Projects/Marketing Campaign Performance Analysis
intermediate5 milestones · ~10 hours

Marketing Campaign
Performance Analysis

A marketing director hands you the budget and asks where to cut and where to double down. The analytical work is the easy part — the skill is *defending the recommendation* when the CMO says 'we tried that' and the CFO says 'show me the number first'. This project teaches both: build the reallocation proposal, then survive the conversation around it. Most analysts make recommendations. Mature analysts make recommendations that hold up under questioning.

What you'll learn

  • Audit campaign spend with consistent definitions across channels
  • Identify efficient and inefficient channels with significance thresholds (not vibes)
  • Build a concrete budget reallocation proposal with dollar amounts and risk analysis
  • Anticipate stakeholder objections and write defensive responses BEFORE the meeting
  • Ship a portfolio that demonstrates analytical depth AND political/communication skill

After this project

What you'll be able to claim — credibly — once your repo is shipped.

Roles you can credibly apply to

Marketing Analyst
ROAS, CAC, channel-level efficiency, and budget reallocation are the bread-and-butter outputs of a marketing analyst. This project produces all four with stakeholder-defense thinking baked in.
Companies with sophisticated attribution stacks may want multi-touch experience; this project uses last-touch (the most common but limited model).
Performance Marketing Analyst
The reallocation proposal + pushback memo demonstrates the political skill performance marketing actually needs — defending budget moves under CMO/CFO challenge.
A growth-experimentation project would round out the toolkit for performance marketing roles.
Growth Marketer (analytical)
Growth roles increasingly expect analytical chops — the ability to compute channel ROAS, propose reallocations, and defend them is exactly the value-add.
Add a customer-segmentation project (RFM) to show you understand who marketing is acquiring, not just where.

Keywords on your resume after this

Tools
PostgreSQLSQLExcelGoogle SheetsVS CodeGit
Methods
ROAS analysisCAC calculationConversion funnel analysisChannel-level performanceSignificance thresholdingBudget reallocation
Concepts
Last-touch attributionMarketing ROICustomer acquisition costStatistical noise vs signalBudget reallocationStakeholder defense

Interview questions you'll be ready for

  1. 01Walk me through how you'd compute ROAS by channel from raw spend + conversion data — including how you'd handle attribution.
  2. 02A campaign with $50 spent and 1 lucky conversion looks like a winner. How do you separate signal from noise?
  3. 03If you proposed reallocating $5K from Channel Y to Channel X, what would the CFO most likely push back on, and how would you respond?
  4. 04What's the difference between cutting a campaign and pausing it — and when would you recommend each?
  5. 05How would you defend last-touch attribution as your model when you know multi-touch would be more accurate?
Resume-ready bullets — unlocked when you reach Milestone 5
After completing the project, you'll get a copy-ready resume bullet template phrased the way hiring managers want to hear it, with the numbers your own analysis produced.

The 5 milestones

Each milestone is reviewed before you advance.

  1. 01

    Set up your project repo

    Before any analytical work: create a public GitHub repository, push the standard skeleton, and paste the URL into your workspace.

  2. 02

    Audit current spend

    Map where the marketing budget is actually going, with consistent definitions across channels and campaigns.

  3. 03

    Find efficiency — which channels actually work

    Identify under- and over-performers with thresholds for 'real signal' (not noise from small experiments).

  4. 04

    Build the reallocation proposal

    Concrete dollar amounts. Where to cut, where to add, what the expected impact is, what the risks are.

  5. 05

    Defend the proposal — the pushback memo

    Anticipate the CMO's and CFO's objections, write the responses, ship as a portfolio piece.

Reading & references

Pre-flight setup: VS Code, database, spreadsheet
Setup Guide · Premium
Marketing analytics vocabulary
Article
Last-touch vs multi-touch attribution
Article · Premium
When is a marketing test 'statistically real'
Article · Premium
Building marketing dashboards in Google Sheets
Article · Premium
How to write a budget reallocation proposal
Article · Premium
How to disagree with executives — productively
Article · Premium
Anatomy of a great portfolio README
Article

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