A pizza chain growing at 7% a year grew at 20%.

Sanpeggio’s was a healthy pizza business with no website and no online ordering, growing at single digits. We built the site, then spent sixteen days running no marketing at all so we would have a real organic baseline to measure against. Campaigns went live on 17 December 2021. That half-month made December the best month of the year. An online ordering channel started from nothing and reached $63,610 a month within a year, and 2022 closed 20.5% up on 2021 — against a business that had been growing at 6.9% a year.

Sanpeggio’s sells pizza across several locations in Alabama. When we started in October 2021 the business was in reasonable health and growing steadily, but it had no meaningful web presence, no online ordering, and no way to know where a customer had come from.

The growth rate is the number worth holding on to, because everything on this page is measured against it. Single digits, steadily, for years.

That last figure is the first thing we would point at. It is also the one that needs the most care, which is why it gets its own section further down rather than a headline here.

The website went live on 21 November 2021 and averaged 35 visitors a day in its first month.

Then we did nothing. From 1 to 16 December we ran no campaigns at all, deliberately, to find out how much traffic the site would attract on its own. It settled at 44 visitors a day. That was the baseline.

Campaigns went live on 17 December. Over the following fortnight daily visitors rose 120% against that measured baseline and 174% against the launch month. Nearly nine in ten December visitors were new, and by January returning visitors had roughly doubled.

These are small absolute numbers — a site six weeks old attached to a business already doing well over a million dollars a year. They matter as a measurement, not as a result. What they bought was the ability to say what happened next was caused by something.

October and November 2021 were spent building the website. No campaigns ran. Both months came in below the previous year — October down 1.6%, November down 2.8%. Whatever the business was doing heading into December, it was not accelerating.

Campaigns went live on 17 December. December closed at $134,740: up 13.1% on December 2020, the best month of the year, and 7.9% ahead of the previous best month of 2021.

December is a strong month for pizza, so the raw figure needs testing. There are two reasonable ways to work out what the month should have produced without marketing, and they agree:

Published in full rather than as a headline, because the shape is the argument. The effect built through the year instead of spiking and fading — the second half grew almost three times as fast as the first.

First half up 11.2%. Second half up 29.5%. December 2022 was the strongest month in three years of records.

The website built in November 2021 came with the restaurant’s own online ordering attached. In December 2021, its first partial month with marketing running, it took $8,229.

In December 2022, the month this engagement ended, the same channel took $63,610 — 7.7 times the figure twelve months earlier, December against December, with no seasonal adjustment needed because it is the same month on both sides. That was 37% of everything the business sold that month, through a channel that had not existed thirteen months before.

What it costs to take an order that way, against the alternative:

These are like-for-like: marketplace commission already includes card processing, so it is not stacked on top of the first row. The delivery row is highlighted because pizza is a delivery category — the low collection rate is not the relevant comparison for most of this volume. And commission is only the floor. Sponsored placement and funded promotions are bought separately, with the restaurant covering the discount and a per-order fee on top.

What we did not measure, and will not pretend to. Nobody was tracking what share of this restaurant’s total ordering ran first-party versus marketplace in 2022. We can tell you what the channel we built took each month. We cannot tell you what proportion of the whole it represented, because the reporting to answer that did not exist yet — and building it is one of the things we would do differently.

Seven weeks passed between the engagement starting and the first campaign running, in the middle of the busiest quarter of the year. Two months of website build, then a fortnight of deliberately measuring nothing. A client who wanted campaigns in week one would not have got them, and would have been right to ask why.

The ad budget was small — $1,200 across the launch period — so there was no room to test at volume. It worked here because search intent did the heavy lifting and pizza is a category people are already looking for. In a category with no existing demand, the same budget would have proved nothing.

And the strongest evidence on this page covers a short window: fifteen days of December and 45 days of online ordering data. The 2022 figures are a full year and stand on their own, but the December analysis is a fortnight, and a fortnight is a fortnight.

From January 2023 Sanpeggio’s took marketing in house. The site, the search position, the online ordering channel and the reporting were all built to be handed over, and they were handed over working. That is the right outcome for a business of this size — a restaurant group at this scale does not need a permanent agency line in its P&L, it needs the channel built properly once and a team who can keep it running.

They ran it themselves for three years. In January 2026 they came back to us.

We make no claim about what the business did between 2023 and 2025, because we were not there and the numbers are not ours to publish. The only thing worth reading into that gap is that the client had three years to compare the alternative.