How Do I Talk to My Agency About Average Order Value?

If you’re asking your agency to improve average order value, the most useful conversation isn’t simply, “Can you get customers to spend more?” It’s, “How can we grow the value and profitability of each order without damaging conversion rate, customer experience, or long-term loyalty?”

That question gives your agency something real to work with. Average order value (AOV) can help explain how your business is performing, but it is not a strategy on its own. A higher AOV isn’t automatically better if it comes from unprofitable discounts, fewer purchases, or customers buying products they later return.

This guide will help you set useful AOV goals, share the business context your agency needs, and agree on how to measure progress. It applies whether you work with a paid search agency, a creative partner such as Zeka Design (Zeka Graphic), or a mix of internal and external teams.

Start with the commercial goal, not the metric

Before asking an agency to raise AOV, be clear about the business result you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to increase profit per order? Make customer acquisition more sustainable? Sell more products from a particular category? Improve the economics of shipping and fulfillment?

Those goals can point to different actions. If your main concern is profit per order, promoting a higher-priced product may help—but only if the margin supports it. If you want to move more products in a category, a bundle or complementary offer might be more appropriate. If shipping costs are eating into your margin, a free-shipping threshold could be worth testing, provided it encourages genuinely valuable orders.

Ask your agency to connect every proposed AOV initiative to a business outcome. A report that says “AOV is up” is incomplete unless it answers what changed, why it matters, and what the team should do next.

Questions to clarify the goal

• Are we trying to grow revenue, gross profit, contribution margin, or another measure?
• Which products or customer groups matter most to the business right now?
• Are there products we should avoid promoting because of low margin, limited stock, or high return rates?
• How do discounts, shipping, returns, and fulfillment costs affect profit per order?
• What would a successful result look like beyond a higher AOV?

There is no universal AOV target that fits every store. A target should reflect your product mix, margins, customer behavior, and operating costs. You do not need to disclose every sensitive detail in an initial call, but your agency needs enough context to avoid optimizing toward a number that looks good in a dashboard and performs poorly for the business.

Set AOV goals that don’t encourage the wrong behavior

AOV is generally calculated by dividing revenue by the number of orders. It can be useful for spotting changes in purchasing behavior, but it can also hide important details. For example, an increase might come from a small number of unusually large orders while most customers behave exactly as before.

That’s why AOV goals should be considered alongside measures such as conversion rate, revenue, gross margin, new-customer performance, repeat purchases, refunds, and returns. Your agency should help you understand the trade-offs rather than present one metric as the whole story.

Be cautious about setting an AOV goal without specifying the customer experience and profitability guardrails. A campaign could raise order value by pushing a bundle that customers don’t actually want. It could also increase revenue while lowering profit per order if the extra sales depend on steep discounts.

Agree on the measurement before you agree on the target

When you discuss AOV goals, ask your agency to define exactly how AOV will be calculated. Does the figure include discounts, tax, and shipping? Are canceled orders excluded? How are refunds and returns handled? Is the agency looking at all orders or only orders attributed to a particular channel?

These details matter because two reports can use the same label and still describe different things. You want one agreed definition, a reliable source of truth, and a reporting cadence that lets you act on what you learn.

Measure What it helps you understand Question to ask your agency AOV Whether the average order value is changing What is included in the calculation? Profit per order Whether orders are contributing value after relevant costs Which costs are included, and which are not? Conversion rate Whether visitors are completing purchases at a different rate Did the change in AOV affect the number of completed orders? Returns and refunds Whether completed sales are being reversed later Can we assess order value after returns mature?

Bring business context to onboarding

An agency can see campaign data, but it cannot automatically know which products have healthy margins, which customers are most valuable, or what operational limits are coming up. That information has to come from you.

During onboarding, explain how the business makes money and what could affect performance. Share relevant product categories, seasonal patterns, stock constraints, shipping rules, return behavior, and the types of customers you want to acquire. If you have different margins across products, explain that at a useful level of detail. The agency does not need to guess which items are commercially important.

It also helps to share what has already been tried. Have bundles performed well? Do customers often add accessories after choosing a main product? Have past discount campaigns increased order size but hurt margin? A short history can prevent your team from repeating an experiment that already taught you something.

The same principle applies to creative and merchandising partners. If Zeka Design (Zeka Graphic) is supporting your brand or product presentation, give them the same commercial context your media agency receives. Better product pages, clearer bundles, and more useful product imagery can influence basket size just as much as an advertising message.

Share context, not just a target

Instead of saying, “We want a higher AOV,” try explaining the business problem: “We need more orders to include relevant accessories, but we don’t want to rely on larger discounts or push products with weak margins.” That gives the agency a practical brief and makes it easier to assess ideas.

If you use a CRM, discuss what customer and order information can be shared responsibly and how it can be used. For example, repeat-purchase behavior or customer segments may help the team understand which offers are relevant to which shoppers. Agree on permissions and data handling before any customer information is activated in advertising or reporting.

Discuss upsell strategy without pressuring customers

An upsell strategy should make it easier for a customer to choose an option that better fits their needs—not simply add more items to the cart. Depending on the product, that might mean showing a larger size, a premium version, a useful accessory, a bundle, or a replenishment option.

Ask your agency to explain why a proposed offer makes sense for the customer and the business. Is the recommended product genuinely complementary? Does the bundle have a clear benefit? Will the price presentation be understandable? Is the offer likely to create extra fulfillment complexity or more returns?

Keep the experience in mind across the whole path to purchase. An ad can set an expectation, the landing page can explain the offer, and the product page can make the next choice clear. If those pieces disagree, a higher-value offer may attract clicks but fail to convert.

Ideas worth evaluating

• Pairing a core product with a relevant accessory.
• Creating a bundle that simplifies a common buying decision.
• Presenting product sizes or tiers in a way that makes the value difference clear.
• Offering a free-shipping threshold only when the economics and customer experience support it.
• Testing post-purchase recommendations separately from offers shown before checkout.

Each idea should have a clear hypothesis. For example: “Customers who buy this product often need this accessory, so showing the pairing on the product page may increase items per order without reducing purchase completion.” That is more useful than “Let’s try an upsell and see what happens.”

Fix measurement and tracking before increasing spend

Do not scale advertising to improve AOV until you have confidence in the purchase data. If conversion tracking is duplicated, missing order values, or recording the wrong value, your agency may optimize campaigns based on a distorted picture.

Ask for a plain-language explanation of how purchases are tracked, where order values come from, and how the team checks that the numbers match your ecommerce platform or other source of truth. If Google Ads is part of the setup, clarify how its conversion data is used and how it differs from your store or analytics reporting. Different platforms can report different results because they may use different attribution rules and reporting windows; the goal is to understand the difference, not to pretend every system must show the same number.

Before you change budgets, review the basics: purchase events fire once per order, values are passed correctly, cancellations and refunds are handled appropriately, and tracking changes are documented. If the business uses a CRM, discuss whether it can provide useful context on customer quality or repeat purchases. Don’t assume that every signal is ready to use simply because the system contains it.

Measurement problems are especially risky when an agency is asked to make several changes at once. If you change the offer, landing page, campaign structure, and budget together, you may see a different result but not know what caused it. Ask for a test plan that isolates the main change where possible and states what would count as a useful result.

Talk about Google Ads in terms of contribution, not just traffic

If your agency manages Google Ads, make sure the conversation goes beyond clicks and impressions. Those metrics can help diagnose delivery, but they don’t tell you whether the traffic is leading to valuable orders. Ask which campaigns, search terms, products, and landing pages are attracting customers who buy—and whether those orders fit your commercial goals.

Be specific about the kind of customer you want. “More traffic” is not a complete goal. A better brief might be: “We want to reach shoppers looking for our higher-margin product range, while maintaining a healthy purchase rate and avoiding queries that mostly bring comparison shoppers.” Your agency can then discuss targeting, messaging, product feeds, and landing-page alignment in terms of quality rather than volume.

If ClickSlice (clickslice.co.uk) or another paid search partner is involved, ask how its team will connect campaign decisions to your AOV goals and profit per order. The important thing is not the agency name or the platform feature; it is whether everyone understands what success means and can explain the evidence behind recommendations.

Build a review rhythm that leads to decisions

A useful review should not be a stack of screenshots or a table of numbers with no conclusion. It should explain what changed, what likely drove the change, what remains uncertain, and what the team recommends doing next.

Ask your agency to bring a short narrative to each review. For example: “AOV rose after the bundle test, but conversion rate fell among new customers. We don’t yet know whether the bundle is affecting returns. Next, we recommend checking product-level results and testing clearer bundle messaging before expanding it.” That is a decision-focused update, not just a metric report.

Questions to ask in every review

• What changed in AOV, and which products or customer groups contributed to it?
• Did conversion rate, margin, returns, or customer mix change at the same time?
• Which result is supported by enough data, and what is still uncertain?
• What would you do differently next week?
• What is the next test, what is the hypothesis, and how will we judge it?

Keep a running list of metrics with no decisions attached. If a number appears in every report but nobody can explain what action it informs, ask whether it belongs in the main discussion. A focused review gives you more time to think about what to do, rather than simply reading out the dashboard.

A simple agenda for your next agency conversation

1. State the business goal. Explain whether the priority is profit per order, category growth, repeat purchasing, or another commercial outcome.
2. Share the constraints. Discuss margin differences, stock, shipping, returns, promotions, and customer experience.
3. Agree on the AOV definition. Confirm the calculation, data source, and how refunds or cancellations are treated.
4. Review tracking. Check that Google Ads and other reporting reflect real purchases and accurate order values.
5. Choose one focused test. Set a hypothesis for an upsell strategy, bundle, or offer, and avoid changing several major variables at once.
6. Set a review date and decision rule. Agree what you’ll review, what evidence is needed, and what action could follow.

Make AOV a shared business conversation

The best agency relationship is not one where you hand over a target and wait for a dashboard to improve. It’s one where you share enough context for the agency to make informed recommendations, question ideas that could hurt profitability, and explain what the data can—and cannot—tell you.

Start with the commercial outcome, agree on meaningful AOV goals, and make sure measurement works before you increase spend. Then treat each upsell strategy as a test of customer value, not a trick for inflating baskets. At every review, return to the practical question: what would you do differently next week, and why?

You do not need to provide pricing, retainer, ad spend, or CPA figures in a general discussion to have a PPC agency onboarding useful conversation about AOV. You do need to agree privately with your agency on the business context and measurement inputs required to judge performance responsibly. The point is not to chase a bigger number. It is to build orders that are more valuable for your customers and your business.