From Build to Buy: Why Smalls Chose Fairing for Reliable Attribution

About

Smalls is a leading DTC cat-food brand offering fresh, human-grade meals for cats.

Industry

Pet Food

Platform

Custom

Challenge

Smalls’ in-house post-purchase survey became increasingly difficult to maintain and lacked the show-level visibility the team needed to make confident marketing decisions. At the same time, GA tracking changes and leaked promo codes eroded attribution accuracy across key channels.

Results

Smalls went live with Fairing in days, increased their attributable customers percentage, and gained the visibility needed to scale their marketing investments confidently.

From In-House Maintenance to Marketing Ownership

Like many brands, Smalls initially chose to build their post-purchase “How did you hear about us?” survey in-house. It provided helpful signal early on, but maintaining it became a growing strain. Response rates declined, updates required engineering support, and the survey’s limitations became more apparent as Smalls’ marketing mix evolved.

Their internal setup posed several critical challenges:

Declining response rates left more and more customers unattributed.
Labor intensive to maintain with reliance on the engineering team for updates.
Limited granular channel visibility, for example Smalls could see “Podcast” as a source, but not which Podcast the customer watched or listened to.

With GA tracking changes and frequent promo code leaks, Smalls’ core attribution inputs became unreliable, creating a critical visibility gap just as the brand experienced rapid growth and the marketing team ramped up spend across multiple channels.

“It was a panicked moment of, ‘what are we going to do?’” said Marija Janjos, Strategic Finance & Analytics Manager at Smalls.

Smalls needed a new solution and they needed one fast.

Ramping Up with Fairing

Smalls came across Fairing and knew it was the solution they needed to solve their current attribution problems.

Quick Implementation

Smalls found Fairing and quickly recognized that rebuilding their survey to match Fairing’s capabilities would require more time and engineering resources than they could afford. With Fairing, they were able to launch in a matter of days.

Granular & Reliable Data

Fairing immediately unlocked the show-level podcast attribution Smalls had been missing. This eliminated code-leak bias and gave the team clarity on which podcast partners were actually performing.

As Janjos explained, “Fairing has allowed us the confidence to invest in podcasts because we can actually see where customers are coming from. We would have been a lot more hesitant to scale without that visibility.”

Higher Response Rates for Trusted Data

Moving from their in-house dropdown to Fairing’s optimized survey design increased response rates to 90%, up from 50–60%. This step-change in data capture restored their confidence in the data feeding their attribution model.

Marketing Owned

Fairing shifted ownership of the survey from engineering to marketing. The marketing team can now adjust questions, add follow-ups, and modify responses instantly. This flexibility ensures their attribution measurement evolves in lockstep with their marketing strategy.