Measure Paid Campaign Success

Business Context

GlowCart, a DTC skincare subscription company, ran a 4-week paid marketing campaign across Meta, Google Search, and influencer partnerships to acquire new customers for its $30/month subscription box. The CMO says the campaign generated strong traffic, but the CFO is questioning whether it created profitable growth.

Metric Scenario

During the campaign, GlowCart spent $420,000 and recorded 3.2M impressions, 96,000 clicks, 11,500 site signups, 4,200 first purchases, and 1,050 subscribers still active after 90 days. Average order value on the first purchase was $38, gross margin was 62%, and estimated 12-month LTV for retained subscribers is $168 gross profit. Channel-level results vary: Meta drove cheaper clicks but lower purchase conversion, Google drove fewer clicks but higher intent, and influencers drove the highest signup rate but inconsistent retention. Leadership wants a clear framework for deciding whether the campaign was successful overall and which channel should receive next quarter's budget.

Requirements

1. Define the primary success metric for this campaign and explain why it should be the headline KPI.
2. Identify the supporting metrics across the acquisition funnel, from impression to retained subscriber.
3. Show how you would evaluate campaign performance at both overall and channel levels.
4. Explain how you would distinguish short-term efficiency from long-term value creation.
5. Recommend what GlowCart should do next if one channel has strong conversion but weak retention.

Data Available

• ad_spend_daily: date, channel, campaign_id, spend, impressions, clicks
• web_funnel_events: user_id, timestamp, landing_page, signup_completed, checkout_started, purchase_completed
• orders: order_id, user_id, order_date, revenue, discount_amount, product_type
• subscriptions: user_id, subscription_start_date, cancellation_date, renewal_count, active_90d_flag
• customer_profiles: user_id, acquisition_channel, geo, device_type, first_touch_date