How PureBites Made Paid-ad Promo Codes Work without Giving them to Everyone

The brand

A pet treats brand built on ingredient transparency

PureBites makes premium, limited and single-ingredient treats, food, and toppers for dogs and cats. The brand is built on a simple premise: pet parents should know exactly what they're feeding their animals. Minimal ingredients, complete transparency. It's the kind of positioning that earns loyal customers and makes every decision, including how a promotional offer is delivered, matter more than it might at a generic brand.

The challenge

Showing a promo code to paid visitors without showing it to everyone

Running paid ads with a discount code offer looked straightforward until PureBites thought through the options.

Putting the promo code publicly on the site meant showing it to every visitor. Organic traffic, direct traffic, return customers: anyone who landed there would see the offer, whether they needed the incentive to buy or not. That erodes the margin on revenue that would have converted at full price regardless.

But keeping the code out of the site entirely, and relying on the ad alone to communicate it, meant some paid visitors arrived without it visible and converted at lower rates.

Standard Shopify tools had no clean answer. The offer either reached too many people or too few.

Why Relevant Bits

A Shopify-native way to match offers to traffic source

PureBites needed a tool that could read why a visitor arrived and adjust what they saw accordingly, without creating duplicate pages, injecting scripts, or touching theme code.

Relevant Bits works inside the native Shopify theme editor using existing theme sections. No new editor to learn, no separate templates to maintain, and no developer team required. Stuart, PureBites' ecommerce manager, could set up and adjust recipes independently.

"This app is wonderfully simple. It allows us to display custom content to very particular audiences." Stuart · Ecommerce Manager, PureBites

How they use it

UTM-matched variations for paid campaigns

PureBites uses Relevant Bits to serve different versions of their store based on UTM parameters. Visitors arriving from a paid campaign that carries a specific UTM parameter see a version of the site where the promo code is visible. Visitors arriving from any other source see the default experience without the offer.

The targeting is set up once inside the theme editor. When a new paid campaign runs, the relevant UTM parameter routes visitors to the right variation automatically.

Stuart also built a second recipe independently: visitors arriving via a specific QR code see a version of the site configured for informational browsing rather than purchasing. That use case came from Stuart himself, not from a feature guide or onboarding flow.

The result

Enabling things that weren't possible before

When a UTM-targeted promo code is running, PureBites sees over 1% lift in paid-ad conversion rate.

Asked how much time the app saves, Stuart shifted the framing. The value wasn't primarily about time. It was about what the tool made possible at all.

"Not so much saving time as enabling things that weren't possible before." Stuart · Ecommerce Manager, PureBites

PureBites has also identified future use cases they haven't activated yet, including personalizing the experience for high-value customers versus first-time shoppers.