From Test to $50K/Day: The Art of Scaling New Channels

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

You know you should diversify away from Meta, but let’s be honest: pulling budget from what works feels terrifying.

What if the new platform doesn’t scale? What if CACs spike? What if growth stalls?

That’s why Scott Kramer’s story matters.

Scott is the VP of Growth at AS Beauty Group (Laura Geller, Cover FX, and more). Last year, he scaled a new channel — AppLovin — from a $500/day test to $50,000/day by Labor Day. It became 30% of their holiday media mix.

Here’s how he did it…

On the Menu:

📈 The Testing Methodology That Actually Works
🔍 Measuring True Incrementality
🎨 Creative Strategy: Adapting to New Platforms
🧩 Structuring Your Team for New Channel Success

BTW, don’t miss our entire conversation with Scott from our recent sit down with him: 

Check it out on Spotify 🎧 and Apple 🍎 as well.

📈 The Testing Methodology That Actually Works

When Scott’s team tested AppLovin, they didn’t chase a viral hack. They started small, learned fast, and scaled with discipline.

“We started like $200, $500… and when we got to $1,500, we said, ‘Hey, this is looking really good — let’s go a little more aggressive.’”

Here’s their exact approach:

• Start with a real test budget — Enough to generate signal through the noise. For Scott, that meant a few hundred dollars/day — enough to hit meaningful conversion volume.

• Scale in steps — Every few days, they paused to assess: “Are the numbers holding over a 3–5 day window?”

• Push harder when it works — Once ROAS and new visitor % held steady, they jumped faster: → $1,500 → $5K → $10K → $20K

• Always tie spend to data — No guesswork. Every budget increase had a reason.

By Labor Day, AppLovin had gone from an experiment to a tentpole channel. 

💡 In Practice: Start at a level that gives you at least a handful of daily conversions. Then assess in 3–5 day decision windows. Let signal build before you scale.

🔍 Measuring True Incrementality

Scaling a new channel is the easy part. Proving it drives net new growth is hard.

Scott’s team knew they didn’t just need ROAS. They needed to know if AppLovin was actually reaching new customers or just cannibalizing Meta.

So they built a measurement system that gave them confidence. Here’s what it included:

• New Visitor % — Their first checkpoint. If they weren’t bringing in new eyeballs, it was a red flag. “That new visit percentage got really important to us.”

• New Customer ROAS — They isolated returns from first-time buyers, not blended ROAS that hid repeats and retargeting.

• Post-Purchase Surveys — They asked: “Did you come from a mobile app game? If yes, which one?” That question helped them find a clear alignment with their core demo: women 40+ playing Wordscapes and other casual games. Exactly the customers buying their products.

• First-Click Attribution (via Triple Whale) — To make cross-platform comparisons fair, they standardized attribution across Meta, Pinterest, and AppLovin.

Scott noted that Pinterest’s reporting used a “30-30-30” window (30-day view, click, and engagement), creating massively inflated performance claims. Standardizing fixed that.

Eventually, they simplified everything further. After consolidating to a single ROAS campaign (a suggestion from the AppLovin team), performance metrics improved, including new visitor %.

💡In Practice: Track new customer ROAS, new visitor %, and first-click attribution. Run post-purchase surveys to verify your sale source. In short, avoid using native platform metrics alone.

🎨 Creative Strategy: Adapting to New Platforms

Most brands treat new channels like extensions of Meta — they drag and drop their best ads and hope for the best. That rarely works.

Scott’s team took a smarter approach. They started with their best Meta performers, but then they adapted them to AppLovin’s unique environment.

🧠 Here’s what they learned:

• Understand the attention context
  AppLovin ads show up between mobile game levels. Users expect them, and they can’t scroll away.
  
  That changes everything. Instead of cramming value into a 0.3s hook, they used 15–30 seconds to educate and persuade.
  

• End cards drive action
  These static “final frames” became key conversion levers. Scott’s team tested multiple variants focused on clear CTAs, product benefits, and visual cues.
  

• Repurpose, but then refine
  They didn’t reinvent the wheel. They ported over high-performing Meta ads — built to deliver fast, punchy messaging — and optimized them for longer attention spans and different UX.

💡 In Practice: Start with what already works, but then tailor it to how users engage with the new channel. Especially in gaming environments, attention works differently. End cards matter more. Clarity wins.

🧩 Structuring Your Team for New Channel Success

The biggest reason most brands fail to scale new channels? It’s not the media. 

It’s the org.

Scott’s team had Meta and Google dialed in. But layering in AppLovin, TikTok, and others introduced chaos: creative fragmentation, unclear ownership, and time scarcity.

So they made a structural shift:

• Created a dedicated Acceleration Team — Focused 100% on testing and scaling emerging platforms.

• Shared wins across brands — AS Beauty manages multiple lines. They shared AppLovin, Meta, and TikTok wins internally, turning isolated wins into systemized playbooks.

• Assigned KPIs by channel maturity — Mature platforms (Meta) focused on blended ROAS. New platforms (like AppLovin) were tasked with driving new-to-file customers and new visitor %.

💡 In Practice: Don’t expect your growth team to test TikTok or AppLovin at 8pm. Give new channels ownership, accountability, and internal airtime. Or they’ll stay side projects forever.

🧰 Operator Toolbox - Scott’s New Channel Pack

🚨Reminder: We have $250,000 in free AppLovin Credits! We’re handing out more and more of these credits every day. Fill out this quick form to get yours before they’re gone →

⭐️ Agency & Vendor Recommendations! We’re introducing brands to our top vendors and partners, including the team that helped us execute our advertorial LP. Just fill out the linked form and let us know what you’re looking for. Quick connect →

🔹 Triple Whale - Tracking and attribution across different channels is impossible without a single source of truth. We use TW at Obvi for this, too. Check out their new AI agents →

🔹 Knocommerce - What Scott uses to conduct post-purchase surveys. Simple, intuitive, and powerful, everyone in DTC should be surveying their visitors. Learn everything about your customers →

🔹 Disco Network - Scott also mentioned this post-purchase advertising network for Shopify stores. Get paid to offer personalized deals to your customers →

Some of these are referral partners. We only share what we actually use or would recommend to a friend.