What's working in ecommerce acquisition right now?

I run diagnostics on ecommerce brands as the first thing I do in every engagement. Across the work I've done in the last 12 months, the same patterns keep showing up. What worked in 2023 stopped working in 2024. What worked in early 2025 is already losing efficiency. The brands that are still acquiring profitably in 2026 are doing a handful of specific things differently, and most of them aren't what the marketing world is talking about.

Here's what I'm seeing right now that's actually moving the needle.

The platforms have changed how they reward creative, and most brands haven't caught up

Meta's Andromeda update, Google's Demand Gen evolution, TikTok's creative optimisation systems: they all share one thing in common. The platforms are increasingly rewarding creative volume and variation over precise audience targeting. The era of finding the perfect audience segment and pointing a few hero ads at them is over. The platforms want to make those targeting decisions themselves, and they need more creative inputs to do it well.

What this means practically: if you're still producing 2-4 new creative concepts a month and iterating slowly, you're under-feeding the algorithms. The brands acquiring efficiently right now are producing 15-30 distinct concepts a month, testing them in disciplined ways, and letting the platforms pick the winners.

Most brands can't sustain that creative volume because their production model wasn't built for it. They have a designer who does a polished hero shoot once a quarter, plus a few ad variations made each month. That worked when targeting did most of the work. It doesn't work now.

The fix isn't hiring more designers. It's restructuring how creative gets produced. Lower-fidelity concepts, faster iteration cycles, more direct response work, less brand-building work at the campaign level. The hero shoots are still useful, but they're not the engine anymore.

Direct response creative is outperforming brand-led creative on cold traffic

Related to the above, but worth naming separately. The creative that's winning in cold acquisition right now looks more like 2018 direct response than 2023 brand-led editorial.

Hooks that work in the first 2 seconds. Captions that name the problem. Demos that show the product in use. Customer testimonials that resolve real objections. Comparison ads that show why this product over that one. These are the formats that are pulling in cold customers efficiently.

The beautifully shot brand campaigns are still working for retargeting and warm audiences, but they're getting worse and worse at converting cold traffic into customers. The brands that are confused about why their ROAS is dropping are usually still running cold campaigns with what is effectively brand creative, then wondering why the platforms aren't rewarding it.

If your cold acquisition is plateauing, look at your top-performing ads. If they look like brand campaigns, that's the problem. The platforms aren't rewarding aesthetics in 2026. They're rewarding direct response.

User-generated content is no longer optional for ecommerce

Three years ago, UGC was a nice-to-have. Two years ago, it was an emerging best practice. In 2026, ecommerce brands that don't have a consistent UGC production pipeline are operating at a structural disadvantage.

The reason is simple. Cold buyers don't trust brand-produced content the same way they trust customer-produced content. Even when the UGC is professionally produced through a creator network, the format itself signals authenticity. Static brand product shots, no matter how beautiful, perform worse than a 15-second video of a real customer talking about why they bought the product.

This isn't a creative preference. It's how the buyer's brain processes the ad. UGC bypasses the "this is an ad" filter that buyers have built up over years of exposure to traditional ecommerce creative.

The brands that are acquiring efficiently have made UGC a structural part of their creative production. Either through working with a creator network, building an in-house UGC pipeline, or systematically encouraging and licensing real customer content. The brands that aren't doing this are competing with one arm tied behind their back.

Email is doing more of the acquisition work than people realise

Most ecommerce brands treat email as a retention channel. Send to existing customers, drive repeat purchase, nurture loyalty. That framing made sense five years ago when paid ads were cheap and acquisition was easy.

It doesn't make sense now. Paid acquisition costs have risen meaningfully across most categories. The customer you acquired last year is worth more than the customer you might acquire next quarter, because the next one will cost you more to acquire.

The brands acquiring efficiently in 2026 are treating email as an acquisition channel too, not just retention. Welcome flows that convert browse traffic into customers. Win-back flows that re-activate dormant subscribers. Browse abandonment and cart abandonment flows that turn high-intent traffic into purchases. These aren't retention activities. They're acquisition activities running in your email channel.

If your email program is sending campaigns to a list and running basic flows, you're leaving meaningful acquisition revenue on the table. The lifecycle architecture is where the real acquisition compounding happens in 2026.

The funnel between visit and sale is where most brands are leaking money

This is the one I bring up in almost every diagnostic. Brands focus on traffic acquisition because it's visible, easy to optimise, and feels like growth. They focus far less on what happens to that traffic once it arrives.

The numbers I see consistently: brands with healthy traffic at the top of the funnel and 1-3% site conversion rates. Which means 97-99% of paid traffic is bouncing without buying. That's the actual problem in most ecommerce businesses, but it doesn't get treated as one because it's harder to fix than turning up ad spend.

The fix is structural. Better product pages that resolve objections in the first 200 words. Clear hierarchy on the page. Trust signals near the add-to-cart button. Mobile-optimised flows because 70%+ of traffic is mobile. Cleaner checkout. Persistent cart so people who leave can return to a saved cart. None of this is glamorous, but the cumulative effect on revenue is enormous.

The brands acquiring efficiently in 2026 are spending as much energy on conversion rate work as they are on acquisition work. The brands struggling are still treating conversion as something the agency or the developer should handle in the background. That gap is widening.

What this means for your brand

If your acquisition has been plateauing or declining, the question isn't "what new tactic should I try." The question is whether your fundamentals have caught up to how the platforms and buyers actually work in 2026.

Specifically:

• Is your creative production volume keeping up with what the algorithms now demand?

• Is your cold creative still working as direct response, or has it drifted into brand mode?

• Is UGC a structural part of your pipeline, or still an experiment?

• Is email doing acquisition work, or just retention?

• Is your conversion rate work proportional to your acquisition spend?

Brands that answer no to two or more of these are usually the ones telling me their performance has stalled. The fix isn't a new agency or a new channel. It's getting the fundamentals right for the version of ecommerce we're actually operating in.

This is the diagnostic work I run for every brand I take on. Before any campaigns get touched, before any new creative gets briefed, the first question is always: where is growth actually constrained in this business? The answer is rarely where the brand expects it to be.

If you want a senior diagnostic of where growth is actually constrained in your business, you can book a discovery call with me here. 15 minutes, no pitch, no pressure.