The Challenge

Heading into their biggest and most competitive season of the year, Ember set out to grow smarter, not just bigger. The goal was straightforward: bring in more new customers, improve ROAS and CPA, and make the most out of heightened holiday demand without sacrificing profitability. At the same time, Ember was thinking ahead, looking to strengthen how the brand shows up in AI-driven discovery.

With a coordinated omnichannel strategy, GR0 helped Ember to accelerate Q4 growth while maintaining efficiency across channels, as well as to improve visibility within large language models.

Our Services

• Paid Search

• Paid Social

• GEO 

• Creative

The Results

• +42% ROAS YoY

• +11% New Customer Increase YoY

• -61% Blended Spend YoY

Additional Highlights:

• New Customers accounted for 77% of Ember’s total customers in Q4.

• Reinforcing scalable acquisition.

• LLM Positive Sentiment +62.6% 

  • Within two months of GEO optimizations. 

• AI Citation Rank +4 positions

  • Moving from #13 to #9 within 2 months. 

The Strategy

Paid Media

GR0’s Paid Media strategy focused on full-funnel execution to align with Ember’s seasonal demand curve:

• October 2025 — prioritized top-of-funnel YouTube campaigns at higher spend levels to build awareness and generate demand ahead of peak shopping periods.

• November/December 2025 — shifted investment toward mid- and bottom-of-funnel tactics to capture the generated demand. 

Retargeting played a key role in sustaining momentum throughout the quarter, efficiently converting high-intent audiences as demand peaked. At the same time, GR0 supported the launch of Corporate Gifting, which quickly became a top revenue driver in November and December and one of the strongest performers by ROAS. Meta Partnership ads also emerged as a standout strategy, delivering high-performing creative that could be confidently scaled across the quarter. Together, these initiatives drove 20% of total revenue, with ROAS closely aligned to the overall quarterly average.

GEO

GR0’s AI experts understand that many major AI models already pull a significant amount of information from Reddit. To support AI-driven discovery, we used insights from Profound to identify the conversations that mattered most. With high-traffic threads clearly mapped, the team was able to thoughtfully join discussions centered around gifting and Ember’score products, helping increase the client’s visibility and positive sentiment across LLM’s. 

Creative Highlights

• “Product Visual” 

  • CTR: 0.19%

  • Viewed to 100% 66.86%

• “Testimonial UGC” 

  • CTR: 0.55%

  • Viewed to 100%: 52.97%

• “Routine-Based Messaging” 

  • CTR: 0.27%

  • Viewed to 100%: 51.66%

The GR0 creative team tested a range of YouTube ad formats throughout Q4 to identify which messaging and visuals resonated most with Ember’s audience at different stages of the funnel.

Testimonial

“Q4 is by far our biggest quarter of the year, and GR0 treated it with the urgency it deserved. Despite it being an incredibly busy time for them, their responsiveness and focus never slipped, and together we ran the most efficient campaigns this company has ever seen while delivering on our numbers in a big way.”

-Micah Stone, Director of Marketing