David Protein, a fast-growing functional food brand, turned to WorkMagic to build a unified measurement foundation as it expanded from DTC into Amazon and retail. By aligning finance and growth teams around incrementality, the company uncovered hidden halo effects and gained the confidence to scale profitably across every channel.
Key Takeaways:
With WorkMagic, David Protein gained the following insights:
WorkMagic revealed that 18% of total sales were driven by advertising on Meta
Incrementality uncovered a 36% overestimation of DTC orders relative to true incremental lift
Analysis showed David Protein could increase ad spend by a further 40% to maximize sales while maintaining ROAS
"We knew from the start that we were unique in our ability to quickly ramp up to retail, but that came with its own unique set of measurement challenges.
Incrementality testing solves that for us by giving us a common foundation on which marketing, operations, and finance can base their decision-making on."
Gavin McManus, Growth Manager at David Protein
About David Protein
David has a mission to help people increase muscle and decrease fat by delivering food with more protein and fewer calories, without compromising on taste or texture. Since launch, the brand has grown rapidly from a DTC startup into a national retail presence, expanding onto Amazon and into leading national retailers.
With its focus on an evidence-based approach to nutrition that prioritizes protein density and quality while managing caloric intake, David has quickly become one of the fastest-scaling entrants in the snack category.
David's rapid scale outgrew their existing measurement framework — leading to guesswork in performance measurement and planning
David Protein was founded with rapid growth in mind — an ethos that extended from its products to its own internal departments. With experienced founders and a viral marketing strategy, the team was aware that they'd be growing quickly and entering retail storefronts much quicker than most other brands. This brought about its own set of challenges:
Finance lacked reliable forecasting inputs
"We've got a robust finance team, but without the right inputs, we were making broad assumptions and validating what we could." Gavin shared.
The measurement tools the team used often conflicted with platform-reported data. In one case Gavin related, platforms were reporting that CPAs were dropping, even when internal analysis saw CAC rising across the board.
These mismatches eroded trust with the figures, and held the team back from making decisions like quickly increasing spend to capitalize on a viral moment — actions that had contributed to their meteoric rise.
Traditional attribution could not keep up with David's expansion to Amazon and retail
"We knew we were going to ramp up to retail really quickly," said Gavin. "An inevitable outcome of this step-change was that we’d have less direct visibility into customer acquisition.”
While strong product–market fit and viral marketing campaigns fueled David’s rapid rise, the brand also relied on advertising to reach new customers. With an ever-increasing share of sales happening outside of the brand's online storefront, measuring the halo effect of the ads — the impact occurring on Amazon and retail — became all the more urgent.
Therein lay the problem of their existing stack: a lack of visibility into the halo effect.
As David expanded, the importance of precise forecasting and demand planning across all sales channels only increased. Yet without a clear view of how advertising drove demand across DTC, Amazon, and retail partners, the company lacked the confidence to model demand and identify the budgets that would maximize growth.
WorkMagic provided a unified foundation for measurement — one that bridges finance, growth, and operations
David began engaging with WorkMagic to evaluate how the platform might resolve existing measurement concerns, and it soon evolved into the core measurement solution for the entire growth organization.
"We needed something that we could feel confident in and to make assumptions on — incrementality was the foundation on which we could build that was rooted in data and not guesswork." said Gavin
WorkMagic’s incrementality testing framework gave the team a new baseline for decision-making — connecting on-site performance data with Amazon and retail outcomes in a single view.
"Finance really appreciated the results and the accompanying analysis — it gave them far more confidence in lieu of our previous assumptions and estimates." said Gavin.
When asked, Gavin said that the platform is “widely used across the entire David organization—from growth and data to finance and beyond—since performance metrics inform many different inputs.”
Here's how the organization uses WorkMagic:
Incrementality testing gave David the operational efficiency to continue their record-breaking growth trajectory
The David Protein and WorkMagic teams partnered to design a lift test that would elucidate Meta's impact on both their online storefront as well as their Amazon store.
Meta's true incremental impact was measured, laying the foundation for better decision-making
The lift test validated what the David team already suspected: for every order attributed to Meta, even more were occurring outside DTC across other sales channels.
With this foundational result, the WorkMagic platform recalculated key metrics for the brand, and found:
36% initial overestimation in DTC orders compared to actual incremental orders
18% overall lift via ad-driven contribution
40% recommended increase in ad spend to maximize sales
The incrementality test also quantified the halo effect that David Protein was experiencing across their sales channels, which, once included, showed that traditional attribution had underreported Meta’s overall impact.
Through one lift test, the team gained clarity over the true impact of their advertising on Meta as an omnichannel brand: the platform was indeed driving high-value awareness that was converting on Shopify, Amazon, and retail, but more importantly, they were able to quantify the impact on all sales channels and get a true understanding of how valuable Meta was for driving overall growth.
Finance and operations gained confidence to adjust CAC thresholds and forecasting processes
These new key metrics had a knock-on effect for the finance and operations teams as well. With a full understanding of the halo effect, the finance and growth teams could now confidently adjust their CAC thresholds while keeping within a desired range.
"Without WorkMagic’s incrementality insights and adjusted metrics, CAC was always an estimate that required constant validation, especially since we couldn’t see the full impact of advertising beyond our site. For a brand like ours — where margins shift and fulfillment and forecasting are continually evolving — having objective, reliable inputs makes a meaningful difference for both our growth and finance teams," said Gavin.
Now, the growth team is able to confidently scale spend during more aggressive periods, while the finance and operations teams are able to better forecast and fulfil demand as a result of that increased spend.
From Guesswork to Ground Truth
With WorkMagic, David Protein turned measurement from a constraint into a competitive advantage. What began as an effort to clarify marketing performance became the foundation for more confident forecasting, operational planning, and cross-team alignment.
By grounding every decision in incrementality, the brand replaced guesswork with precision — empowering finance to plan proactively, operations to forecast with confidence, and growth to scale efficiently across Shopify, Amazon, and retail.
Need to build cross-functional alignment for your omnichannel brand? Book a demo with WorkMagic today.