How to Know Which Audience Won (Without Being a Data Scientist)

Your sprint campaign is live.

Each audience has spent some of its budget.

Now you need to answer one very simple, very important question:

“Which audience should we put real client money behind?”

You don’t need a data team for this.

You just need to look at the right metrics and compare them the right way.

The metrics that actually matter for this sprint

For each audience line item in your DSP Connect campaign, pull these metrics:

Impressions: how often the ads were shown.
Clicks and CTR (click‑through rate): who actually clicked.
Cost metrics (CPC/CPM): what it cost to get clicks/visibility.
Time on site and bounce rate (from your analytics): how people behaved once they landed.

Why these:

CTR shows who is interested enough to click at all.
CPC/CPM shows how efficiently you’re buying that attention.
Time on site and bounce rate show whether the traffic is qualified or just curious.

For this sprint, think of conversions as a bonus.

The primary goal is to see which audience consistently sends better traffic.

You don’t need benchmarks from the whole internet.

You’re comparing audiences against each other inside the same campaign.

Look at a simplified report like:

Audience A:
- 40,000 impressions
- 240 clicks (0.60% CTR)
- Avg. CPC: $1.25
- Time on site: 0:45
- Bounce rate: 65%
Audience B:
- 35,000 impressions
- 490 clicks (1.40% CTR)
- Avg. CPC: $0.80
- Time on site: 1:30
- Bounce rate: 45%
Audience C:
- 38,000 impressions
- 340 clicks (0.90% CTR)
- Avg. CPC: $1.05
- Time on site: 1:05
- Bounce rate: 55%

You’re looking for a segment that clearly wins on at least two of these:

In this example, Audience B is your winner:

You don’t need statistical jargon to see that B is the best place to focus next.

Sometimes, all the audiences look similar:

When that happens:

Don’t pretend you have a clear winner.
Label the sprint as “inconclusive” and communicate that clearly.
Plan a second sprint with more extreme differences: new industries, new roles, or a different geo mix.

The win for you is that you didn’t blow $10k on guesswork.

You spent a small budget to learn that your first hypothesis set wasn’t differentiated enough.

Your clients don’t want a CSV.

They want to know what it means.

Here’s a simple narrative structure you can reuse:

“We tested [X] distinct audiences for you, all with the same creative and budgets.”
“[Audience Y] delivered ~[N%] higher CTR and stronger on‑site engagement than the other segments.”
“That tells us this group is significantly more responsive to your offer. Our recommendation is to focus the next phase of spend on this audience, then expand once we’ve maximized what’s working.”

That’s strategy, not “we ran some ads.”

The next step is to make sure this isn’t a one‑off fluke.

That’s what your confirmation sprint is for.