Lower TikTok Acquisition Costs for a Direct-to-Consumer Cosmetics Brand
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Diagnose TikTok ad costs for a DTC cosmetics brand using performance data and live creatives. Earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
A roughly 30-person, venture-backed cosmetics company in Western Europe sells skincare and makeup directly to consumers online, with no physical stores or retail partners. It has built a loyal, highly engaged short-video following but is now watching its paid-acquisition costs outrun its margins, forcing a hard look at why some ads convert cheaply and others burn budget.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
How can the brand restructure its TikTok ad creative to cut its cost per acquisition by 20% without diluting the visual identity and tone its audience already responds to?
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Collect and clean social ad data from a public source while respecting its terms of use
- Apply content-analysis methods to code creative attributes consistently across a sample
- Test which creative attributes are statistically associated with conversion efficiency
- Translate analytical findings into prioritized, on-brand creative recommendations with projected impact
- Communicate insights persuasively through visualizations and an executive summary
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Web Scraping
Apply web scraping to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Content Analysis
Apply content analysis to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Data Visualization
Transform complex data into clear, insightful visual representations.
- Social Media Analytics
Apply social media analytics to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Tiktok Ads
Apply tiktok ads to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Performance Marketing Analyst
Connecting creative attributes to acquisition cost is the daily work of performance marketing analysts, who must prove which ads pay off. This challenge rehearses that loop end to end, from raw social data to budget-shaping recommendations.
This challenge sharpens
- social-media-analytics
- content-analysis
- data-visualization
Paid Social Specialist
Paid social specialists own creative testing and spend efficiency on platforms like TikTok. By diagnosing creative drivers of cost per acquisition and proposing on-brand fixes, you practice the core judgment this role demands every campaign cycle.
This challenge sharpens
- tiktok-ads
- social-media-analytics
- content-analysis
Marketing Data Analyst
Marketing data analysts turn messy campaign data into decisions. Collecting, cleaning, and statistically analyzing ad creatives, then visualizing the findings for non-technical stakeholders, mirrors the exact deliverables this role is hired to produce.
This challenge sharpens
- web-scraping
- data-visualization
- social-media-analytics