Incremental new customers
True cost per acquisition
Prospect funnel efficiency
Media mix vs incremental contribution
Channel performance
Where the spend actually moved.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
The acquisition picture had stopped making sense. Platform dashboards were claiming credit for sales the brand would have made anyway, while genuinely incremental channels looked underpowered next to a self-reporting walled garden. The team knew the numbers in the room weren't the numbers driving the business, but no one could prove which were which.
On top of that, the category itself had shifted. Professional skincare lives across three overlapping worlds: the pro channel, direct-to-consumer, and retail, and each had its own way of attributing a sale. The brand needed one honest read on where new customers were genuinely coming from, and which media dollars were actually creating them rather than harvesting demand that already existed.
THE APPROACH
How the engagement was structured.
We started with the measurement layer, not the media. Before changing a single bid, we rebuilt how the brand judged a channel, moving the conversation away from platform-reported return and toward incremental contribution. That meant designing a testing cadence the business could actually run: clean holdouts on the channels carrying the most spend, geo-based reads where holdouts weren't possible, and a planning rhythm that treated every quarter as a chance to learn rather than just to spend.
Acquisition media was then rebuilt around what the tests showed. Paid social and paid search were re-scoped, not just retargeting the same warm pools, but pushing genuinely top-of-funnel investment into the formats and audiences the incrementality work proved were creating new demand. Creative strategy followed the same logic: briefs were written for prospect performance, not blended performance, with a velocity model that fed the channels enough fresh hooks to keep top-of-funnel efficient.
Throughout, the discipline was to let the measurement layer have the final word. When platform metrics and incremental reads disagreed, we trusted the incremental read and rebalanced. That shifted budget across channels more than once, and each shift was defensible because the testing cadence behind it was honest, repeatable and visible to the wider team.
DERMALOGICA · IN THE ROOM
Inside the engagement.
The working moments behind the numbers.
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THE OUTCOME
The acquisition engine started behaving like a business asset rather than a monthly performance puzzle. Incremental new-customer volume lifted in the channels the testing pointed to, and the channels that had been over-credited got right-sized without losing top-line sales, proof the original spend had been buying demand that was already coming.
Quarter on quarter, the programme delivered gains that kept building on the metrics that actually moved the business: incremental new customers, cost per genuinely new customer, and prospect-funnel efficiency. The measurement discipline outlasted any single campaign, and the brand now plans media against a read of reality, not a read of the platforms.
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