Leadership asks: if we turned off all paid social tomorrow, how many sales would we actually lose? How would you answer with evidence?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Explains attribution cannot answer this
- Designs a geo holdout or lift test with control
- Defines duration, metric and success criteria
- Accounts for lag effects and seasonality
- Uses result to set budget or iROAS
Model answer
Platform and analytics attribution cannot answer this, because they only assign credit to touches and include sales that would have happened anyway. I would run an incrementality test. One option is a geo test: pick matched groups of cities with similar past sales, pause or heavily reduce paid social in the test group and keep it running in control for four to six weeks. Another is a platform conversion lift study with a randomised holdout. Before starting, I would agree the main metric, such as total orders from the CRM, the minimum lift we can detect and the duration, and avoid festive seasons that distort results. I would also watch for a lag after the test ends. The result gives incremental ROAS, which I would use to recalibrate attribution numbers and set budgets.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.
More hard Digital Marketing Specialist questions
- The company asks you to cut the marketing budget by 30% but keep lead volume as close as possible to current levels. What do you do?
- Tell me about a campaign that failed. What happened, what did you learn and what did you change?
- Ad platforms now automate targeting, bidding and even creatives with AI. Where do you still add value, and what risks do you manage?
- The product head wants a big launch campaign for a new feature, while the sales head wants all budget on bottom-funnel leads this quarter. How do you handle it?
- The CEO wants to triple paid media spend next quarter. How do you decide whether and how to scale?
- Explain marketing mix modelling and how you would use it alongside attribution.
- Your company is launching its product in a new country, for example from India into the UAE. How would you plan the digital marketing?
- How would you build a first-party data strategy for a brand that currently relies on third-party targeting?
- Suddenly most of your marketing emails are going to spam. How do you diagnose and fix the problem?