth agency that works with ecommerce brands. Steve Cozzolongo, a partner at Digital Position and its CMO, diagnosed PureOne’s problem quickly, and it’s a familiar one, he said.

Brands get lots of numbers, but they have no reliable way to tell which of their marketing efforts produce sales, because every platform grades its own homework. Google, Meta, and Amazon overlap, and Shopify reports separately, too, of course.

“Attribution looks wonky because everyone wants credit,” Cozzolongo said.

Getting Back on Course

Digital Position’s first move was to pull reporting across every channel into one view, including direct-to-consumer sales on Shopify and PureOne’s Amazon storefront. Then it compared total revenue directly against total marketing spend.

The calculation that came out of that effort was PureOne’s marketing efficiency ratio, or MER.

While PureOne still tracked product costs, overhead, and agency fees to determine overall profitability, MER served as the macro lens for demand. A platform’s ROAS only reflects what’s happening on that platform. MER asks the bigger questions, Cozzolongo said, which are “How much are you spending overall, and how much is the business making as a result?”

For example, one shopper might see a brand on social media and later buy on Amazon for the free shipping, while another never visits Amazon at all. Once Digital Position could see how shoppers actually moved between platforms, it could reallocate budget accordingly.

The other early priority was to implement server-side tracking, which Cozzolongo says Digital Position sets up for every client within the first month of working together.

Ad blockers, consent tools, and some browsers make tracking more difficult, he said, so ad platforms only see around 60% to 70% of the purchases customers make. Server-side tracking closes most of that gap, giving ad platforms better data to optimize against.

Teeing Up New Customers

Having laid the measurement groundwork, Digital Position started separating new customers from existing ones, which is important, because the acquisition costs for those cohorts are quite different.

When Digital Position came on board, much of PureOne’s Meta spend was going toward remarketing people who already knew the brand, Cozzolongo said. Meanwhile, on Amazon, PureOne was paying for ads on searches for its own name.

Neither tactic is necessarily wrong; both preach to the converted. New customers are more likely to find PureOne through broader search terms, like “golf training aids” or “swing aids.”

But PureOne also needed a clearer picture of who exactly its ideal customers really are. To find out, Digital Position scraped reviews, Reddit threads, and competitor forums and built buyer personas from the patterns it observed.

The personas range from teachers and trainers to competitive golfers who want to hone their skills to a group Cozzolongo jokingly refers to as “finance pros,” folks who have money to spend and an impulsive streak when it comes to golf.

That analysis changed the pitch. Digital Position turned off discounting and leaned more into emotional messaging that plays on a golfer’s pride and drive to improve, Cozzolongo said.

Over the past year, PureOne’s website conversions have gone up 463% compared to 2025, according to Jackson, while Amazon sales improved more than 500%. “The first couple of months you say to yourself, ‘Oh, this might just be a fluke,’” he said. “But now it’s a trend, and I’m starting to feel more confidence.”

And so Jackson is content to leave the technical details to his agency and do a monthly check-in call, since he has plenty of other things on his plate.

“I wear every hat around here, from shipping and receiving to procurement and banking,” Jackson said. “So it’s nice to be able to trust someone else to just do the work and get the results.”