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Grüns’ Power Play: How Northbeam Became the Daily Fix for a Fast-Growing Brand
Grüns’ superfood gummies promise to streamline health into a bite-sized, fruit-snack experience. But the real magic isn’t just in the product—it’s in how they get it in front of the right people. That’s where Northbeam comes in.
We sat down with Claire Yi, VP of Growth at Grüns, to break down how a health & wellness brand in its infancy has already become one of the most exciting DTC players in the space, thanks to a potent mix of aggressive channel testing, a creative-first marketing ethos, and a data backbone that gives them clarity amid the noise.
Northbeam gave Grüns enough integrity and confidence in their data to 22x their spend, which resulted in 40x total revenue. Here’s how they did it.
A Platform Worth Waking Up To
The decision to integrate Northbeam wasn’t a lengthy deliberation for Grüns.
“Our CEO, Chad, was already plugged into a network of DTC founders who swore by Northbeam,” Yi explains. “So, we were early adopters by default.”
The result? Northbeam quickly became the company’s gospel. “I check in every day,” Yi says. “Our CFO checks in. Our CEO checks in. It’s the first look of the day for all of us.”
Moving at the Speed of Growth
Startups live and die by speed, and Grüns is no exception. With the brand not even two years old, Yi’s team needs to pivot on a dime.
“We’re constantly testing new channels,” Yi says. “I rely on Northbeam very heavily every single day. The most useful part of it is just specific metrics like percent new visits by channel, new customer acquisition costs and others. Having that really helps me know if a new channel that we test into is actually bringing in incremental new users to our site.”
That word—incremental—is a big one at Grüns. It’s not enough to get a new customer; they have to be truly new. And that’s where Northbeam shines.
The Obsession With nCAC
If there’s one number that runs the show at Grüns, it’s new customer acquisition cost (nCAC).
“Our entire model is built around it,” Yi says. “We look at nCAC across all our channels—Meta, YouTube, and more —and it helps us benchmark against our holistic goal.”
Northbeam’s ability to separate actual first-time customers from returning buyers or cross-sales means that Grüns isn’t throwing money at inflated metrics. “We don’t trust platform data alone,” Yi adds. Relying on platform data is like letting a chef be the food critic for their own restaurant. It’s almost like being able to have an “Ads Manager” view of all platforms in one view, but without each channel overattributing their conversions across all your orders.
Grüns saw the cost incurred to acquire net new customers decrease by over 14% after implementing Northbeam
Creative is King—And Northbeam is the Court
Grüns isn’t just a performance brand; it’s a creative-driven performance brand. With a heavy emphasis on visuals and storytelling, they need to know immediately which ads are working and which ones need to be optimized.
“We don’t just optimize at the campaign level—we optimize at the creative level,” Yi explains. “Which ad, which visual, which CTA is truly working? Northbeam tells us. We don’t even look at platform data for this anymore.”
And with that kind of granular view into what is truly working, Northbeam becomes a tool to validate all the others. “I use Shopify with Northbeam because it helps us look at day-of performance very sharply, especially during holiday periods or sale periods” Yi says. “We want to be able to scale back if the day is looking a little off from a conversion rate standpoint.”
This ability to instantly separate high-performing creative campaigns from flops means that Grüns can pour budget into winners before a campaign fizzles, maximizing returns with ruthless efficiency.
Applovin, and the Hype vs. Reality Test
In a world where new ad platforms pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, Grüns uses Northbeam to separate reality from the hype.
“We tested Applovin because there was a lot of buzz around it,” Yi says. “But when we ran the numbers, it wasn’t reaching new customers at an efficient enough CPM ”
The decision? Spend elsewhere where new visits and new customers were at our overall benchmark according to Northbeam. For now.
More Than Just Numbers—Confidence in the Boardroom
At the end of the day, Northbeam isn’t just a marketing tool—it’s a confidence booster.
“I've been able to use those metrics–nCAC, percent new visits, and more–to explain to stakeholders that a specific channel isn't a priority channel for us right now.” Yi explains. “It also saves us a lot of time in being able to understand at a high level, revenue, new orders, returning orders, marketing spend, and if we're pacing towards our nCAC goals. And it also helps me pull reports really easily to know how much we spent on each channel by month.”
When Grüns needs to decide whether a platform, ad, or creative direction is worth the investment, the answer is already waiting for them. And that’s the real power of Northbeam.
Grüns is building a health & wellness empire with the speed of a tech startup. And in a world where decision fatigue is real and ad dollars vanish into the void faster than you can say "platform algorithm update," Northbeam is their secret weapon for staying sharp, strategic, and relentlessly efficient.
Northbeam’s Profitability Benchmarks: Tailored Performance Targets for Your Business
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding what defines a successful ad campaign is crucial for sustainable growth. Profitability Benchmarks is a tool within Northbeam designed to help you set personalized performance targets based on your unique business data.
Why Profitability Benchmarks?
Traditional benchmarking often relies on external industry data, which may not accurately reflect your business's unique dynamics. Profitability Benchmarks shifts the focus inward, allowing you to set personalized performance targets, enhance decision-making with real data, and simplify complex data into the metrics that matter.
By establishing performance targets for each of your campaigns, you can demystify what constitutes a “good” or “bad” ad campaign in the context of your specific business.
How does it work?
Profitability Benchmarks give brands the flexibility to define their own success metrics by analyzing past performance and filtering out misleading anomalies.
Here’s how it works:
- Select your baseline days: Choose historical data that best represents your typical performance; this ensures that benchmarks are grounded in real business outcomes rather than industry-wide assumptions.
- Adjust for profitability: Factor in COGS to create profitability-based benchmarks to ensure that your targets reflect actual margins, not just revenue.
- Manage outliers: Promotional periods, product launches, or unexpected downturns can distort performance data. You can remove these fluctuations so that your benchmark reflects normal business operations for a more accurate view of long-term performance trends.
- Consider incrementality: Not all sales are directly attributable to a single ad or campaign. You can adjust benchmarks to exclude non-incremental conversions, ensuring that your targets focus on true revenue impact.
- Compare and optimize: Once your benchmarks are set, you can track performance against your targets in real-time. This helps identify which campaigns are overperforming, which need adjustment, and where to allocate budget more effectively.
Why does it matter?
With Profitability Benchmarks, brands can move beyond vanity metrics and focus on what actually drives profitability. They can improve budget allocation, scaling the right campaigns and cutting inefficient spend with data-backed confidence. Finally, they can drive sustainable growth by setting realistic, performance-based goals that ensure long-term profitability.
With Profitability Benchmarks, success is no longer defined by generic industry data — it’s defined by you.
If you’re interested in gaining access to Profitability Benchmarks, get in touch with our team to learn more.
The Northbeam Effect: How Tumble Leveraged Northbeam to Further Power it’s Revenue Machine
From Media Buyer to Growth Architect
Before Andrew took the reins as Tumble’s Director of Growth, he was deep in the trenches of digital marketing at MuteSix, a performance marketing agency. That’s where he first encountered the world of MTA (multi-touch attribution) platforms. “Northbeam was always at the top of the list,” Andrew recalls. “When I joined Tumble, I knew we needed a more sophisticated way to measure performance.”
For the first year, Tumble relied on platform-reported metrics (we see you, Meta) and last-click data, which, in Andrew’s words, “is more limited... since it's single session.” But something wasn’t adding up. The team knew there was a better way to see the full picture.
In December 2023, they turned to Northbeam.
“We needed a tool that gave us a unified view of performance across channels and helped us cut through the noise of over-inflated platform metrics,” Andrew said.
The Problem: Are Kids’ Rugs a Flop or a Hidden Goldmine?
Tumble launched a kids’ rug collection late last year, hoping to expand beyond their traditional washable rugs. After a slow start to sales, they made a more aggressive push to market the product via partnerships and Meta advertising, tailored toward parents of infants and toddlers.
That’s when they turned to Northbeam to cut through the noise.
Instead of guessing, they leaned on Northbeam’s product attribution tool to analyze performance across channels. They ramped up their Meta advertising, built a dedicated kids’ funnel, and did a campaign push with Babylist.
The Northbeam Unlock: Proving the Demand Was There
Northbeam didn’t just help Tumble track revenue—it helped them see what was actually driving it.
“When we pulled the numbers in Northbeam, we realized that our kids’ rug campaigns were performing at the same efficiency as our best-selling washable rugs,” Andrew says. “If we had just looked at platform-reported data, we wouldn’t have seen that.”
The real kicker? 40% of the attributed revenue from these campaigns was coming from those new kids’ designs. With over 80 other designs for customers to choose from outside of their kids collection, it was a very encouraging signal.
“That’s when we knew,” Andrew says. “There was real demand, and we felt comfortable scaling up.”
With that clarity, they doubled down, spending more aggressively on the kids’ funnel and shifting their approach on creative and audience targeting.
Clicks + Views = Better Decision-Making
Initially, Tumble used a conservative one-day click attribution. With their consideration window expanding as they scaled, Northbeam helped them realize they were missing a huge chunk of conversions by relying on one-day click.
“We knew that directionally our average time to convert and average number of touchpoints to convert had grown as they continued to scale up our customer acquisition efforts, and through additional testing and analysis, 7-day click/1-day view was a better performance indicator for us specifically.”
The addition of Northbeam's Clicks + Views Enhanced model has also given them more confidence when making optimizations on TikTok and AppLovin as they continued to expand on both channels.
By the Numbers: How Northbeam Transformed Tumble’s Growth
The proof is always in the data, and Tumble’s numbers tell a story of transformation:
- Total revenue and new customer transactions have continued to grow, both up over 150% YoY with the help of Northbeam.
- Kids Rug attributed revenue is up 183% over the last 60 days with Northbeam's data providing more confidence in scaling.
- Meta spend increased by 275%, yielding a 335% boost in revenue.
“Northbeam hasn’t just helped us see our data—it has helped us act on it.” Andrew says.
Scaling Smarter, Not Harder
Now that Tumble has a full year of Northbeam data, they’re not just scaling—they’re scaling intelligently.
“Northbeam ROAS and New Customer ROAS, along with new visits percentage are my first checks every single day,” Andrew says. “We also use them to compare against holistic performance, and make real-time adjustments.”
And it’s not just about numbers—it’s about action.
“With Northbeam, we get insights that also help us make better creative decisions,” he adds. “We can drill down into what’s working, optimize funnels, and help validate spend in a way that wasn’t really possible prior to that.”
Why Northbeam?
Andrew doesn’t mince words: “Northbeam gives us a clearer, unified view of our ad performance. It helps us level the playing field, cut through inflated platform-reported metrics, and make more confident scaling decisions.”
And the result? Tumble isn’t just another DTC brand throwing money at ads and hoping for the best. They’re winning—because they have the data to prove it.
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