Excel for marketing

Marketing analysis is mostly combining exports that were never designed to be combined, then working out cost per outcome.

What the job actually asks for

Every ad platform exports a different shape. The work is cleaning those files into a common structure, joining them on campaign name, and calculating cost per lead or per acquisition — usually under time pressure before a review.

The recurring tasks

Compare channel spend against conversions
Calculate cost per lead and per acquisition
Clean and combine exports from ad platforms
Summarise results by campaign and month

Where people get caught

Joining on a text key that is not consistent between systems. Campaign names differ by casing or a stray space, the lookup fails silently for a subset of rows, and the totals are quietly understated.

What interviews test

Summarising spend and conversions by channel with several conditions, and explaining how you would reconcile two exports whose campaign names do not match exactly.

Practice built from marketing work

2 exercises using the situations above, ordered from most approachable to hardest.