Architectural products retailer · Home & building

The 25 days between a sample and an order

Buyers wanted to see the finish in their own room before a full order, so the funnel sold a sample first and I measured how long the second sale takes.

15.4 → 19.0

Sample orders a day, baseline against the first days after the relaunch

11%

Sample buyers in the lead category who placed a full order within 60 days

+90%

Sample-only orders YoY, August 1 to 24 (count)

~70%

Samples' share of order count, against under 4% of revenue

1.3% converted by day 10

Sample-to-full-order conversion at day 10: paid, June and July

Architectural finishes are a big purchase, and buyers want to see the finish in their own light first. So the funnel sold a small sample first and treated the full order as the second sale. I designed it and its reporting. With the agency team it became a Meta campaign built on four customer worries (will it look real, will it fit, is it the right finish, can I install it), sample landing pages, and Klaviyo flows that follow sample buyers to the full order.

What I needed most was the wait. Followed forward from their first sample, buyers placed a full order a median of about 25 days later (24 to 30 across the February to May cohorts). The board report covers the previous month so that lag has played out, and plans use a value per sample buyer by category.

The launch nearly failed. Within hours of the build, a CRM integration rewrote the tracking on all 45 ads, and they came back from review with their media stripped. We rebuilt from one canary ad, and within days sample orders went from 15.4 a day to 19.0, with weekend days of 29 and 26.

Measure forward: Counting back from a buyer's first-ever sample nearly doubled the window to about 48 days, so every cohort is followed forward from the month it sampled.
Compare cohorts at the same age: Ten days in, the paid cohort had converted at 1.3%, between June's 0.9% and July's 2.5% at the same age, so it sat inside the normal range while most of its full orders were still to come.

Sample orders 15.4 → 19.0 a day
Sample orders +90% YoY (Aug 1-24)
Rebuilt from one ad
Reconciled within 0.1%

Paid Measurement Lifecycle

The question

“How do you judge a paid funnel when the order you care about lands weeks after the click?”

The assignment

Take everyone who first bought your entry product in one month at least six months ago, follow them forward to their first full order, and write down the median number of days before you judge any flow or campaign.

August revenue also grew, mostly from trade orders coming back. Sample orders are under 4% of revenue, so I don't credit that growth to this funnel. The new owners closed both sites in September, before the paid cohort could be read in full.

Agency work, orchestrated by me end to end: funnel design, measurement and the Klaviyo flows. The agency's paid and creative team built the Meta campaign and landing pages to my brief.

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