This audit assesses gearUP's digital marketing and demand engine end to end, spanning the two properties that carry the business, the marketing technology that connects them, and the channels that feed them. Its purpose is to give leadership a clear, evidence-based basis for the four decisions ahead: where to invest by channel, whether the current numbers can support confident planning, how to structure the team, and what to execute in the next ninety days.

Order truth lives in Magento and reaches the CRM and email tools largely by hand. As a result, almost no new marketing initiatives have gone live since October 2025. Paid campaigns remain paused and many operational marketing processes continue to rely on manual execution. The good news underneath that constraint is significant: the storefront is healthy, with a strong average order value and solid conversion rate, and the largest growth channels have barely been switched on. The work ahead is to connect the data, automate the manual steps, and then turn on demand against numbers everyone can trust.

Leadership has committed to roughly $9M of new revenue, lifting the company from approximately $30M to $39M, with a substantial share expected through digital. The path runs through five sequenced moves: fix the data flow so channel-level attribution (the ability to identify which marketing channel generated each sale) is visible, automate lifecycle and email so existing demand is captured, lift conversion on an already-healthy storefront, rebuild the WordPress site for engagement, SEO, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) , visibility within AI-powered search experiences such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews , so the lead funnel becomes a reliable demand channel, and then scale paid media once it can be measured.

The company's growth objective represents approximately 30% revenue expansion, increasing annual revenue from roughly $30M to $39M. Industry benchmarks typically assume that digital channels contribute approximately 50% of total growth through conversion rates in the 1.5%–2.0% range and average order values near $100. gearUP's confirmed performance significantly exceeds those assumptions, with conversion rates of 3–4% and an average order value of $208. These stronger baseline economics create a more favorable growth profile and suggest that growth may be achievable with a more efficient investment profile than industry benchmarks would otherwise indicate.

Demand reaches gearUP through two distinct journeys, and the assessment treats each on its own terms.

The company generates roughly $30M across all channels. The Magento web store, the direct-to-athlete engine this audit focuses on, accounts for approximately $20M of that. The remaining revenue flows through B2B, club, and direct sales relationships. The $20M web store figure is the basis this audit works from.

Demand is concentrated in two channels. Organic search and direct traffic together account for roughly 92% of qualified sessions. Paid media, email, social, and AI Search Referrals (AEO/LLM), including sources such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-powered answer engines, are effectively dormant: paid has had no active campaigns since October 2025, and email, social, and AI Search Referrals (AEO/LLM) each register only a few dozen sessions year to date, with zero conversions attributed to AI Search Referrals.

Figure 2.3, Share of qualified sessions by channel. Three of the four largest growth levers available, paid media, lifecycle email, and retargeting, are essentially switched off. That is the headroom behind the growth target, and it is exactly why activation must wait for measurement.

The demand model is the financial framework that translates traffic, conversion rates, average order value, and revenue goals into a required advertising budget.

The current demand model is directionally sound and is the right way to back into a budget. It is, however, built on inputs that understate where the business already sits, so it should be rebuilt on actuals before it goes to leadership.

Figure 3.1, Planning assumptions compared with confirmed year-to-date actuals. Both average order value and conversion rate exceed the plan's modeled targets, meaning the growth math is more achievable than the current model implies.

Conversion work splits along the same two-property line, and the nature of the opportunity is different on each side.

This is the anchor section, because nearly every recommendation elsewhere depends on it.

The business-level numbers are trustworthy and confirmed from Magento: $208 average order value and 3–4% conversion year to date. What is missing is the layer above and below that topline. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is installed on the WordPress site only and currently receives no Magento commerce data, so conversion cannot be broken down by channel and the purchase funnel cannot be examined step by step.

The remedy is a server-side event pipeline that carries Magento commerce events into both analytics and the CRM, including purchases, order value, and refunds. This single build is the highest-leverage move in the audit, because channel attribution, funnel analysis, trustworthy paid measurement, and accurate customer segmentation all depend on it. Until it exists, the business is managing its largest revenue channel without instrumentation.

A server-side event pipeline captures commerce activity directly from Magento's backend and sends it to downstream systems in real time, rather than relying on browser-based JavaScript tags that can be blocked by ad blockers, lost in page transitions, or broken by template changes.

Magento should remain the system of record because it holds the authoritative record of every transaction, including order value, product detail, customer identity, refunds, and cancellations. Making Magento the source of truth for all downstream reporting eliminates the discrepancies that arise when browser-based tracking and backend records disagree.

Once the pipeline is in place, purchase events, refund events, cancellation events, and customer records flow automatically into GA4 for analytics, HubSpot for lifecycle marketing and CRM, Microsoft Dynamics for business reporting, and Azure Synapse for data warehousing and advanced analysis. Each system receives the same confirmed data from the same source.

The pipeline is built with deduplication logic so that a single purchase is recorded once across all systems, regardless of how many tools receive the event. This prevents inflated conversion counts and ensures reporting is consistent across platforms.

This single build resolves the attribution gap (every sale is tied to its originating channel), the reporting gap (refunds, cancellations, and pending orders are captured accurately), and the measurement gap (paid media can be evaluated against real ROAS rather than estimated performance).

Done correctly, this transforms a $20M storefront from a revenue source that can be measured only at the top line into a fully attributable growth engine. This is the single highest-leverage initiative identified in the audit because every downstream investment in paid media, lifecycle marketing, reporting, optimization, and forecasting depends on it.

What this means for the business: eliminating manual work, improving customer visibility, and creating the foundation required for scalable lifecycle marketing.

Two builds turn the current manual operation into a system that can scale.

The WordPress-to-HubSpot forms connection already works; the gap is specifically on the Magento side, where order and purchase behavior do not yet reach the CRM without manual handling. Closing it is what makes meaningful segmentation possible at all.

The current email process is manual and slow to scale: a single team-specific send takes roughly twenty minutes of hands-on work, which does not multiply across the dozens of teams the business serves. The consolidation and the Magento integration together remove exactly that friction.

There is no single correct structure here. gearUP should weigh these options against its own appetite for hiring, its timeline, and the level of control it wants to retain.

The following opportunities are ranked by business impact, implementation effort, and sequencing logic. Immediate priorities are those that unlock everything downstream.

What this means for the business: each phase builds the foundation for the next, ensuring marketing investment scales only after measurement and automation are in place.

The plan sequences the work so that each phase enables the next. Measurement is the gate: paid scaling does not begin until Magento commerce events are flowing into analytics.

Figure 8, The 90-day sequence across three phases, with the measurement gate between Build and Scale.

This section makes the audit's confidence levels explicit, so leadership knows precisely which numbers were confirmed and how.