Clarity Money: Insights On Ad Creative, Metrics, and KPIs

I am currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Clarity Money where I focus on our growth efforts from User Acquisition, Operations, Partnerships, and Marketing. Prior to joining Clarity Money, I was the Head of Growth at Paribus. I oversaw the growth of the company from 10,000 users to almost 1,000,000 in 12 months until Paribus got acquired by Capital One. Prior to that, I was a Business Operations and Planning Analyst at Flurry (acquired by Yahoo). I have also interned and been involved in other industries including ad-tech and venture capital.

I graduated from Harvard College, where I earned my degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I also played on the Harvard squash team. I graduated in 2010 from College Notre-Dame de Jamhour in Beirut, Lebanon. I am fluent in English, French, and Arabic, while having conversational skills in Spanish and Italian.

Besides squash, I enjoy playing tennis and basketball. Moreover, I am an avid fan of Chelsea F.C. and a poker amateur.

ON METRICS

The key metrics we measure against are maybe a little different than the usual. Every day, I look at the different channels we are running paid marketing on and look at the CAC by channel/campaign/ad set (all the way to the creative/ad copy).

I work closely with the Data Science team to merge this data with engagement metrics, which in our case are actions taken on the different features we offer within the app. We then built a model that weighs CAC but also revenue opportunity from the different actions.

I believe that it is essential to be very familiar with the tools you use to measure campaigns you are currently running and know how to easily extract the data, analyze and come-up with actionable insights. You have to stay on top of the newest trends in the market (Snapchat Ads, Apple Search Ads,532 etc…) as they tend to be cheaper as the market is still not mature and the big advertisers are not there yet. As a startup you can afford to make fast well educated decisions.

ON CREATIVES

Clarity Money offers a plethora of features that span the gamut from getting organized and having a holistic view into your financials to opening a savings account or even canceling subscriptions. It is very important for us to understand what feature resonates with what demographic. Therefore we came-up with a few ads for each feature spanning a few ad formats and we’re currently running them across different demographics. We will soon have results as to what demographic resonates with what feature. Deep-linking is going to be key here as well.

Learn more about Marc from his Mobile Heroes profile.

ON OPPORTUNITIES

I constantly think about scale and what channels are going to be there for us when we hit 1M, 10M users etc. Whether it’s paid or non-paid, it is worth investing our time today to try to find those channels and start investing in them very early on. I’m excited about launching on Android/Desktop. I believe Desktop is going to be huge for us from an acquisition standpoint (working with the top personal finance blogs, influencers, offline channels, etc.).

THE LAST WORD

• Test, learn, iterate, scale!
• Don’t be afraid of newer channels, they might be the cheapest and the best ones for you
• You learn from successful experiments, you learn even more from failed ones
• Build a nice product, while it won’t sell itself, it will help you tremendously with your day-to-day job. There is nothing more fulfilling than having your users advocate for the product to their families and friends.
• Think about macro events: weather, tax season, holidays, trends, etc…
• Hire people that are smarter than you, and who complement your set of skills
• Data will tell you the first half of the story, customer feedback will tell you the other half
• Learn from what others have done, there is nothing wrong in eating at a restaurant multiple times before opening your own “better” restaurant
• Go with your intuition and experience but let the data decide whether you were right or wrong
• Embrace the competition, they might be more helpful than you think