Definitively Know Your CPA

Our client, a national fitness center, needed to understand how their mid-funnel, paid media campaigns were contributing to the overall growth of new members. With post-pandemic closures being lifted, the marketing team needed to revisit their media strategies and investments to determine the most cost-effective ways to drive new members in the “new normal.” Specifically, they were curious about what impact display and discovery brought through Google had on driving new membership sign-ups. By quantifying the media investments’ contribution, the team would have a more informed view on where to increase and decrease budgets to drive maximum efficiency.

Our data science and analytics (DSA) teams leveraged a control vs. exposed framework based on traditional scientific methodology. They kept the display and discovery media running without any changes and simultaneously removed the spending of display and discovery from the test group. For the test, the best approach was a split market approach that analyzes markets where the client advertises and builds the test and control groups in parity. Factors are considered based on market size, historic media spend, impressions and more. This creates two groups as equal as possible to achieve the cleanest results.

The incrementality test proved that mid-funnel, paid media efforts were efficient at driving new member sign-ups. The exposed group, which continues to run display and discovery, measured a positive lift of 5.16% on incremental new members thus proving to the marketing team the importance these mid-funnel, paid media campaigns were having on driving new memberships for the fitness brand. Additionally, the team uncovered new members measured under the incrementality testing were acquired at 43% less than the CPA reported as part of standard attribution.