As an intern for a startup that sells products that pertain to a specific place, I have learned a lot about what goes into the marketing side of things, both financially and in decision making.

Why marketing is the whole business

My first rotation required me to deep dive into marketing data. I had to look at campaigns, adsets, ads, and their differences. Why there are different phases during a marketing rotation, and why we actually have marketing rotations.

The questions I was asking myself at first included ones like: why are we spending SO much on marketing? I suppose I was naive to the truth about starting a business: marketing is literally the key to it all. Without good marketing, the business fails to run and expand. As a company that runs geographically dependent leagues, it is especially important in the beginning. Once people come and enjoy it, they will likely return for another season!

Phase 0 and Phase 1

The next questions I asked myself were about Phase 0 and Phase 1 ad campaigns. Phase 0 running as a broad distribution of ads, and Phase 1 as a more direct, smaller marketing campaign targeting the leagues that weren't performing as well. There was so much ad spend on these few leagues. Was it really worth it?

Flagging fatigued ads

This is where my project came along. In my marketing rotation I researched ways to flag an ad or adset as fatigued, what that looked like, and how much money we were losing off of fatigued ads. I learned about how to pull data from Windsor AI and observe Meta and Google ads. I learned how to connect data and make truly meaningful insights, and how to present that data in ways that people can read and make data-driven decisions from. A big part of that was building dashboards in Looker Studio, so people could actually see the trends instead of just reading a spreadsheet of numbers. A lot of my recommendations included changing the way we structured adsets and campaigns to ensure that they exited the learning stage. Without exiting the learning stage, you have less of a chance of reaching the correct target audience.

Where does the money actually go

Some of the most interesting questions came up when I tried to figure out where our money actually goes. If we sell in specific places, shouldn't I be able to see exactly how each state or region is performing? I learned it isn't that simple. Meta attributes ad spend by market (DMA), and those markets don't line up neatly with state lines, so a league's spend can get credited to a neighboring state's market. That taught me to trust efficiency at the region level and volume at the state level, instead of assuming every number is accurate at every grain. I also had to question what "profitable" even means for us. I asked whether a breakeven ROAS is just 1, and learned it is actually 1 divided by our margin, because we are selling a service with real delivery costs, not just a product. Little things like that completely changed how I read the numbers.

Rethinking Phase 1

I also worked on discussing strategies to try and reduce the amount spent on Phase 1 ads. Are there better ways to do this other than spending on adsets that never reach the target audience and never exit learning? One thing I kept coming back to is that a lot of Meta's standard advice assumes you are selling a product you can ship anywhere, but we sell a local service, which is the whole reason Phase 1 exists in the first place. That made me ask whether we should cut Phase 1 entirely and lean on broader Phase 0 plus local and organic marketing, or whether there are ways to make Phase 1 work within that local constraint, like optimizing for add-to-cart to escape the learning phase or grouping leagues by metro. This was a tougher question to answer, and ultimately it will have to be tested over time as the company continues to grow and expand leagues.

I learned so much about how marketing differs for this type of product, and I genuinely feel as if I have come out a better data scientist and a better critical thinker, as well as with a more well-rounded understanding of how a business works, especially when it comes to marketing and its structure.