Growth Marketing Skills Assessment

When a conversion rate drops after a page change, the page itself is the primary suspect. Analyzing bounce rate, scroll depth, and CTA visibility isolates whether the redesign created usability friction. While traffic source shifts and bugs are valid secondary checks, they should come after ruling out the most probable cause. Sales follow-up is unrelated to self-serve pricing page conversions.

12% Day-7 retention indicates users are not reaching the value moment before disengaging. Improving onboarding to accelerate time-to-value is the highest-leverage fix. A re-engagement push at Day-3 (before Day-7 drop-off) can recover users who lost momentum. Increasing install spend without fixing retention is pouring water into a leaky bucket. Referral programs improve acquisition, not retention.

A 60% MQL-to-SQL rate is strong, indicating lead quality and qualification are not the problem. An 8% SQL-to-close rate is the bottleneck - it suggests friction in the sales cycle itself: competitive displacement, pricing objections, unclear differentiation, or a mismatch between what was promised in marketing and what sales delivers. The growth marketer should work with sales to identify where deals are being lost.

A referral program must start with the incentive structure because it drives both the economics and the user psychology of sharing. Identifying the right in-product moment (post-activation, when users have experienced value) determines conversion rate. Building mechanics before knowing the incentive creates rework. Launching to a test segment before full rollout prevents costly mistakes at scale.

False. Performance marketing focuses on paid channel optimization and cost-per-acquisition metrics. Growth marketing is broader - it spans the full funnel from acquisition through retention and referral, uses both paid and product-led mechanisms, and is grounded in experimentation methodology. A performance marketer optimizes existing channels; a growth marketer designs and tests new growth loops across acquisition, activation, retention, and referral.

False. CPL is a useful efficiency metric but optimizing for it in isolation can flood the funnel with low-quality leads that never convert, increasing cost-per-acquisition and wasting sales resources. Growth marketers should optimize for cost-per-qualified-lead or cost-per-acquisition, which account for downstream conversion rates. A channel with a higher CPL but better MQL-to-SQL conversion often produces a lower blended CPA.

CAC by channel, MQL volume with conversion rates, and payback period are all decision-relevant metrics that tell leadership whether acquisition is efficient, what quality looks like, and how long it takes to recover investment. Social media post count is an activity metric, not an outcome metric, and has no place in an acquisition performance report.

PLG uses the product as the primary growth engine. Free trials and freemium tiers are the standard PLG acquisition mechanism because they lower the barrier to experiencing value. Viral loops embedded in the product (collaboration features, sharing, exported content with branding) create compounding growth. PLG can coexist with a sales team but is not dependent on outbound sales — that describes a sales-led growth model.

LTV:CAC measures whether the long-term revenue generated by an acquired customer justifies the cost to acquire them. A ratio of 3:1 is commonly cited as the minimum healthy benchmark (the customer generates 3x what it costs to acquire them). Growth marketers use this ratio to evaluate channel efficiency, justify budget allocation, and identify when acquisition costs have grown unsustainable relative to customer value. Accept: economically, financially, commercially, viable.

Growth loops (also called flywheels) are self-reinforcing systems where each new user or customer creates the conditions that attract the next one — through referrals, content creation, network effects, or marketplace liquidity. Unlike linear funnels that stop at conversion, loops compound over time. Identifying and strengthening growth loops is a core growth marketing skill. Accept: loop, flywheel, cycle.

The ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) is a standard prioritization tool in growth marketing that scores each experiment on expected impact, confidence in the hypothesis, and ease of execution. It helps allocate limited budget toward experiments most likely to generate useful signal. Equal budget allocation wastes resources on low-probability channels. Search volume and competitor analysis inform but do not drive prioritization.

DAU/MAU ratio measures product stickiness — how frequently active users return relative to the total monthly active base. A viral coefficient above 1 means the product is growing exponentially without paid acquisition. CAC is the fully-loaded cost to acquire one paying customer. Churn rate measures the rate of customer loss in a given period, which directly impacts LTV and the sustainability of growth.

The 53-point retention gap between checklist completers and skippers is a strong activation signal. The growth action is to recover skipped users by meeting them where they are — surfacing the most relevant checklist items based on their activity rather than restarting from the beginning. Removing the checklist would eliminate a proven retention driver. Forcing completion creates friction. Using it only for presentations wastes actionable data.

A sharp open rate decline from Email 1 to Email 5 signals that the sequence is losing subscriber engagement through relevance decay, excessive send frequency, or content that does not match subscriber expectations set at opt-in. The fix is to audit send cadence, segment the list by engagement level, and ensure each email delivers standalone value. A blacklisted domain would affect all emails equally, not just later ones.

LTV:CAC = $360 / $120 = 3. A 3:1 ratio means the customer generates 3 times the revenue it costs to acquire them — the widely-cited minimum healthy benchmark. Below 3:1 suggests the acquisition cost is too high or the product needs to improve retention to increase LTV. Above 5:1 may indicate underinvestment in acquisition with room to accelerate growth. Accept: 3:1, 3, 3 to 1.