Meta and YouTube for demand you create
Behaviors, interests, lookalikes of the people who paid. The creative is the experiment: one change at a time, losers cut on activation and first paid action, not on click rate.
- Home
- Who it’s for
- Consumer and marketplaces
Consumer and marketplaces
Growth for consumer products and marketplaces, judged by cohort.
Consumer growth is a creative problem with a measurement problem attached. The ad that wins this month loses next month, the signup is cheap and means nothing, and a marketplace has two customers who need two definitions. The work is a weekly creative cadence, a page built for the first action, and a record by cohort that shows which spend produced people who stayed and paid. This is the same engagement, for startups in consumer and marketplaces and for companies in it that no longer call themselves startups.
- Consumer apps
- Subscriptions
- Marketplaces
- Fintech for consumers
- Health and wellness
- Education
- Local marketplaces
- Creator tools
Where the buyer is
The channels and the searches that mean someone is ready.
Search for demand that exists
The category, the problem, and the competitor. Smaller than social for most consumer products, higher intent, and the cheapest cohort when the page is honest.
Both sides of a marketplace
Supply and demand get their own campaigns, pages, definitions, and budgets. The side that pays you is the side that is judged, in your revenue. Buying one side without the other is how marketplaces spend a round on nothing.
The people you do not want
Geographies you cannot serve yet, ages or segments outside the product, and the audiences that sign up and never open the app. Logged apart and excluded.
Qualified, defined
What counts as a lead in consumer and marketplaces.
Written in week one, used unchanged for ninety days.
Qualified signup
A signup from a person in the geography and segment the product serves, with a verified contact, logged against the campaign and creative.
Activation
The first meaningful action: a listing, a booking, a completed onboarding, a first session of real length. Defined with you in week one.
First paid action
The subscription, the purchase, the booking fee. Reported by cohort against the spend that acquired the cohort. New-customer acquisition cost, and contribution after variable cost if you already track it.
Supply, for marketplaces
A listing or provider that passed your quality bar, counted separately with its own cost.
The work
What we run, for consumer and marketplaces.
Growth Partner
Creative cadence, and the page.
Meta or Search first, a page built for the first action inside the system, one creative experiment a week with the rule written first, and a record by cohort to activation and payment.
The tech that carries it
Answers from your help center, with the source.
A system over your help content that answers what your support queue already answers, cites the passage, and hands off to a person on request. Piloted against an evaluation set before it talks to a customer.
The records under it
Billing as the source of truth.
The first paid action lives in the billing system, the cohort in your analytics. The design says which is right about what, and the record is built from them, not from the ad platform.
Worth knowing
Things we have learned to check first.
Creative fatigue is the schedule
Consumer creative has a shelf life measured in weeks. The weekly experiment is a creative experiment by default, and we cut from what you already have before we ask for a shoot.
Cohorts or nothing
A blended number hides the month that bought a thousand people who never came back. The record is by acquisition cohort, and so is the decision.
App installs are a different game
If the product lives in an app store, install campaigns, attribution partners, and store pages are their own discipline. We run web-first and say when an app specialist is the right next hire.
Marketplaces need a liquidity plan
Which side first, in which city, at what density. We write it into the brief, because the ads cannot fix a plan that is not there.
Questions
About consumer and marketplaces.
If yours is not here, ask. We answer plainly, including when the answer is that this is not the right engagement.
Is $2,500 a month enough for consumer?
The fee is the same in every category. The media budget for consumer usually needs to be larger to produce a readable cohort, and we say what we think the number is before you commit.
Can you run TikTok?
We test it after Meta or Search is producing, with a small budget and creative cut for it, and we report it honestly. It is not where we start.
Do you do app-install campaigns?
Not as a primary channel. We run web-first, measure by cohort, and bring in an app specialist when the store is the main door.
How do you handle both sides of our marketplace?
Separate campaigns, pages, definitions, and budgets for supply and demand, with a liquidity plan in the brief that says which side we buy first and where. The side that pays you is judged in your revenue.