New marketing channel testing works best as a small, localized rollout, mirroring CPG and fast-food launches. This matters because a new platform needs tuned metrics and native creative, not creative copied from another channel. Without dedicated testing, brands miss revenue lift behind bad setup, or scale nationally before finding where a channel saturates. This video explains how a six-week rollout test reveals incremental revenue and the right spend level.
Why New Marketing Channel Testing Starts With Fixing Platform Metrics, Not Scaling Spend
New marketing channel testing starts with fixing platform metrics, not scaling spend, because a brand that copies its creative or setup straight from another channel is testing a broken version of the new platform, not the platform itself. In this video, John Wallace, CEO of LiftLab, opens with the same instinct fast-food and CPG companies rely on before a national rollout: run the experiment small first. He cites McDonald’s saving tens of millions of dollars by learning, in a handful of stores, that pizza didn’t belong on the menu, a cheap lesson bought with a short-term sacrifice in a few locations rather than a company-wide misstep.
Wallace applies the same logic to new ad channels, using TikTok as the recent example. The first phase of any rollout test isn’t about spend level at all, it’s about getting the platform’s own metrics right in partnership with a rep from that platform, since one LiftLab customer admitted at a conference that copying their Facebook ads directly into TikTok produced miserable results. Only once the metrics and creative are actually tuned to the platform does it make sense to run a geo comparison test, typically about six weeks, measuring revenue in markets where the new channel is active against markets where it isn’t, which reveals both the incremental lift and where the channel starts to saturate.
In this video, you’ll learn:
The value of incrementality testing for new ad channels
How to align platform metrics with business goals
Risks of recycling creative assets across different platforms
Techniques for identifying and managing channel saturation
Methods to validate media spend through localized testing
TIME STAMPFull Video Transcript: New Marketing Channel Testing Explained
+–
John Wallace walks through how to test a new marketing channel properly, from tuning platform metrics to reading a six-week rollout experiment.
[0:00 – 0:28] Embracing Experimentation in Marketing
All marketers are going to be faced with the task of bringing new channels online, new marketing channels into their media plan, and I think it should start with an embrace of experimentation, much like fast food companies and CPG companies. They call them rollout tests, and McDonald’s saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by figuring out, in a handful of stores, they had no business putting pizzas in a McDonald’s, right? So they sacrificed a few stores’ sales for a short while to learn that lesson, and so you can do that as well.
[0:29 – 1:06] Getting Ad Platform Metrics Right
You will be working with the rep from one of those new ad platforms. We know a lot of brands that have made it through this process on TikTok over the past year or year and a half. You can start these tests in a handful of markets, and your initial focus is going to be on getting the ad platform metrics right, and you will be working with your rep from that platform to know that. We had one customer that admitted in a conference that they kind of copy and pasted their Facebook ads into their TikTok account, and those ads performed miserably. So getting water through the pipes and making sure that you have ad platform metrics that work for you.
[1:07 – 1:49] Scaling Spend and Understanding Diminishing Returns
Once that’s in place, you are going to want to turn your attention to understanding the diminishing returns, and so those same markets can serve for that. You are going to be using LiftLab to compare, what’s the performance in the markets where I’m serving those ads to the markets where I’m not serving those ads, and quite literally, how much more revenue did I make, and also understanding the degree to which you can scale that spend. These experiments typically run for about six weeks; they gather a lot of rich evidence about the performance of those markets, the performance at different spend levels, and it will start to yield some evidence of where there’s potential saturation. We love watching teams invest in these new channels with confidence and quickly adding them to the media plan with the right amount of spend.
Key Lessons: Testing a New Marketing Channel the Right Way
Strategic experimentation: Start with small, localized tests to validate new channels before committing significant budget.
Platform optimization: Work closely with platform representatives to tune ad metrics rather than simply copying creative from other sources.
Performance analysis: Use comparison between active and non-active markets to measure incremental revenue gains accurately.
Scaling confidence: Utilize data gathered over testing periods to determine the optimal spend level for new media channels.
