Improving ROAS +84% With Data Driven Decisions at MyHD
Leveraging accurate attribution to enhance marketing efficiency
The Northbeam Team
March 1, 2023
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table of contents
TL;DR
Challenge: MyHD DJ Store faced difficulty identifying which marketing channels delivered the best returns, leading to inefficiencies in ad spend.
Solution: Northbeam's platform provided MyHD with accurate, actionable insights by consolidating first-party data and offering advanced attribution models.
Strategy: By analyzing performance across platforms, Juan reallocated budget from underperforming channels like Meta to higher-ROAS channels, including Google.
Outcome: MyHD achieved an 84% improvement in blended ROAS, a 21% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and optimized marketing efficiency.
“I had a slight feeling that Google Ads was the key to my financial success, but I wasn’t so sure until Northbeam made it clear that I needed to invest more in Google to see a better long-term ROI.” - Juan, MyHD DJ Store
Juan, an entrepreneur and small business owner based in Chile, had become accustomed to relying on instinct to make ad spend decisions. Amidst an economic crisis, his ecommerce business finds itself among the lucky few with profits increasing. Juan often juggles a myriad of daily tasks as an individual running his own business. So, swift decision-making to ensure his time and budget are utilized efficiently was of utmost importance.
After only two months on Northbeam, Juan was surprised by how quickly he was able to identify the best channels for finding new customers, reallocate his limited media budget, and drive growth – all of which were dependent on accurate data.
Unhelpful Data Aggregation and Vanity Metrics
Juan accepted that data to assess the performance of his digital ads was limited and ambiguous. He often questioned the data provided by ad platforms like Meta and Google – the revenue number the ad platforms claimed to realize was always more than he realized during that same period. It was clear that if he made media buying decisions based solely on Google’s data, then he would spend more on advertising than they were bringing in through sales.
Ultimately, Juan’s only choice was to make decisions based on his instinct, which wasn’t a risk worth taking for a small business amidst an economic crisis.
How First-Party Data Reduces Spend to Increase Profitability
Juan knew there had to be a better way – so he searched for a tool that could provide him with accurate marketing data to really learn what was driving revenue. Northbeam’s ability to collect and aggregate first-party data allowed Juan to access insights generated from a complete data set that wasn’t limited by privacy laws placed on 3rd party data providers (i.e., Google and Meta). A dashboard that is easy to navigate and interpret–with the ability to dig more granularly, which was crucial for Juan since his day-to-day as a business owner required him to wear many hats. “Northbeam makes it clear on any of the gaps you find on other platforms," Juan said.
Since Juan implemented Northbeam, he uses the platform as a single source of truth to ensure that he continues to realize more revenue than he is spending. After only 67 days on Northbeam, Juan was able to quickly compare Google versus Facebook’s contribution to sales. Northbeam’s data demonstrated that CAC was significantly higher on Facebook compared to Google–but ROAS had the potential to be higher since his prospective customers were finding him mostly through Google search. He re-allocated spending based on new insights, increasing ROAS on Google from 7.72 to 18.68.
The Growth Continues
Since using Northbeam to inform decisions, Juan’s total ad spend decreased – making room in his budget to continue using and spending on Northbeam. After reducing spend, Juan improved blended ROAS by +84% and reduced CAC by -21%. He refers to the platform as a free tool because his returns are far more than the cost of Northbeam. Aside from data fidelity and ease of use and decision-making, Juan feels supported by the regular Data Reviews conducted by his dedicated customer success manager and continues to find the Northbeam dashboard and the customer success team as invaluable.
Before Andrew took the reins as Tumble’s Director of Growth, he was deep in the trenches of digital marketing at MuteSix, a performance marketing agency. That’s where he first encountered the world of MTA (multi-touch attribution) platforms. “Northbeam was always at the top of the list,” Andrew recalls. “When I joined Tumble, I knew we needed a more sophisticated way to measure performance.”
For the first year, Tumble relied on platform-reported metrics (we see you, Meta) and last-click data, which, in Andrew’s words, “is more limited... since it's single session.” But something wasn’t adding up. The team knew there was a better way to see the full picture.
In December 2023, they turned to Northbeam.
“We needed a tool that gave us a unified view of performance across channels and helped us cut through the noise of over-inflated platform metrics,” Andrew said.
The Problem: Are Kids’ Rugs a Flop or a Hidden Goldmine?
Tumble launched a kids’ rug collection late last year, hoping to expand beyond their traditional washable rugs. After a slow start to sales, they made a more aggressive push to market the product via partnerships and Meta advertising, tailored toward parents of infants and toddlers.
That’s when they turned to Northbeam to cut through the noise.
Instead of guessing, they leaned on Northbeam’s product attribution tool to analyze performance across channels. They ramped up their Meta advertising, built a dedicated kids’ funnel, and did a campaign push with Babylist.
The Northbeam Unlock: Proving the Demand Was There
Northbeam didn’t just help Tumble track revenue—it helped them see what was actually driving it.
“When we pulled the numbers in Northbeam, we realized that our kids’ rug campaigns were performing at the same efficiency as our best-selling washable rugs,” Andrew says. “If we had just looked at platform-reported data, we wouldn’t have seen that.”
The real kicker? 40% of the attributed revenue from these campaigns was coming from those new kids’ designs. With over 80 other designs for customers to choose from outside of their kids collection, it was a very encouraging signal.
“That’s when we knew,” Andrew says. “There was real demand, and we felt comfortable scaling up.”
With that clarity, they doubled down, spending more aggressively on the kids’ funnel and shifting their approach on creative and audience targeting.
Clicks + Views = Better Decision-Making
Initially, Tumble used a conservative one-day click attribution. With their consideration window expanding as they scaled, Northbeam helped them realize they were missing a huge chunk of conversions by relying on one-day click.
“We knew that directionally our average time to convert and average number of touchpoints to convert had grown as they continued to scale up our customer acquisition efforts, and through additional testing and analysis, 7-day click/1-day view was a better performance indicator for us specifically.”
The addition of Northbeam's Clicks + Views Enhanced model has also given them more confidence when making optimizations on TikTok and AppLovin as they continued to expand on both channels.
By the Numbers: How Northbeam Transformed Tumble’s Growth
The proof is always in the data, and Tumble’s numbers tell a story of transformation:
Total revenue and new customer transactions have continued to grow, both up over 150% YoY with the help of Northbeam.
Kids Rug attributed revenue is up 183% over the last 60 days with Northbeam's data providing more confidence in scaling.
Meta spend increased by 275%, yielding a 335% boost in revenue.
“Northbeam hasn’t just helped us see our data—it has helped us act on it.” Andrew says.
Scaling Smarter, Not Harder
Now that Tumble has a full year of Northbeam data, they’re not just scaling—they’re scaling intelligently.
“Northbeam ROAS and New Customer ROAS, along with new visits percentage are my first checks every single day,” Andrew says. “We also use them to compare against holistic performance, and make real-time adjustments.”
And it’s not just about numbers—it’s about action.
“With Northbeam, we get insights that also help us make better creative decisions,” he adds. “We can drill down into what’s working, optimize funnels, and help validate spend in a way that wasn’t really possible prior to that.”
Why Northbeam?
Andrew doesn’t mince words: “Northbeam gives us a clearer, unified view of our ad performance. It helps us level the playing field, cut through inflated platform-reported metrics, and make more confident scaling decisions.”
And the result? Tumble isn’t just another DTC brand throwing money at ads and hoping for the best. They’re winning—because they have the data to prove it.
Founder and CEO Jack Haldrup started Dr. Squatch with a simple goal: create natural soap bars for men that didn’t have the synthetic ingredients found in most big brands. Jack suffered from a common skin condition and frequently shopped at farmer’s markets and health food stores to find soap that wouldn’t irritate his skin.
“But the average guy… isn’t going to hunt down these products and buy them from a farmer’s market,” Haldrup said, speaking to the San Diego Union Tribune. “And they’re also not shopping at health stores where these bars are widely sold.”
Jack began experimenting with making handmade soap and started selling bars out of his apartment. After getting rave reviews, Jack realized he had found a huge underserved market; men’s personal care was an afterthought compared to women’s products, and the space was long dominated by multi-national conglomerates such as P&G and Unilever.
It was ripe for disruption. Dr. Squatch combined this insight with savvy marketing that used tongue-in-cheek humor, most famously in their 2021 Super Bowl LV commercial, and the rest is history.
What started as a small batch DTC handmade soap store is now a $100M+ brand advertising across a dozen different channels. They’ve also expanded from DTC into retail: Dr. Squatch products fly off the shelves at Target, Walmart and other major retailers all over the nation.
Even with their massive success, the marketing team at Dr. Squatch still had a problem: they wanted to improve the performance of their sizable marketing spend. Before Northbeam, Dr. Squatch relied on flawed solutions like Google Analytics and in-platform reporting to make allocation decisions on their omnichannel ad spend – even though they knew data from those platforms were limited and biased. As the end of third-party cookies loomed ahead, the Dr. Squatch team decided it was the right time to upgrade their marketing attribution.
Dr. Squatch then turned to Northbeam as their top source of truth for marketing attribution.
We sat down with April Lonchar, Manager of Growth Strategy at Dr. Squatch, to discuss how they use Northbeam for everything from creative testing to performance benchmarking.
Northbeam's data as the centerpiece
“We’ve been with Northbeam since early 2023, so we’re probably a bit further along than most folks with embedding the platform into our ongoing routines,” April said.
“We actively advertise across most major channels so our media buyers rely heavily on Northbeam to gauge performance. They’re looking at metrics regularly in the Sales Page to decide whether to continue investing or not. Our Head of Creative also checks Northbeam frequently because that team is constantly experimenting with new concepts and making tweaks based on what we’re seeing. My job is to be the main conduit and basically translate what these Northbeam numbers mean for our teams.”
Because both paid and organic efforts flow into revenue from new customers, Dr. Squatch uses Northbeam as a single source of truth when making paid media decisions. The company relies on the platform to analyze the interaction between channels and identify root causes of growth.
“For example, when we saw a dip in new customers on our online storefronts, Northbeam helped us identify that organic acquisition was the primary driver. We just wouldn’t have been able to get that level of insight before Northbeam.”
Going further with Custom Metrics
Dr. Squatch started by selling bar soap but has since expanded into deodorant, lotion, hair care, and cologne. As the brand grew, the team shifted their focus from simply acquiring customers to evaluating the entire lifecycle, encouraging customers to purchase subscriptions and bundled products. These repeat buyers are valuable because they can increase customer lifetime value and allow for promotional pricing to get people in the door.
This strategy gives Dr. Squatch more flexibility with CAC targets and new customer offers because the brand is confident they can make up for it over the average customer’s lifetime by using lifecycle retargeting to expand across product categories.
April described how she was chatting with her Northbeam success manager about tracking subscription performance when they recommended trying Northbeam’s Custom Metrics. Instead of having to export Northbeam data into another spreadsheet, Custom Metrics allows April to create bespoke metrics to see how many customers were actually signing up for subscriptions.
“I created two new Custom Metrics in Northbeam: Take Rate and Upsell Rate,” April said. “Take Rate looks at the percentage of new customers who immediately convert to subscribers while Upsell Rate tracks the percentage of returning customers who then decide to sign up for a subscription.”
“Between the two, I’m able to quickly decipher which campaigns are the most successful at finding and converting subscribers.”
As part of her daily routine with Northbeam, April will sometimes give “red zone” ads another chance if they’ve shown promise at driving subscriptions. These campaigns get a longer leash than they otherwise would because the brand can stomach a higher CAC in exchange for the higher LTV gains. New channels also get judged on their ability to drive subscribers in addition to the team’s normal KPIs on efficiency and conversions.
Dr. Squatch uses two other Custom Metrics to help track subscription performance: Discount Rate and Return Rate. Like many popular DTC brands, Dr. Squatch uses discounts to entice customers in the door to try their products. Generally, customers love their soaps and other products so much that they stick around and buy more, but the team still wanted to track discount activity and have visibility into how many dollars were being spent to keep CAC at healthy levels.
April defines Discount Rate as the percentage of revenue that wouldn’t occur without promotions, and splits that out into new and returning customers. She’s able to look at each channel and decide if the discounts are worth the squeeze as an additional data point. April also layers Return Rate on top of that analysis, defined here as the amount of refunds coming from any given marketing channel.
“It’s important for us to offer a great customer experience, but getting too many returns can really eat into our margins,” April said. “I keep an eye on whether certain channels or cohorts are over-indexing on the amount of discounts and returns we would expect from an average campaign. If they’re already in the ‘red zone’ then it’s a pretty simple decision to cut those ads because returns can quickly inflate CAC beyond where we’d like to see it.”
Improving marketing ROI while staying future-proof
“I’m not really sure how I would do my job without Northbeam,” April said. “A big part of my role is allocating resources every week to all of our channels. Our finance team sets overall targets, and I’ll then tweak their recommendations based on my experience seeing the numbers every day. Our media buyers take it from there to divvy up that spend within their own platforms.”
“None of that would be possible without the trust we have in Northbeam’s data and modeling.”
Northbeam has become a key tool in Dr. Squatch’s tech stack, but more importantly, insights from the platform have proven invaluable in improving their commercial and topline performance.
In the first full year of using Northbeam, AOV improved +3% across the board – no small feat for a company of Dr. Squatch’s size – and the team has continued to build on that momentum by experimenting and innovating their marketing strategies; the company just closed an impressive BFCM and holiday season with revenue growing +31.8% and ROAS up +3.8% in Q4 ‘23 compared to the previous quarter.
Not only did Dr. Squatch effectively build and capture demand, they even managed to lower CAC -2.9% during a period with elevated CPMs and competition.
“We’re really excited to continue partnering with Northbeam as privacy changes - such as Google Chrome deprecating cookies - make our jobs just that much harder,” April said. “We initially picked Northbeam because we thought it would be a future-proof solution for our analytics needs and we look forward to pushing our capabilities with new features and releases.”
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“Northbeam is my single source of truth and an analytics tool that every advanced marketer needs. I don’t even look at Facebook’s stats anymore and rely only on Northbeam to make tactical adjustments. Northbeam shows me metrics I didn’t even know to look for.“ –Carly London, Marketing Consultant, KITSCH
KITSCH is a Los Angeles-based women’s accessories brand built on positivity and hard work through supporting its community with elevated beauty products. Founded in 2010 by Cassandra Thurswell, the $87M brand started with a simple hair tie before expanding into beauty and personal care, including a popular silk sleep line. After iOS14 changed the digital privacy landscape, the brand grappled with identifying signals from noise across all channels, but found Facebook especially difficult to figure out. KITSCH realized they could no longer rely on third-party data and looked to find a first-party solution for the next phase of their growth journey.
Wasted Spend from Incomplete Platform Data
KITSCH was used to making marketing allocation decisions based on in-platform data. However, after iOS14 reduced the efficacy of Facebook’s tracking, Carly London, KITSCH’s Marketing Consultant, noticed the ROAS and revenue metrics she was seeing weren’t matching with reality and struggled to understand the true performance of her campaigns.
“It’s so confusing to figure out what’s really going on with Facebook. I wasn’t able to get a complete and accurate picture of performance,” London said. “Sometimes Facebook would report positive ROAS on campaigns but I wouldn’t see results after we spent more.”
She realized the platforms were using limited modeling practices to extrapolate favorable results for their own products, even if underlying metrics like CTR or time spent on site indicated questionable traffic quality. Tired of wasting spend on campaigns that weren’t driving results, London began looking for an attribution software that doesn’t leverage third-party data or modeling that she could rely on for objective metrics.
The Northbeam Difference: First Party Data and World-Class Modeling
After onboarding, KITSCH was able to take advantage of Northbeam’s proprietary pixel to begin collecting first-party data, ending their reliance on in-platform reporting. Northbeam doesn’t use any third-party platform data in their attribution modeling, so KITSCH immediately noticed more plausible metrics that were in line with revenue performance. Northbeam also gave the team a sharper understanding of customer journeys by leveraging world-class Machine Learning models to accurately stitch users across sessions through a bespoke identity and device graph.
Armed with a clear picture of how campaigns were actually performing in Facebook, KITSCH began setting new benchmarks based on Northbeam’s attribution modeling. London used Northbeam’s Clicks Only model to compare ROAS across different campaigns to identify top-of-the-funnel strategies responsible for bottom-of-the-funnel conversions. Northbeam uncovered several hidden prospecting campaigns that Facebook had been underselling, so London began scaling spend to take advantage. With these insights, KITSCH was able to increase their Facebook ROAS +22% and revenue +60% while actually lowering CAC -17%.
With the top channel back on track and performing well, Yingying Kuang, Senior Director of Marketing, turned her attention towards optimizing KITSCH’s media mix to find new audiences. The team had been experimenting with Google Ads, but couldn’t figure out if spending on other platforms would have an incremental impact on their bottom line. Kuang used Northbeam’s Common Click Touchpoints feature to analyze platform interaction and discovered that Branded Search overlapped heavily with Facebook prospecting campaigns with an excellent conversion rate of about 50%. KITSCH now spends almost 20% of their media budget on Google with revenue up +88% and ROAS +70%.
Pursuing Omni-Channel Perfection
Northbeam gave KITSCH a much better grasp of marketing performance and a holistic understanding of which touchpoints were ultimately driving sales. Thanks to Northbeam’s first-party data and modeling, KITSCH was able to make effective allocation decisions driving +75% more revenue and improving ROAS +39% across all channels. KITSCH even saw an increase in spend efficiency with CAC decreasing 21%.
“The difference after Northbeam was night and day,” explained London. “We were stumbling around in the dark before, but Northbeam helped us cut through the fog and gave us the confidence to trust our metrics. We’re able to make smart and timely choices, and thanks to that we’re on the path to profitable growth.”
KITSCH continues to leverage Northbeam by using the platform’s ability to stitch users across multi-platform journeys to optimize their media mix. Due to the potential they saw with Google Branded Search, they are now testing out Bing and TikTok ads because they’re both discovery platforms. Although they only represent a small portion of total spend, KITSCH is already seeing promising results on both: Bing revenue increased +175% and ROAS +61% while TikTok ROAS also increased +64%, due to an efficiency gain with CAC down 35%.
TikTok's unique strength lies in its highly engaging, view-driven content, making it a performance driver for many disruptive DTC brands. Yet, traditional click-based attribution methods often fail to capture its full impact, leading advertisers to undervalue its contribution to revenue and customer growth.
Northbeam’s new Clicks + Deterministic Views (DV) model bridges this gap. By combining TikTok’s impressions with Northbeam’s infinite look back and deterministic attribution, brands now have a reliable, data-driven way to measure TikTok’s full performance. This case study details the results from 15 advertisers participating in the CDV beta program during the critical October 1st to November 30th, 2024 period, comparing it to Northbeam's well-established Clicks-Only model.
The Challenge: Showing TikTok’s True Impact
Despite TikTok’s low CPMs and ability to drive massive awareness, brands often struggle with a fundamental question:
“We believe it works, but how can we measure the true impact of TikTok?
The skepticism stemmed from a reliance on traditional click-based attribution, which undervalued TikTok’s view-heavy contribution. This lack of visibility led advertisers to pull back spend or prioritize channels with clearer, albeit incomplete, attribution models.
Northbeam’s CDV model is a transformative shift in attribution, designed to provide brands with fully factual, deterministic data while remaining conservative in its revenue attribution. Here’s how it works:
Foundation of Accuracy: The model starts with factual Clicks-Only data, ensuring a solid, verified baseline. This data is 100% 1st Party, allowing us to provide an infinite attribution window to capture every page view, ad click, and site visit.
Layered TikTok Data: Verified TikTok impressions are integrated, allowing the model to track view-through impact with precision.
Conservative Attribution: Views are validated against Northbeam’s tracking methodology to ensure accuracy and consistency.
This consistent, factual approach ensures that the data is not only reliable but actionable. As Ryan Kovach, Northbeam’s Head of Media Strategy, explains: “This new lens of incorporating views into attribution increases the reliability of our data and its power in guiding better decisions. Brands are already using this approach to make precise campaign optimizations.”
This new model can help showcase the impact of TikTok views and we are confident that this will provide advertisers a more accurate set of deterministic data to make decisions on which campaigns to scale up or down on a daily basis.
Performance Results: CDV vs. Clicks-Only
The beta program revealed the transformative power of the CDV model compared to the Clicks-Only baseline. By design, this model will always provide a lift over Clicks Only but the magnitude of lift for performance metrics is impactful to highlight the full value of impression-focused platforms like TikTok.
The following metrics were pulled from our 15 first advertisers on the beta using data from October 1st, 2024, to November 30th, 2024, using Northbeam’s Clicks Only model vs. the new Clicks + Deterministic Views model. This sample is analyzing over $7 million in TikTok Spend and over $10 Million in TikTok Attributed Revenue:
Transactions and Revenue:
Transactions Lift: +328.04% TikTok campaigns drove a threefold increase in attributed transactions. This first metric is important in quantifying the additional transactions that TikTok played a part in when including views to the model.
Revenue Lift: +354.00% Overall revenue attributed to TikTok grew more than threefold.
New Customer Percentage:
New Customers % Lift: +44.23% The share of new customers attributed to TikTok increased by 44%, solidifying its role as a discovery driver. This is a super promising metric, TikTok looked strong already in terms of new customer acquisition with click-based models.
First-Time Revenue Lift: +388.34% Revenue from first-time customers skyrocketed, showcasing TikTok’s effectiveness in customer acquisition.
Performance Metrics
Conversion Rate Lift: +328.04% The enhanced model revealed significantly higher efficiency in converting traffic into sales.
ROAS Lift: +354.00% Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) improved dramatically, proving TikTok’s profitability as an acquisition channel.
First-Time ROAS Lift: +388.34% ROAS from first-time customers nearly quadrupled, reflecting TikTok’s ability to convert high-value new customers efficiently.
CAC (First-Time) Improvement: -54.83% Customer Acquisition Costs for first-time customers dropped significantly, making TikTok campaigns more cost-effective.
Key Insights for Advertisers
The enhanced visibility provided by CDV enables brands to:
Validate Campaign Performance: CDV gives brands a complete view of how TikTok drives both awareness and revenue.
Optimize Spend: Advertisers can confidently scale budgets, knowing they’re supported by precise data.
Improve Retargeting Strategies: Insights from CDV refine retargeting windows, especially for brands with higher AOVs or longer consideration cycles.
Scale Creative Testing: With clear attribution of views and clicks, brands can effectively test and optimize creative strategies to maximize impact.
Customer Impact: Real Results from BYLT basics on the Beta Program
One beta participant, BYLT Basics, a rapidly growing DTC apparel brand, leveraged CDV to unlock TikTok’s full potential during the competitive holiday shopping season.
BYLT historically saw favorable auction costs on TikTok and felt it could be a strong top of funnel channel but, click-based ROAS was lower than what they saw on other social channels, which limited their ability to scale.
TikTok CPM’s were $10 cheaper than other paid social channels and $30 cheaper than our search platforms.
BYLT’s Key Outcomes using Clicks + Deterministic Views:
With the additional lens of Clicks + Deterministic Views, the customer was able to see during the most impactful weeks of the year that TikTok was moving the needle(compared to what we were only able to see on a click basis):
As TikTok's CPM's held steady through BFCM while other platforms crept up, BYLT increased TikTok ad spend by 54% YoY, while maintaining efficiency.
Achieved a 30% higher efficiency compared to other social platforms during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Saw a 44% increase in new customers, confirming TikTok’s role in driving first-time purchases.
Conclusion: A New Era for TikTok Attribution
The CDV model isn’t just an exciting innovation; it’s a rigorously factual tool for better decision-making:
The Solution: Northbeam Clicks + Deterministic Views: The model relies on verified impressions, reattributing fair distribution of revenue to TikTok.
Future-Ready: Northbeam plans to expand the model to include impression data from additional platforms, broadening its reliability and application.
Proven Success: Brands in the beta program have already used this data to drive meaningful optimizations, scaling their TikTok efforts profitably.
Northbeam’s Clicks + Deterministic Views model delivers a paradigm shift in how brands measure and scale their TikTok campaigns. By unlocking TikTok’s full potential as a performance driver, advertisers can now make smarter, data-driven decisions that lead to profitable growth.
This Q4, brands using CDV achieved dramatic improvements in ROAS, conversion rates, and customer acquisition, positioning themselves for continued success in 2025. With Northbeam at the forefront of innovation, the future of attribution has never looked more promising.Contact your Northbeam Rep to get setup on Clicks + Deterministic Views today!
Omnilux is well-known today as a cult-favorite medical-grade LED light therapy for home use, but the company actually started in 2003 by selling medical devices directly to dermatologists and aestheticians for use in clinics around the world.
When Omnilux dove into the direct-to-consumer space, their customers changed, and so did their go-to-market challenges. Bringing this FDA-cleared, dermatologist-recommended therapy device to a new audience has been a process of learning and iteration since the beginning.
We spoke with Omnilux President Quinten Stanier and Chief Marketing Officer Layne Ergas about what the past years have looked like from a marketing perspective, and how they’ve been able to find success and unlock their target audience with Northbeam.
Holistic insights for confident decision making
“The direct-to-consumer space was a fairly new experience for us,” Quinten said. “To measure our marketing performance, we were using Google Analytics, in-platform data — Meta, Google, Pinterest, etc. — and Google Data Studio with several different API connections. It ultimately turned into a pretty unruly Frankenstein attribution tool that would often break. It was probably down 30% of the time. We were constantly fixing it and never really trusted the data that was coming in.”
Omnilux knew that it was doing well — it knew that its business was growing — but it couldn’t tie this performance back to specific marketing levers.
“We knew what was going in and what was coming out, but it was really about optimizing and understanding how we were scaling and if we were scaling as efficiently as possible.”
This desire for better data led them to search for a marketing intelligence platform that could give them the information they needed to feel secure in where they were spending each dollar of their marketing budget.
“We wanted to get a holistic view of performance and attribution and be able to see everything in one place so we could feel more confident in the data,” Layne said. “We evaluated other marketing intelligence platforms but Northbeam was the most fully integrated with the ad platforms that we were using, and it allowed us to be more flexible and customize reports. We have a fairly large international presence as well and Northbeam has enabled us to hone in on that side of our business.”
“Northbeam provides us with insights into our performance and shows us where we can improve, and the machine learning capabilities were better than the models that the competition was offering.”
“I also love the fact that Northbeam allows us to zoom in and zoom out down to the creative level, platform level, country level, and ad level — it gives us a lot of flexibility to better understand the customer journey.”
But access to data is one thing — how do you know what good performance looks like, and how do you get there?
“It’s a lot harder to hack media buying than it was maybe four or five years ago due to IOS changes,” Quinten said. “Understanding what’s a good thumb-stop rate, view-through rate, etcetera allows us to not just scale but inform future creative ideation and strategy down the road.”
True cross-functional value
But Northbeam hasn’t just facilitated the marketing team’s strategy, it’s also a go-to source of truth for other key team members across the organization.
“We have a lot of people in Northbeam pulling data,” Quinten said. “Whether it’s Layne, our CMO, or myself, the president. Our CFO looks there as well, and it allows for full functionality for the whole team.
“One of our goals has been to connect marketing and finance and have finance understand the marketing metrics that drive growth and profitability. Northbeam has been really helpful with that.”
Omnilux’s 2024 priorities
“One of our top goals this year is measuring performance by product type and product line so we can better understand how each product contributes to the overall business and where we can find scale,” Layne said. “Product mix evaluation is a really big focus for us this year, and we’re looking to get much more granular at the platform and geography level as well.”
“We’ve been working with Northbeam to get those views set up and they’ve been great at facilitating that project.”
“Another significant focus for us is investing in affiliate and influencer marketing. We engage with both traditional affiliates and PR-type affiliates. Northbeam has been instrumental in helping us understand how these distinct types of partnerships contribute to driving awareness and conversions.”
Omnilux has a broad range of channels across the customer journey funnel where it can reach its audience. “We’re kind of everywhere, so it’s really been about getting a better view of all the different platforms.”
“This year we’re doing a lot of landing page testing and investing more in personalized experiences for various ad campaigns and influencer partnerships,” said Layne. “Another area of focus for us is on subscriptions and retention. We have a range of skincare products where we offer subscriptions and we’re trying to better understand customer LTV by product and offer type.”
“Given the scale that we’ve observed over the last couple of years, the question we keep asking ourselves is: where is our next dollar best spent?” Quinten said. “And where are we hitting a point of diminishing returns? What is a ceiling and what is a glass ceiling?”
MMM+ blends art and science
With MMM+, Omnilux hopes to answer these questions and more.
“The MTA tool is great for understanding what’s happened,” Quinten said. “The MMM+ tool will help us better understand what’s going to happen and give us a range of outcomes to better run the business… it allows us to be smarter marketers and make actionable decisions with data in real-time.”
“We started advertising on TV in August and that has expanded our capability to spend on other channels because of the increased brand awareness,” Quinten said. “Just because something isn’t easily attributable with a click doesn’t mean it’s not producing positive outcomes for the business. We're leveraging MMM+ to better understand the relationship between TV spend and its ability to increase scale on other channels.”
The metrics that matter
Beyond MMM+ and MTA, the Omnilux marketing team makes sure to keep up with certain metrics on a regular basis to understand their marketing performance against goals.
“I look at spend and MER mainly,” Quinten said. “And if I know we are on budget and hitting our MER target, CAC and other metrics are typically strong.
“But it gets more granular as the responsibilities on various teams become more definitive. Our creative director, for example, is looking at thumb-stop rate and channel-specific data related to certain creative types.”
An unbiased outside perspective
Northbeam’s platform provides data, and our customer service provides insights into that data that a customer may not otherwise see.
“Our team is so constantly entrenched in the silo of Omnilux,” Quinten said. “Sometimes it's good to have an outside perspective that can look at our data in an unbiased way. They can make calls and ask questions like: why is this number this way? There are always valuable nuggets that challenge the way we think about the business and there’s great value in that.”
“We have access to our own data, but Northbeam has access to millions of dollars of spend every month across a ton of different categories. They have a good snapshot of the entire industry to an extent. That definitely helps when we have our conversations with them.”
“It’s just nice to have a team of people that we can check in with and ask for advice and recommendations,” Layne said. “The Northbeam team has been a huge help with getting our affiliate and influencer programs filtering in the way we want them to — that was a process that was really hard to wrap my brain around because of the various affiliate types we engage with and manage through a variety of platforms.”
“I feel like I can always reach out to Northbeam if I need advice or if I want to look at something a certain way but don’t know how to set up a view,” Layne said. “They are truly helpful with that.”
“Northbeam has been instrumental in making sure we find and recruit high-value customers who are likely to repurchase in the future for growth. We’re able to have visibility - by channel - into acquisition costs and lifetime value to make sure we’re keeping them at healthy levels.” –Dan Pingree, CMO, PetMeds
Founded in 1996, PetMeds makes buying prescription medication online easy and convenient for pet owners in the US and Canada. As pet ownership and spending continue to rise, PetMeds found it difficult to navigate complex customer journeys that spanned dozens of touchpoints to identify customers who could drive recurring revenue with subscriptions or repeat purchases. To complicate matters, competition has only intensified with other brands over the past several years. The team needed a new solution to identify which marketing initiatives were profitably acquiring new customers who would be more likely to return.
Data Silos and the Limitations of Platform-Native Data
Prior to Northbeam, PetMeds relied on a variety of tools including SAP Commerce and Google Analytics across their marketing and sales teams, which meant much of their data lived in separate, siloed databases. The accuracy and quality of this data was also unreliable due to inconsistent implementation, resulting in an incomplete and fractured view of commercial performance. Due to these data silos, the team struggled to identify which marketing strategies and customer touchpoints were actually driving impact and revenue, and couldn’t effectively leverage all of their data to make opportunistic media-buying decisions. As a result, PetMeds often overspent on their top channels, leading to wasted marketing dollars that could’ve been better allocated elsewhere.
Furthermore, these solutions provided mostly blended metrics and didn’t distinguish between first-time or returning customers. The team had extremely limited visibility into performance by customer type, obscuring their ability to identify actionable insights into what was actually driving repeat purchases.
“We couldn’t figure out how to efficiently recruit new customers, and were losing ground to our competitors,” said Dan Pingree, CMO at PetMeds. “Keeping acquisition costs at healthy levels is crucial for our business, but we were struggling to find a solution to help us do that.”
How PetMeds uses Northbeam to Find High-Value Customers
Next, the team focused on keeping CAC healthy by acquiring valuable customers more likely to purchase again in the future. They used Northbeam’s Clicks Only attribution model to compare acquisition costs and revenue across different channels side-by-side to identify the strategies that were driving the most success at the top of the funnel. Ultimately, the team identified the biggest opportunity on Google. Instead of spreading budget between multiple channels, they scaled their Google spend because it accounted for 36% of purchases from new customers.
Finally, PetMeds looked to increase customer retention by honing in on subscriptions and repeat purchases that could sustainably drive lifetime value. The team used Northbeam’s Customer Type feature to split out key KPIs such as ROAS by first-time and returning customers, revealing clear insights into what campaigns were converting throughout the funnel. This feature also allowed PetMeds to uncover previously hidden opportunities that didn’t look promising at first, but were highly impactful at driving return purchases. For example, paid retargeting campaigns only saw a +6% increase in first-time ROAS, but a +74% increase in returning ROAS.
Fueling Sustainable and Profitable Growth
Using Northbeam’s advanced attribution-modeling, PetMeds gained a deeper understanding into which prospecting campaigns and strategies were performing well and which weren’t. By identifying the exact touchpoints and customer journeys that were driving traffic from new customers, PetMeds decreased overall CAC -21% while increasing the number of orders by +26%.
PetMeds continues to explore new ways of using Northbeam to grow their brand – including using the LTV tab to track customer lifetime value by the first product a customer purchased. This data not only ensures that customers are coming back and repurchasing, but also helps inform the team on which product(s) to push during key selling periods.
“If you don’t have Northbeam, you just don’t know what happens between your spend and the revenue generated. There’s immense business value in understanding the steps between, as well as having the accurate data and clean UI needed to see how the whole marketing mix plays together.” – Connor MacDonald, CMO, The Ridge
The Ridge launched with a simple goal: make wallets better. Two kickstarters, nine years, and 3 million wallets later, the now well-known company is applying the same innovative design to even more everyday items – and with the help of a new attribution tool. Knowing that expansion would mean more data and more complex customer journeys, the company knew it needed to move on from the limited platform analytics to stay on top of consumer behaviors.
In-Platform Biases and Customer Journey Blind Spots
As a premium accessories brand, The Ridge often struggled with one very specific problem: unsustainably high customer acquisition costs (CAC). They simply didn’t have enough insights to understand what was happening between spend and conversion.
“Google Analytics (GA) is a good starter tool because it’s simple and easy to use, but that also means it’s rigid,” said Connor MacDonald, CMO at The Ridge. “For example, Google prioritizes its own search function, so we saw our GA display performance lose attribution to branded search, which created holes in our reports that made it difficult to know which campaign or which customer path was having the greatest impact.”
Moreover, The Ridge’s marketing team faced issues with in-platform data, like Facebook Analytics, where they saw as much as a 70% discrepancy between it and GA. Without baseline first-party data to measure against, it’s impossible to determine where ad platforms overstate their own performance metrics.
The Flexibility of Custom Labeling Lead = Profitability
Once The Ridge integrated Northbeam, its first order of business was to improve their CAC. They started by using the Automatic Label Rules to organize their data and to quickly identify which top-of-funnel efforts were driving the most awareness with new customers.
“Custom labeling makes it possible to instill your intent in your various campaigns and structure your reporting in a very intricate way,” explained MacDonald. “We created landing page labels, and labels based on things like ad concepts rather than targeting or platform, which gave an unbiased view into interest and helped quickly identify where it made the most sense to pause or increase spend.”
Northbeam’s deep ML capabilities enable it to learn and automatically apply labels to future content as well – a feature The Ridge was quick to leverage. Once labeling and reporting was on autopilot, the company was able to understand which awareness tactics captured the highest-intent audiences. By doubling down on these tactics, it boosted performance across the rest of the marketing funnel.
“Most people are looking at campaign performance within the various platforms they use,” added MacDonald. “That can be useful, but you can’t overstate the value in an intricate and unbiased view of all channels in one place. When you have both a top level and granular view at the same time, you can actually understand the nuances in your customer journeys and make really lucrative decisions.”
Onward and Upward (Post iOS14.5)
Using Northbeam’s custom labeling and proprietary attribution models deeper insights into customer journeys, audience cohorts, and media spend for The Ridge. The company improved ROAS by +24% and MER by +15% across all channels. As far as CAC goes, they improved their spend efficiency by 24%.
Not only that, but as the competition floundered in the wake of iOS14.5, The Ridge increased marketing spend +147% in 2021, increasing site visits +205% and ultimately growing revenue +239% year over year.
“We went from looking at Northbeam once a week to every day after the iOS update,” said MacDonald. “The first-party data focus gives us the accurate baseline we need, and we’re able to continuously give credit to the channels that created the intent rather than the ones that captured the conversion.”
Today, The Ridge is exploring additional functionality within the Northbeam platform to continue optimizing its ad buying strategies. This includes taking a deep dive into accrual vs. cash spend reporting in order to better understand how much new customer revenue is attributable to day-1 spend–this has helped us distill exactly what we want to be getting and making that replicable.
The Oodie started with the wearable blanket. Now it's on a mission to make the most snuggly, cuddly, and softer-than-soft comfort wear in the world. It’s the top-rated wearable blanket in the world, but it’s also home to other cozy wearables, from sleepwear to beach outfits to pet accessories and beyond. .
In 2022, The Oodie brought on Northbeam as their marketing intelligence platform to help them grow in key markets and mature their marketing data.
We spoke to Sigrid Lundborg, The Oodie’s Head of Paid Media, about how her Northbeam usage has evolved and what value she gets out of having accurate, first-party data at her fingertips.
Why Northbeam?
There comes a time in every company’s life when they need better data to unlock better decision-making. That time for The Oodie was March 2022.
“We were looking for a partner with a more advanced attribution tool that leverages first-party data to provide deeper insights into the customer journey,” Sigrid said. “Given the rapidly-changing landscape, having a solution that is effective both now and in the future is extremely compelling.”
“Northbeam gives us that holistic view over our acquisition efforts. It helps us really understand what impact these channels are driving and the near-real-time data gives us the ability to pivot and scale fast and hard with data that we can trust.”
The metrics that matter
Sigrid spends a lot of time focusing on new versus returning customer metrics.
“Aside from metrics like CAC and ROAS, being able to fully analyze our percentage of new visits and what customers are being driven from which platforms from a first time or returning perspective has enabled us to evolve our strategy greatly.”
When she’s not doing incrementality testing, that is.
“As a paid team, we’re really looking to level up our sophistication in terms of performance metrics. So we’re digging into understanding the incremental value and what that means for what marketing is doing so we can maximize our efforts.”
“We’re currently conducting a lot of incrementality tests,” Sigrid said. “This helps us look at the campaign level to understand what’s really happening and what activities are actually driving incremental value. Is it a sale? Is it a new product launch? Or is it business as usual?”
The Oodie goes global
Breaking into a new market is tricky — Sigrid and her team would know. They manage The Oodie’s paid media around the world, from Australia to New Zealand all the way to Europe, the United Kingdom, The United States, and Canada.
“It’s quite a few markets, and they’re all at a different stage of their life cycle in terms of market penetration,” Sigrid said. “Some are quite mature and others have different brand awareness levels. We do need to tailor our approach somewhat and Northbeam has been a big help.”
“With Northbeam, we can have that comprehensive view across the customer journey and understand all the different touchpoints and channels and what’s happening in each, because what happens in one market doesn’t necessarily happen in another market. They’re all quite unique.”
“We test different channels and find that they do have different uptakes in different markets, probably because those platforms themselves have different penetration across different markets. Which is all quite interesting. Different products and designs also perform differently across geographies.”
Customer service you can rely on
Aside from trustworthy data she can use to unlock decision making, Sigrid cited customer service as one of Northbeam’s main selling points.
“The team has been phenomenal in their support and aligning with our goals to ensure that we’re using Northbeam to its full potential,” Sigrid said. “They’re very efficient at answering any questions that we have, and they’re always open to assisting with any data pulls or reports.”
“Northbeam has former media buyers supporting us, which makes it much easier to gain actionable insights and view the data in new and interesting ways. Their expertise helps us interpret metrics and trends, allowing us to make more informed decisions.”
“It feels like Northbeam is an extension of our team, in a way,” Sigrid said. “I feel really confident asking them any questions that we might have, or even just asking for their views or opinions on some of our reports or approaches. Having a team that is so knowledgeable in this space has been a massive benefit.”
For over 170 years, Timex has been a trusted name in watchmaking, blending classic designs with innovative craftsmanship. By partnering with Northbeam, Timex DTC unlocked significant growth opportunities, achieved record-breaking revenue, and redefined their marketing attribution and media strategies.
We spoke with Dan Gallagher, Director of Performance Marketing at Timex Group, about the improvements he’s been able to unlock with Northbeam to bolster Timex’s rapid direct-to-consumer (DTC) growth.
Timex opts for data integrity
“I joined Timex Group’s DTC team in 2022. Timex Group is a large organization operating multiple brands with DTC channel being a main area of focus for hypergrowth.”
“Prior to Timex, I worked at a brand that had every tool under the sun when it came to media measurement,” said Dan. “We had media mix modeling (MMM) that was custom-built in-house. We had everything you could imagine to effectively evaluate the success of our investments.”
“My charter was to onboard a measurement partner that could start to give us a full picture of what was being driven by our spend. We wanted consolidated views. We wanted deduplicated attribution. We wanted multiple attribution models. With that in mind, we evaluated the space back in 2023 and selected Northbeam as our partner because of what seemed to be a strong process for attribution and transparency. If we ever need the back-end data, we can get it.”
“There are a lot of fancy user interfaces out there that make it look like you’re going to get a lot on the surface, but when we evaluated our options there seemed to be some holes in data processing and transparency of how accessible the data would be for ad hoc analysis, which was another priority of ours when selecting a partner.”
Northbeam helps Timex make the case
“With Northbeam, we unlocked attribution at the tactical level, the creative level, and allowed us to scale our programs and justify our investments internally. We were able to illustrate different investment models and make the case for the path to drive the DTC business forward.”
Dan and team started to leverage Northbeam’s MMM solution in 2024 as a trusted tool to justify substantial shifts in their media investment.
Picture this: historically just under half of Timex DTC’s media mix has been allocated to Meta. Per Northbeam’s MMM recommendations, during the BFCM season, they raised that allocation significantly which saw the following results:
Before utilizing these MMM recommendations (July through September) their total business revenue was up double digits YoY.
After implementing MMM and utilizing the platform’s recommendations (November 1st through 23rd), their total business revenue was 3x YoY.
Then, after trusting the MMM recommendations to increase their contributions to Meta further during Cyber Weekend, total business revenue doubled YoY.
“We have been happy with the product and plan to continue to work with Northbeam into 2025.” Dan said. “Q4 2024 was so great for us in large part because of the insights we received from Northbeam and my team’s ability to apply the learnings across their channels.”
Turnkey MMM leads to Timex’s best quarter yet
“Even before Northbeam, our primary metric was incremental return on investment (IROAS),” said Dan. “When we onboarded with Northbeam, we used that same principle and IROAS was the driving factor in day-to-day optimizations. Now that we have MMM, we’ve created new incrementality factors that we can apply to the MTA view of performance that has given us a clearer picture of where and how we should be spending our dollars and resources.”
“Before we signed on with Northbeam, we were using another MMM tool for a year. It required manual work of pulling together data via each ad platform and lacked automation. We also were capped at the number of models we could run in a given year.”
“With Northbeam, having all the connections in place, you just make all your connections via native integrations and go. The barrier of entry was low as a new customer and we were able to start using the tool quickly.”
“Once we started getting regular reads on performance via MMM we could confidently start saying: Meta is actually performing 2x better than we thought it was via MTA alone, and other channels are underperforming. The new data from MMM led us to completely change our media mix leading to a great end of 2024.”
MTA + MMM = magic
“We’re using MTA as a guide to keep us on track on a day-to-day basis, and MMM on a monthly basis as an investment planning tool to help guide our media mix for the following month and validate IROAS trends from previous months. The combination of the two tools has given us the tools necessary to continue our growth trajectory as we introduce our brand and offerings to new customers.”
“We’ve been with Northbeam now for over 18 months and are pleased with the results thus far.”
Motion is magic, according to shoe brand Kizik. And we agree, especially if that motion looks like Kizik’s performance since it was founded: an upward curve reflecting a strong product and a powerful marketing engine.
Kizik’s comfortable and attractive shoes are unapologetically hand’s free; a novel innovation with multiple patents to its name and the growth to show for it.
Founded in 2017, Kizik entered a licensing partnership between Nike and its parent company, HandsFree Labs, in 2019, signaling the growing impact and popularity of slip-on sneakers as well as the unique value of its proprietary technology.
In 2021, Kizik started working with Northbeam to help capture data and better bring its revolutionary product to a direct-to-consumer audience.
We sat down with Jesse Semchuck, Kizik’s Head of Acquisition, and Brett Swensen, Kizik’s VP of Marketing to talk about how Northbeam supports Kizik to bring the magic of motion to a growing audience and make great marketing decisions along the way.
I didn’t know what I’d been missing
“I started using Northbeam in 2022 when I joined Kizik,” Jesse said. “And I didn’t really know what I’d been missing. At previous companies, we used last-click, Google Sheets, and Excel, but nothing that would show us the true lifetime value (LTV) like Northbeam does.”
But Brett was around during the transition to Northbeam. “We were maturing as a brand at the time and growing pretty rapidly and we started to expand our channels,” Brett said. “I remember meeting with the Northbeam team and laying out some of our struggles of growth and diversification and measurement. It was a challenging time for attribution and how to track success. Northbeam felt like a great solution to help us stitch our data points together and make better decisions as we grew.”
“It felt like the most sophisticated tool on the market. And as we talked through it and really understood the model and the science behind it, it made a lot of sense to take the leap,” Brett said.
Making the decision to adopt new software requires confidence in the data and abilities of the platform. It is a decision that impacts your whole team, so it’s important to think about software in the context of not only your current state but your goals for scale.
Brett agrees: “There wasn’t anything else that felt sophisticated enough, quite frankly, to meet our needs. We were one of the fastest growing direct-to-consumer brands out there and we needed support.”
“I can’t even count how many different brands I’ve recommended use Northbeam” Jesse said. “I think it’s a situation where you don’t know what you don’t know. And what has worked in the past might still seemingly continue to work, but you don’t know the insight that you’re missing until you can see it and use it. Now I just can’t envision a world where a brand would be ramping up direct-to-consumer spend and not using a tool like Northbeam.”
Northbeam provides answers to questions I didn’t know I had
“We’re in the business of selling shoes, but we also want to understand the customer journey throughout the sale,” Jesse said. “We don’t just want to sell them one pair. We want to sell them multiple pairs. We want them to become brand ambassadors. We want to engage with them long-term. And Northbeam helps us do that.”
Building brand loyalty is important for any DTC brand, and Northbeam is an integral partner in helping achieve a higher LTV. But how exactly does Northbeam help DTC brands achieve their goals?
“One of the metrics I love looking at is email sign up rate,” Brett said. “That’s a real leading indicator for success that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise look at. Maybe you’d shut off a campaign. But seeing that it can actually drive net new customers that show intent and maybe take a little longer to convert is powerful. That’s something people aren’t necessarily thinking about on their own.”
What metrics do you look at to see how customer intent plays out in the long run?
“I look at attribution model reports quite a bit,” Brett said. “We’re looking at clicks only as the first touchpoint, but we’ve also built some other views as well. We have a pretty big influencer program and it’s nice to be able to see breakouts for those different attribution models. So I’m constantly flipping between the different ones to determine what our spend mix should be going forward.”
“It’s great to get a pulse on the business week-over-week and see changes and trends,” Brett said. “Transitioning from the holidays to the new year is big for us, and it’s helpful to see year-over-year comps. The fact that we have years of data in there to look at how things have shifted over time has been a useful way to validate our decisions, especially amid the constant changes in the iOS landscape.”
“As we ramp up for the holidays, we spend a lot on prospecting and building audiences that look terrible in platform. Traditionally, other companies would shut that off. But we know by using Northbeam and the data we have that those usually back into sales come November and December.”
“It takes a lot of faith to run those campaigns when you’re banking on things paying off 30 or 60 days down the road. But having a tool that we can both look back at for historical context and look forward with to see how things play out eases some of that anxiety.”
Growing at the right pace is paramount. And access to intelligent data exactly when you need it is crucial to maintaining that pace.
“We don’t have a huge team,” Jesse said. “So when I’m looking at data, I’m looking for a quick answer to an important question. And oftentimes, I end up getting the answer to another three questions that I didn’t know I even had. This helps us move faster and helps us grow.”
Kizik has big marketing goals this year. Growth has been their focus over the last few years, but now sights are set on profitability and maximizing their existing traffic and audience.
“We’re looking at our retention efforts and being efficient with our spend more than we ever have before,” Brett said.
“We’re trying to find a balance now where we’re still pushing for growth and moving aggressively, but not moving so aggressively that we’re taking away from the bottom line. We’re looking at things like contribution margin that perhaps weren’t as big of a focus for us the previous few years. It’s a dance every day and every week to find that sweet spot.”
“In 2024, it’s a lot more about execution,” Jesse said. “For example, we want to be a little faster about our creative rotations and linking ads to inventory. Northbeam has tools that can help us with that.”
“We’re growing internationally; we’ve just signed with some distributors in two or three global locations,” Brett said. “And we’re opening five retail stores, plus wholesale. We’re becoming a lot more omnichannel as a brand and that requires deeper thinking and long-term planning, especially in the footwear space. We have a lot of operational excellence goals as a business.”
“A lot of what we do with digital advertising and what we track through Northbeam affects how people buy, it affects wholesale, it affects retail and Amazon. We have to continue to pound that drum that it’s an ecosystem that needs to stay in balance. Being able to tell that story is huge for the team.”
Staying on top of both trends and the competition is key to staying relevant in a space as saturated as footwear. And Kizik has been able to do so with the help of Northbeam.
“A lot of brands in our space and at our size do things in a similar way,” Jesse said. “I think we’re a little better at it, and that’s allowed us to grow. But I think to really separate from the pack, we have to execute at a very high level. That takes a lot of detail work and automated reporting, and Northbeam can help us do that.”
With AppLovin creating buzz in the DTC advertising space, many are asking:
Is AppLovin performance truly worth the social media hype?
Is this channel a worthwhile test or a distraction for scaling brands?
Although AppLovin campaigns for eCommerce have been live for only 1–2 months for most Northbeam customers (and over the peak BFCM period), many marketers are eager to understand its performance through a larger, data-driven lens beyond anecdotal social media buzz. Based on early data, AppLovin shows promise in both activating and reactivating users to drive a high ROAS and new customer percentage:
Activating New Users: AppLovin’s video ads—integrated into mobile games—capture the attention of users who may have seen your product elsewhere but remain unconvinced. These full-screen, partially unskippable ads (up to 60 seconds) are touted to effectively transition users from passive awareness to meaningful engagement.
Reactivating Past Customers: AppLovin also performs well at re-engaging past customers. With Northbeam’s tracking, which allows an infinite lookback window, we’ve identified cases where users with 100+ touchpoints made purchases just minutes after viewing an AppLovin ad. This suggests a unique ability to reignite action among lapsed customers.
With Northbeam’s advanced tracking capabilities and deterministic data approach, we can provide an unbiased look at how AppLovin performs for real brands in real campaigns.
Adoption Stats
Early adoption rates suggest that AppLovin has gained rapid traction as a viable channel for DTC brands:
75% of Northbeam’s top 100 spending DTC brands are active on AppLovin.
Over $10M in AppLovin spend has been tracked through Northbeam, with several brands exceeding $1M in spend over the past two months.
Performance Overview
The following data was sourced from Northbeam clients who spent advertising dollars on AppLovin between October 1st and November 30th. All figures are based on Northbeam’s clicks-only attribution model (Multi Touch Attribution), reflecting a clear and conservative view of performance.
Share of Wallet
While Meta still leads with a 63% share of wallet across Northbeam's customer base, AppLovin accounts for 5.71% of total budgets among brands live on the platform—outpacing other channels like TikTok, Snap, YouTube, and Pinterest.
In November, AppLovin captured 10%+ of ad spend for 31 brands, with one brand allocating as much as 34% of their budget to AppLovin.
Brands spending on AppLovin grew their overall media budgets an average of 125% YoY, with AppLovin playing a key role in this expansion.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
AppLovin’s average ROAS is 45% higher than Meta and 74% higher than secondary platforms like TikTok, Snap, YouTube, and Pinterest. The platform’s click-driven nature contributes significantly to these strong performance metrics
While 1-day efficiency is high on AppLovin, other channels tend to have a larger lift in ROAS when using longer attribution windows. This suggests that most of AppLovin’s impact is driven on the day of the conversion, while platforms like Snapchat, Youtube, and Tiktok can take 7-14 days to achieve comparable ROAS. Not necessarily a bad thing, but important to keep a close eye on as this can vary from brand to brand.
With increased platform saturation, we expect efficiency to decrease over time. However, for now, AppLovin is performing well for Northbeam users testing this channel. It is important to note that there is still limited understanding of the long term impact of AppLovin due to the channel being so new. Brands leveraging Northbeam will be able to measure the channel holistically across historical benchmarks on other platforms to get a better understanding of long term value.
New Customer % and New Visit %
AppLovin delivers 39% higher nROAS than Meta and 100%+ higher than secondary platforms.
Strong ability to drive new customer acquisitions; with 85% of purchases coming from 1st time customers. This is key as click data is conservative, so this is especially validating that performance isn’t fluff and is actually driving acquisition.
However, AppLovin’s New Visit Rate of 55% is lower than Meta (65%) and secondary platforms (~70%). This indicates the platform may currently target narrower, more familiar audiences. Despite this, it appears to convert first-time customers at a more efficient rate than other platforms.
Customer acquisition is a key metric for most DTC brands, but it’s crucial to identify which channels are most efficient at converting first-time customers vs channels that are better at driving highly qualified new visits to your website.
Understanding the complexities of your business is essential for gaining clarity on your customer journey and the time it takes for a customer to make a purchase after their first exposure to your brand. Brands with complex products or higher AOV, such as those in luxury, electronics, or furniture, typically experience longer consideration periods. This underscores the importance of balancing both short-term and long-term impacts in your decision-making process.
CPMs
On average, AppLovin’s CPMs are 3.95% lower than Meta’s, but more than 20% higher than secondary platforms. Given AppLovin’s currently smaller share of wallet, it’s likely that as brands continue to scale CPMs are expected to be higher than Meta.
While CPMs are a decent gauge for traffic efficiency, higher CPMs are commendable for higher quality audience and performance.
As AppLovin spend and adoption increase in the DTC space in 2025, it will be interesting to observe how auction prices are impacted and if they can remain as competitive as Meta at scale
Why It’s Working
AppLovin’s new eCommerce offering shows promise as an alternative marketing channel for DTC brands seeking to diversify beyond Meta. Its ability to activate new users and reactivate past customers fills a crucial gap for brands aiming to scale.
AppLovin is currently highly competitive in terms of auction costs, with a large volume of clicks on the platform driving new customer conversions. This has contributed to strong overall performance to date and something to keep a close eye on with increased spend volume.
Northbeam users have quickly scaled on AppLovin by leveraging real-time performance insights powered by our first-party data and machine learning. With Northbeam’s accrual accounting methodology, brands can set 1-day profitability benchmarks aligned with their long-term objectives. This approach has allowed brands to assess the immediate impact of AppLovin in comparison to other channels, while continuing to get a deeper understanding of its full impact over time.
Customer Sentiment
Although AppLovin is seeing strong performance within Northbeam, our customers have had various opinions on the channel thus far:
“AppLovin seems to be outperforming most channels, but will this last?”
“We’re cautiously optimistic but impressed so far. The results are undeniable.”
“AppLovin ROAS looks impressive, but I’m worried it’s just retargeting users.”
Concluding Thoughts from Northbeam
Northbeam’s Head of Media Strategy, Ryan Kovach, reflects on AppLovin’s role in reshaping channel diversification for DTC brands:
Optimistic but Measured: Early results show AppLovin’s potential, with strong ROAS and nROAS positioning it as a channel worth considering for expanding media budgets.
Demand Generation Excellence: AppLovin offers an intriguing combination of scale and performance, with early signs of capturing 10%+ of overall ad spend for several brands.
Areas for Improvement: Metrics like New Visit Rate raise questions about audience diversity and potential future saturation, but its performance on ROAS and customer reactivation make these concerns secondary.
Guidance for Marketers
Leverage Northbeam’s data quality for precise tracking:some text
Use Northbeam to track both clicks and view-throughs on AppLovin, providing deterministic measurement of how the channel interacts with others, across devices, and throughout the customer journey.
Monitor key performance metrics like CPMs, CAC, ROAS, and nROAS to assess scalability.
Consider AppLovin for both demand acquisition and customer re-engagement campaigns.
Set profitability benchmarks tailored to AppLovin with Northbeam:some text
Establish CAC payback period targets to align with your brand’s goals and optimize campaigns down to the creative level.
Use New Visit % and New Customer % to validate audience quality.
The Road Ahead
AppLovin’s managed-service model is currently limited to brands spending $20K+/day on Meta, but its self-serve platform launch in 2025 promises broader accessibility. Stay tuned for more analysis- Northbeam will continue refining insights with additional data pulls and case studies in early 2025, including:
Channel Overlap (Touchpoint Data)
First-Touch Attribution Comparisons
Analysis of Brands Allocating Higher Spend Shares
View-Through Measurement with Enhanced Clicks + Views
As DTC brands increasingly adopt AppLovin, its focus on activating and reactivating users positions it as a promising channel for 2025 and beyond.
Gardyn is a trailblazer in smart indoor gardening, empowering consumers to grow fresh produce at home with innovative, tech-enabled systems. To get the inside scoop on how data drives their marketing decisions, we spoke with two key figures at Gardyn: Director of Paid Media Derek Lauermann and Marketing Analytics Strategist Andy Pham. Their unfiltered insights reveal a story of transformation—from a time of guesswork to a world of data-driven precision, all thanks to their true data partner, Northbeam.
From Guesswork to Precision: The Pre-Northbeam Struggle
Before Northbeam, Gardyn’s approach to data was more like a wild guess than a finely tuned strategy. Director of Paid Media Derek Lauermann recalls the old days:
“It was like, nothing adds up. Our process was reluctantly trusting inflated in-platform data and cross-referencing that with Google Analytics. How can you confidently attribute sales to anything that way? It was all guesswork before Northbeam. You had to kind of just test things.”
When iOS 14 hit, the cracks in the system became glaringly obvious:
“Then came iOS 14 and everything became more difficult. Data gaps made optimizing campaigns a nightmare.”
In those frustrating moments, the need for a clear source of truth became undeniable. Northbeam stepped in, providing a granular look at every channel. As Derek explains:
This shift from a guessing game to precise, data-driven decisions not only clarified Gardyn’s marketing strategy—it redefined it.
Metrics Tell the Story
The impact of this transformation is best seen in the numbers. Gardyn’s strategic reallocation of their media spend is a testament to the power of understanding data deeply. Derek lays it out:
“We took 70% of spend down year over year on Meta—69.4%, to be exact—without sacrificing revenue. And, our MER is up in the high double digits, year over year.”
And it wasn’t just about cutting costs. The quality of traffic improved dramatically:
“Our Cost Per New Visit is down 48%, and our Add to Cart Rate is up 94%, which is huge. It’s about quality traffic driving efficiency.”
Shifting budgets from Meta to channels like Google, TikTok, Amazon, and YouTube wasn’t a shot in the dark. TikTok, for instance, saw a mind-blowing 1,478% increase in spend—from practically nothing to over 6 figures, year to date. These figures aren’t just impressive stats; they’re the foundation of real, actionable insights that have transformed Gardyn’s marketing game.
Northbeam: The Daily Data Check
For the Gardyn team, Northbeam is not a once-in-a-while dashboard—it’s part of their daily ritual. Every day, they check in on a suite of metrics that keep their strategy nimble and effective. Derek describes his routine:
“I have two different views I check daily: my Cash Reporting View versus my Media Buyer Accrual View. We’re able to see if the funnel is healthy, and if it’s not where we want it to be, we can immediately adjust and optimize for any cracks we may find. It’s not about one metric—it’s the whole picture. I’m tracking everything from Cost Per New Visit to Add to Cart rates. That waterfall of data tells me if our funnel is healthy.”
Andy adds:
“It’s crazy, because even though many brands might slash their spend and see a drop in new visits, we’re seeing almost flat new visits with dramatically reduced costs. That’s the magic of understanding every single data point.”
These everyday check-ins aren’t just about numbers—they’re about crafting a strategy that’s agile, informed, and ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.
Northbeam: The Decision-Making Tool
Gardyn’s partnership with Northbeam goes beyond mere data visualization—it’s about having a reliable partner in every strategic decision. Derek sums it up perfectly:
“I honestly couldn’t imagine running our campaigns without Northbeam. It’s not simply a tool; it’s a true data partner that transforms raw numbers into actionable insights.”
He doesn’t hold back:
“When it comes to strategic decision-making, Northbeam is the only companion I trust. I rely on it every single day, and my team wouldn’t be where we are without its insights. In our fast-paced world, having such a robust partner is priceless.”
This isn’t just a nod to a great tool; it’s a declaration of faith in a platform that stands at the core of their entire marketing strategy. Northbeam is the engine that powers their decisions, the silent partner behind every successful campaign.
Bringing It All Together
Gardyn’s story is one of transformation powered by a deep, trust-based relationship with Northbeam. Their journey shows that when you truly understand your data, every decision becomes a chance to innovate and improve. As Andy and Derek have demonstrated, every metric plays a critical role in shaping a strategy that’s both efficient and effective. And when you have the right data by your side, you’re not just surviving—you’re thriving. Every day, decisions fueled by Northbeam’s insights, ensure that every marketing dollar Gardyn has is invested wisely. And at that point, data moves from just a set of numbers, to the lifeblood of growth.
In the end, it’s clear that for Gardyn, Northbeam isn’t just another tech stack addition—it’s the source of truth that drives every strategic move.
"Northbeam's accurate attribution modeling is a game-changer for our creative feedback loop. Using insights that only Northbeam can give us, we can quickly test different hypotheses and iterate on our ad concepts, leading to better performance and ROAS." –Shaun Hobbs, Sr. Performance Marketing Manager, Vessi
Founded in 2017, Vessi is a Vancouver-based footwear company that specializes in creating 100% waterproof sneakers for everyday adventures. 6 years and over a million pairs sold later, the brand has expanded into numerous products and markets to grow their customer base. After data privacy changes limited Vessi’s ability to track user data, the company realized it needed to cut through the noise by significantly boosting their creative optimization processes to resonate with and acquire customers. Faced with this daunting challenge, the team began to look for an attribution partner to help them profitably reach their growth goals.
Flawed and Incomplete Data Leads to Ineffective Creative Strategy
Going into 2022, Vessi was grappling with several macro trends that severely limited their marketing effectiveness across all channels. Not only had privacy changes made it more difficult to decipher if their creative strategies and tactics were working, but also marketers were starting to shift away from highly-polished content towards UGC. Although UGC had several advantages like providing social proof and building trust through authenticity, the team needed an attribution partner they could rely on in order to iterate and adopt a hypothesis-testing approach.
“We badly needed marketing analytics that we could trust.” said Shaun. “We realized you couldn’t get away with sub-par creative anymore because targeting and tracking were so limited. We were trying to experiment with new ad concepts, but had no idea which ones were actually driving results. We often saw inflated stats on ads that promised performance, but didn’t result in conversions after scaling spend.”
Realizing they needed to adapt, Vessi decided to move away from the highly polished, curated content that had worked in the past, and towards user generated content that could be produced faster in response to consumer trends and cultural moments. In order to rapidly iterate on ads and improve performance, the team began looking for an attribution partner they could rely on to adopt this hypothesis-testing approach.
Performance Insights and Creative Optimization with Northbeam
Northbeam gave Vessi clarity on the true performance of their ads across all channels, as the team had always felt in-platform data wasn’t giving them reliable signals. After using Northbeam’s Clicks & Views model for several weeks and increasing spend on promising ads, they began to trust Northbeam more and more after being consistently rewarded with higher click-through rates and conversion rates. Confident they could trust their metrics, Vessi started leaning heavily into rapid creative iteration and experimentation.
“After Northbeam identified a winning piece of creative, we would read the comments and brainstorm on how we could make the ad just a bit better.” added Shaun. “We used Northbeam’s Motion integration to visualize and track how different variations performed, which helped to identify common themes that had potential. For example, we noticed Facebook campaigns featuring travel imagery and messaging outperformed many other concepts, so we doubled down and saw an 82% increase in revenue and 13% increase in ROAS.”
The team also used Northbeam to monitor “soft” metrics for specific objectives. For example, Vessi used New Visitor Rate to determine if prospecting campaigns were ultimately doing their job of driving new site traffic. This helped identify potential gems among strategies that weren’t hitting ROAS or revenue thresholds, but still showed promise and deserved a closer look for adjustments. This practice helped Vessi uncover new audiences like healthcare professionals and teachers who turned out to be big fans of the brand.
“We made sure to keep everything organized using Custom Labels to standardize our naming conventions, otherwise it could’ve gotten messy quickly.” explained Shaun. “That really made things much easier when we began experimenting with multiple hypotheses with many different audiences simultaneously. Our creative team really appreciated it while juggling all of our asks and tweaks.”
Becoming a Creative-Led Machine with Northbeam
With Northbeam, Vessi was able to get granular first-party data that dramatically boosted their creative efforts with timely and accurate information. This significantly improved their creative feedback loop by allowing for rapid iteration with their creative team to increase conversions. Overall, Vessi increased revenue +34% while boosting ROAS +8%. This was largely due to efficiency gains from better creative driving CTR +31% while finding more promising audiences (visits increased +41%) who were more likely to try Vessi (First-Time CAC -13%).
Northbeam also helped the brand identify video as their most promising format, so the team invested more effort into testing and creating more video concepts. As a result, revenue attributed to video ads increased +132%, new visits increased +96%, and Vessi improved their conversion rate +36% to take full advantage of these new customers. Vessi even managed to lower CAC -42% from video ads while improving ROAS +61%.
Grüns’ superfood gummies promise to streamline health into a bite-sized, fruit-snack experience. But the real magic isn’t just in the product—it’s in how they get it in front of the right people. That’s where Northbeam comes in.
We sat down with Claire Yi, VP of Growth at Grüns, to break down how a health & wellness brand in its infancy has already become one of the most exciting DTC players in the space, thanks to a potent mix of aggressive channel testing, a creative-first marketing ethos, and a data backbone that gives them clarity amid the noise.
Northbeam gave Grüns enough integrity and confidence in their data to 22x their spend, which resulted in 40x total revenue. Here’s how they did it.
A Platform Worth Waking Up To
The decision to integrate Northbeam wasn’t a lengthy deliberation for Grüns.
“Our CEO, Chad, was already plugged into a network of DTC founders who swore by Northbeam,” Yi explains. “So, we were early adopters by default.”
The result? Northbeam quickly became the company’s gospel. “I check in every day,” Yi says. “Our CFO checks in. Our CEO checks in. It’s the first look of the day for all of us.”
Moving at the Speed of Growth
Startups live and die by speed, and Grüns is no exception. With the brand not even two years old, Yi’s team needs to pivot on a dime.
“We’re constantly testing new channels,” Yi says. “I rely on Northbeam very heavily every single day. The most useful part of it is just specific metrics like percent new visits by channel, new customer acquisition costs and others. Having that really helps me know if a new channel that we test into is actually bringing in incremental new users to our site.”
That word—incremental—is a big one at Grüns. It’s not enough to get a new customer; they have to be truly new. And that’s where Northbeam shines.
The Obsession With nCAC
If there’s one number that runs the show at Grüns, it’s new customer acquisition cost (nCAC).
“Our entire model is built around it,” Yi says. “We look at nCAC across all our channels—Meta, YouTube, and more —and it helps us benchmark against our holistic goal.”
Northbeam’s ability to separate actual first-time customers from returning buyers or cross-sales means that Grüns isn’t throwing money at inflated metrics. “We don’t trust platform data alone,” Yi adds. Relying on platform data is like letting a chef be the food critic for their own restaurant. It’s almost like being able to have an “Ads Manager” view of all platforms in one view, but without each channel overattributing their conversions across all your orders.
Grüns saw the cost incurred to acquire net new customers decrease by over 14% after implementing Northbeam
Creative is King—And Northbeam is the Court
Grüns isn’t just a performance brand; it’s a creative-driven performance brand. With a heavy emphasis on visuals and storytelling, they need to know immediately which ads are working and which ones need to be optimized.
“We don’t just optimize at the campaign level—we optimize at the creative level,” Yi explains. “Which ad, which visual, which CTA is truly working? Northbeam tells us. We don’t even look at platform data for this anymore.”
And with that kind of granular view into what is truly working, Northbeam becomes a tool to validate all the others. “I use Shopify with Northbeam because it helps us look at day-of performance very sharply, especially during holiday periods or sale periods” Yi says. “We want to be able to scale back if the day is looking a little off from a conversion rate standpoint.”
This ability to instantly separate high-performing creative campaigns from flops means that Grüns can pour budget into winners before a campaign fizzles, maximizing returns with ruthless efficiency.
Expanding the Channel Playbook
In an ever-evolving digital landscape, staying agile is non-negotiable. Grün leverages Northbeam to explore emerging platforms with precision and confidence.
"We've seen exciting new customer growth opportunities by expanding into platforms we had not previously tried," Yi notes. "The ability to quickly test and optimize creatives for new audiences has made a huge impact."
Northbeam’s data-driven insights ensure that every new channel test is informed, measured, and refined—giving Grün the confidence to invest wisely and grow strategically.
More Than Just Numbers—Confidence in the Boardroom
At the end of the day, Northbeam isn’t just a marketing tool—it’s a confidence booster.
“I've been able to use those metrics–nCAC, percent new visits, and more–to explain to stakeholders that a specific channel isn't a priority channel for us right now.” Yi explains. “It also saves us a lot of time in being able to understand at a high level, revenue, new orders, returning orders, marketing spend, and if we're pacing towards our nCAC goals. And it also helps me pull reports really easily to know how much we spent on each channel by month.”
When Grüns needs to decide whether a platform, ad, or creative direction is worth the investment, the answer is already waiting for them. And that’s the real power of Northbeam.
Grüns is building a health & wellness empire with the speed of a tech startup. And in a world where decision fatigue is real and ad dollars vanish into the void faster than you can say "platform algorithm update," Northbeam is their secret weapon for staying sharp, strategic, and relentlessly efficient.
“Northbeam is our one stop shop for all things data–from overall business performance to performance by channel, Northbeam has us covered. We even use Northbeam to understand where we need to be at in-platform in order to hit our blended business goals. This has been a huge problem since iOS14 muddied the relationship between in-platform and blended metrics, but Northbeam makes it a non-issue." –Connor Rolain, Head of Growth, HexClad Cookware'
HexClad’s ultimate goal is to provide high-performing cookware for home chefs. Even though multi-Michelin celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay endorsed HexClad as “the Rolls Royce of pans,” the cookware brand still faced challenges growing their business. HexClad needed to find the ideal ad spend to acquire quality customers despite the long consideration process on premium cookware. With the help of a new universal attribution tool, the company was able to refine their brand communications, revamp their performance marketing strategy, and execute high converting funnels.
Finding an Efficient Way to Fill Customer Funnels
HexClad had a record year in 2021, bolstered by excellent results from their traditional performance marketing channels. But the company felt the pressure to keep up the meteoric pace of growth, so at the start of 2022 HexClad went back to the (marketing) drawing board. The team realized they needed to introduce a new mix of campaign messaging, increase the number of assets into their ad accounts, and prioritize email and SMS in their media mix. And most importantly, they needed to identify how their previous media buying spend was contributing to tomorrow’s revenue as they dealt with a long customer consideration period.
In addition to devising a new marketing strategy focused primarily on growth, HexClad needed a solution to see how past ad spend can contribute to future revenue. Since the cookware brand has a 1-3 month consideration period, customers would see a large variety of HexClad’s ads before purchase, and purchases would usually happen outside traditional ad lookback windows.
Understanding the influence of past spend on future purchases is critical for both adding new customers to the funnel, as well as ensuring that customers are properly moving through the various stages of the purchase journey.
The Accuracy of Cash Snapshot Streamlines Operations & Guarantees Profitability
As HexClad set up Northbeam, they first worked with Northbeam’s Customer Success team to activate their dashboard with Breakdown Labels in order to better organize their marketing data by country, creative type, ad placement, funnel stage, and campaign objectives. With the addition of Northbeam’s deep machine learning capabilities on top of custom labeling, Head of Growth Connor Rolain quickly honed in on which marketing touchpoints were generating revenue by connecting top of funnel touchpoints to bottom of funnel conversions.
Next HexClad looked at Northbeam’s accounting modes to identify the relationship between today’s media buying initiatives with tomorrow’s return on ad spend. The Cash Snapshot and Accrual Performance models helped them forecast total revenue against total spend across specific time periods. Figuring out the relationship between their MER goal and contribution margin was crucial for HexClad’s operational planning. “You can make that connection between performance today and connect that with what it’s going to happen 60, 90 days from now,” Rolain said.
Finally, the HexClad team was looking to accelerate their growth feedback loop, which required making day-to-day decisions to scale - or cut back - specific media buying initiatives. This meant having to break the silos between the finance, operations, and marketing departments. Making media buying and budget decisions based on inventory and supply on a daily basis is not out of the ordinary for the fast-growing company – and they needed a reliable source of truth for these cross-departmental efforts. Enter Northbeam.
HexClad President Jason Panzer points out that “the level of analytical rigor in Northbeam’s models” gives him the confidence necessary to make high-level media buying decisions. Across the company, everyone has a “North Star” metric they consistently monitor to ensure they’re hitting their benchmarks. In HexClad’s weekly company meeting, most of the insights reported are pulled from Northbeam.
Around the World We Go!
Using Northbeam’s Breakdown Labels as well as the Cash Snapshot and Accrual Performance models, HexClad tackled 2022 with a new and improved omnichannel strategy. Year-over-year HexClad was able to increase revenue by 156% and reduce CAC -34%. The company focused on better understanding and improving their MER, increasing it from 3.9 in 2021 to 5.5x in 2022.
“We did a good job spending up to our efficiency goals all year long that by the time we hit Q4 we had juicy funnels full of people,” Rolain explained. “So, when we rolled out those offers, we just saw massive, massive growth.”
Today, HexClad is beginning to leverage more Northbeam functionalities in their strategy. For example the cookware brand is using customer cohorts from Northbeam’s LTV model to inspire product bundling and gather accurate insights from customers in newly-tapped international markets. With the Help of Northbeam, HexClad is poised to have another record-breaking year in 2023.
“We learned the hard way that not all attribution solutions are created equal. If we had done a little more due diligence and research before signing up with a partner, we could’ve found our ideal fit a lot sooner. Our results since teaming up with Northbeam speak for themselves.”
–Cody Plofker, CMO, Jones Road Beauty
Created in 2019 by renowned makeup artist Bobbi Brown, Jones Road Beauty is focused on clean, high-performance beauty products that are effortless to use for every skin type and skin tone. The brand launched with much fanfare due to Bobbi Brown’s reputation and expertise and enjoyed a meteoric rise thanks to rave reviews from her fans on Instagram and TikTok. Even though Jones Road Beauty continued to grow after the iOS14 update reduced the efficacy of digital marketing, the team proactively looked for an attribution partner they could rely on to help them amplify their virality. However, after a frustrating experience with a popular vendor, Jones Road Beauty realized they needed to find the right attribution partner best suited for their unique situation.
Dealing with Inconsistent Data and Faulty Attribution
In 2022, Jones Road Beauty experienced massive growth after going viral on TikTok several times. While the team was aware that TikTok was responsible for driving sales, they realized that their attribution tool was inadequate and unreliable in verifying their observations. In order to solve their TikTok problem, Jones Road Beauty onboarded with a popular attribution and dashboard product so they could conduct cross-channel analysis.
“We were growing so fast that we needed to experiment with new channels like TikTok, but we were flying blind because we just couldn’t trust the data,” added Plfoker. “It was great to have so much organic traffic from going viral on TikTok, but we weren’t able to effectively leverage that into more conversions and sales.”
Although the vendor that Jones Road Beauty tried guaranteed unbelievable results at low prices, the team quickly realized they over-promised and under-delivered. Jones Road Beauty noticed major issues when analyzing the data as it showed no consistency in terms of correlation or directionality when compared with historical data from Google Analytics and in-platform reporting. The team knew attribution would never be 100% accurate, but the data just didn’t look right based on their experience with in-platform stats.
“Facebook would say an ad was doing well, but their dashboard would alternate between over-reporting and underreporting performance without any rhyme or reason,” said Plofker. “The data was all over the place, and it just caused even more confusion than when we were just relying on platform analytics. We had to work even harder to make good decisions, which made us wonder why we were paying for an attribution solution.”
Furthermore, top features (such as cross-channel analysis including TikTok) that were a key selling point for Jones Road Beauty were often broken and didn’t work as expected. Frustrated with the subpar user experience and shaky attribution modeling, Plofker realized they had clearly outgrown their previous vendor and began reaching out to ecommerce experts to find a new attribution partner better suited for them.
Boosting Their Business with the Right Attribution Partner
With Northbeam, Jones Road Beauty was able to solve their biggest challenge of tackling new channels with trustworthy attribution modeling. Within 2 weeks of onboarding, the team noticed that historical data across all platforms was completely ingested and available for analysis. By the 30 day mark, the team was able to completely leverage Northbeam’s proprietary models including 1-Day Clicks Only to get a full picture of their marketing performance.
“Being able to toggle between multiple attribution models and windows is really useful,” explained Plofker. “The models feel stable and consistent, and help reveal useful insights. For example we noticed conversion lag was longer on YouTube than other channels, but so was the [customer] lifetime value of those cohorts. We just needed to adjust our benchmarks accordingly to reflect that.”
Jones Road Beauty used Northbeam to build a model to figure out the 1-Day Clicks Only benchmarks they needed to hit in order for other business outcomes to be in a good spot. The team relies on the model to forecast out performance for the next 30, 60 and 90 days by using the LTV metric to monitor expected vs. actual revenue.
The team also realized that TikTok performance looked much better when using Northbeam’s Clicks + Views model to get credit for View Through data as well. It turned out that TikTok was really effective at driving New Visits (+12.4%) and served as an awareness play. That gave them the confidence to keep spending and scaling on the platform, knowing that Facebook and other channels were helping with lower-funnel tactics to drive higher revenues. As a result, Jones Road Beauty increased 2022 total revenues +120% versus the previous year.
Back to Profitable and Sustainable Growth
Empowered by Northbeam’s data-driven insights, Jones Road Beauty had the confidence to scale spend again across all channels. In Q4 2022, the brand increased total revenue +43% while keeping efficiency high with ROAS +5%. Not only did Jones Road Beauty see +60% more sales on their top channel of Facebook (ROAS +4% as well), they also drove revenue +65% and 101% respectively on Google and YouTube by finding new audiences and cohorts who resonated with the brand (New Visits +26%).
“We’re not trying to replace Facebook with newer channels, but we’re at the point where we can find better marginal outcomes there without reducing the efficiency of our spend,” said Plofker. “Northbeam has really helped us understand how our channels work together – giving us the confidence to keep making those bets.”
In Q1 2023, Jones Road Beauty continued their strong trajectory of growth, driving +17% more revenue overall. TikTok continues to be a priority for the brand, with revenue up +26% and ROAS +31% while lowering CAC -21%. More impressively, the brand has started to see real momentum on YouTube, increasing revenue +323% and ROAS +26%, while actually decreasing CAC -22% on a previously difficult channel for Jones Road Beauty before working with Northbeam.
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