Your best market is across a border
Most Vancouver businesses sell into the US, and most of them model unit economics in a single currency. That one simplification hides where the margin actually goes.
Benchmarks in this market
- CPA from creative volume
- -38%CPA from creative volume
- Contribution per order after repricing
- +44%Contribution per order after repricing
- Creative output at local production rates
- 6×Creative output at local production rates
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with PT coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Vancouver office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about Metro Vancouver
Vancouver's domestic market is small relative to the one immediately south, so a large share of businesses here are effectively cross-border operators from an early stage. That introduces a set of economics most marketing plans handle badly: revenue in one currency and costs in another, duties and brokerage on physical goods, different tax treatment, and a US buyer with no awareness that the supplier is Canadian. Layered on top is a deep creative and technical talent pool — film, visual effects and games — which makes production quality unusually affordable here and is a genuine competitive advantage most local brands underuse.
Model contribution in the currency you spend
Revenue in US dollars against costs in Canadian dollars means your real margin moves with the exchange rate, and a break-even ROAS calculated in one currency is wrong in the other. We model contribution per order with the currency split made explicit, which routinely changes which products are worth advertising at all.
Duties and brokerage decide your shipping offer
For physical goods, the landed cost to a US customer includes duty and brokerage that the customer may meet as a surprise at delivery. That surprise is a refund and a bad review. Deciding explicitly who absorbs it — and pricing the free-shipping threshold around the real landed cost — matters more than most conversion work on the page.
Production quality is cheap here and underused
The film and visual-effects industry means genuinely skilled crew and post-production are accessible at rates that would be unrealistic in California. For brands where creative volume is the binding constraint, this is a structural advantage — and most local brands still commission the same volume as a competitor without it.
Your US buyer does not know you are Canadian
It affects almost nothing in messaging and quite a lot in operations — pricing display, shipping expectations, support hours and returns address. The friction shows up in conversion rate on US traffic, and it is usually diagnosed as a creative problem when it is a logistics one.
What usually moves first in Vancouver.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else — we go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Vancouver
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We had two spreadsheets that had never met: what it costs to fill a unit, and what it costs to keep one. Putting them on the same page changed where our money goes. The uncomfortable part was learning our renewal problem was really a maintenance problem.
We were three weeks from cutting the channel that was actually feeding us, and we would have had a defensible-looking dashboard justifying it the whole way. What I found hardest was accepting that our reporting had been wrong for two years, not that it needed fixing.
The hardest part was telling the board our old reporting had been optimistic, and that we would now be running fewer tests and winning less often. Watching the conversion rate move for the first time in two years made that conversation retrospectively easy.
Vancouver questions, answered straight.
Display in the customer's currency — a US shopper seeing Canadian dollars either converts mentally and abandons, or arrives at checkout surprised. What matters more is that your internal contribution model keeps the currencies separate, because a margin that looks healthy in one can be thin in the other once the exchange rate moves. Get the display right for conversion and the model right for decisions.
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site — run against what actually works in Metro Vancouver. You keep the findings either way.