In the race for rapid growth, every bit of your paid media investment must earn its keep. For Seed-through-Series D teams, combining reliable core campaigns with agile experiments and clear, data-driven insights makes all the difference. Below are four tactics to sharpen your media strategy and power your next funding milestone.
1. Balance “Always-On” with Experiment Budgets
Instead of a flat monthly spend, allocate 80% of your budget to proven, always-on campaigns and 20% to rapid experiments:
- Always-On (80%): These are your reliable performers - audiences, creatives and channels that have consistently met your CPL/CAC targets. They run continuously to drive steady conversions and protect your baseline growth.
- Experiments (20%): Dedicate one-fifth of your media budget to 7-14 day tests. Try new creative angles, audience segments or formats in small batches. This keeps your strategy fresh, because even the best always-on campaigns lose effectiveness over time.
- Reallocate Weekly: At the end of each sprint, move any successful variants from the 20% experiments pool into the always-on 80%. Pause underperformers immediately, and use the freed-up test budget for the next round of experiments.
Why it matters: Always-on campaigns inevitably suffer from fatigue and rising costs. By continuously injecting 20% of your budget into experiments and promoting winners into your core programmes, you’re able to maintain long-term performance.
2. Tests with Escalation & Pause Rules
Your 20 % experiments budget is ideal for controlled, rapid testing. Here’s how to run them safely:
- Cap Your Test Spend: Set a strict budget for each variant based on the KPI you’re measuring. Limiting spend upfront means you learn fast without draining cash.
- Escalate Winners: When a variant outperforms against your targets and hits statistical significance early; end the test, boost its budget, and promote it into your always-on mix.
- Pause Rules: If a variant falls short by more than 10–25% (depending on the metric) after seven days, pause it automatically. Those funds then roll into fresh experiments, ensuring you’re always testing new ideas.
By pairing clear escalation triggers with automated pause rules, you eliminate wasted spend, surface only proven tactics and ensure your always-on campaigns stay effective.
3. Forecast Channel Performance with Predictive LTV Modelling
As you progress through Series A and beyond, the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers becomes a vital indicator of true marketing ROI. Rather than chasing the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA), you want to invest in channels that deliver the highest long-term returns. Predictive LTV modelling helps you do just that:
- Collect Cohort Data: Group customers by their acquisition date (for example, all users acquired in May 2025) and track their revenue, repeat purchases or deposits over time. This cohort approach is crucial because it isolates behaviour patterns -rather than averaging everyone together - and reveals how different acquisition dates, channels or campaigns perform as they mature.
- Build a Predictive Model: A predictive model uses historical cohort data to forecast future LTV for new customer groups. At its simplest, this can be a linear regression that links early revenue signals (i.e. first-month spend or engagement) to later revenue outcomes. More advanced methods can incorporate multiple variables (channel, geo, etc.) to improve accuracy. The result is an estimated 6 or 12 month LTV for any new acquisition cohort.
By using cohort data and forecasting LTV, you can direct more spend towards channels whose cohorts show the highest predicted LTV rather than focusing only on low CPAs. Over time, this shifts your focus from short-term cost savings to sustainable, revenue-driving growth.
4. Validate with Advanced Testing Methodologies
Beyond basic A/B tests, advanced tests help you understand the true impact of each channel and creative. Here are three types to consider:
- Incrementality Tests: Establish a control group that doesn’t see your ads and compare its behaviour to a test group that does. This reveals the genuine lift attributable to your campaigns rather than simply counting conversions that might have occurred anyway.
- Brand Lift Studies: Use short surveys to measure changes in awareness, ad recall and purchase intent. By sampling exposed versus unexposed audiences, you quantify how your branding efforts move the needle qualitative metrics.
- Geo-Split Tests: Run your campaign in one geographic region while holding back spend in a similar control region. Comparing performance across these regions uncovers the impact that a certain channel or campaign has on conversions.
Each of these methods goes beyond last-click attribution and gives you confidence that your media spend is driving genuine value. By combining them with your ongoing A/B experiments, you build a greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
