Doing More With Less
Increasing Signups While Cutting Spend
The Challenge
Facing budget pressure heading into a new fiscal year, the challenge was clear: double our year-over-year grow acquisition volume while spending 30% less. The easy path would have been to simply cut spend and accept lower volume. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity to rebuild how we allocated budget and measured performance.
The Strategy
Rather than scaling back uniformly, I audited our entire paid media plan vs last year, looking at cost-per-acquisition by channel, creative performance, and funnel efficiency. The solution was broken down into three easy directions:
01
Where can we spend less?
02
Where can we spend more efficiently?
03
Where can we spend that’s new?
What I Did
Introduced creative at scale, with a consistent high output of variations, angles and hooks and a new testing framework
Overhauled our campaign structure to accommodate the ever-changing algorithm in our ad-platforms
Introduced dedicated budgets, campaign creative, and strict spending guidelines to build top-of-funnel impressions
Introduced a new brand awareness channel through creators
Campaign Performance
-50%
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
YoY
-27%
Acquisition Spend
YoY
+3%
Conversion Target
vs Budget
Dedicated Brand Video Campaign
A dedicated upper-funnel brand video ran during slower acquisition periods, deliberately building video impressions and brand recall, so that when budgets scaled up for peak season, there was already a warm audience ready to convert.
New Channel:
Content Creator Gifting Campaign
A concentrated content creator gifting campaign over a 2 week period across 20+ local creators helped to build an incremental 200K impressions and a 77% YoY lift in directly attributed conversions from creators.
Performance Creative at Scale
Went from 3-5 new ad creatives per month to 10-20 new variations with hook, angle, and format testing to help feed Meta’s new algorithm, along with a new campaign structure and creative testing system to scale up and down more efficiently.