Rebuilding Creative Testing For A DTC Skincare Brand

The account had grown to significant monthly spend on the back of three winning creatives, all more than a year old. Fatigue had set in, cost per acquisition was climbing every week, and the team responded by adding budget and audiences rather than new angles.

Compounding it, platform-reported revenue overstated actual revenue by roughly a third, so every optimisation decision was being made against inflated numbers.

We started with measurement, because nothing downstream could be trusted without it — server-side tagging, deduplicated events and a reconciliation dashboard tying platform numbers back to the finance figure.

In parallel we mapped message territories from customer-support transcripts and review text rather than from internal positioning, briefed twenty-four concepts against those angles, and set a fixed fortnightly review with pre-agreed kill thresholds.

Within one quarter the account was running six concurrent winning concepts instead of three ageing ones, and decisions were being made against numbers that reconciled to within four percent of finance.

The testing cadence outlasted the engagement — the in-house team has run it independently since.