How Full-Funnel Paid Media Created Measurable Demand for Goldback

An integrated program across Google, Meta, connected TV and out-of-home that creates demand, captures it, and proves it in the data.

Campaign Strategy Case Study Content Production Featured Paid Media Reporting and Analysis Strategy

About the Project

Goldback positions its product as voluntary, physical currency: hand-held gold notes designed to be spent like cash, each containing a precise, fractional amount of pure 24-karat gold. The brand is building a genuinely new category customers can hold and use locally, and it launches state by state as local Goldback series come online.

That makes it a high-curiosity product with real objections. Buyers wonder about the premium over spot gold, where they can actually spend it, and whether the whole thing is trustworthy. Winning them over is not a single bottom-funnel click. It takes real education and proof, delivered again and again across the whole funnel.

Anderson Collaborative was brought in to run the paid media program and settle a founder's real doubt about whether the advertising was creating demand or just buying clicks. We built the program to create demand at scale, and we built the measurement to prove it.

Client:

Goldback, Inc.

Product:

Physical Gold Currency

Services:

Paid Media (Google, Meta, PMax), Connected TV, Out-of-Home, Analytics & Reporting

THE PROBLEM:

A new category that has to create its own demand

Goldback is not a product people already search for by the thousands. The client frames it as a new form of voluntary, physical money that most of the market has never heard of, sold against real objections around premium, spendability, and trust, and launched region by region. A narrow, bottom-funnel-only account cannot build that. The brand needs paid social and search, PMax, connected TV, out-of-home, and content working together to educate cold audiences, capture the intent that education creates, and support each state launch. The hard part is proving it worked, because the demand a brand campaign creates shows up downstream in branded search and direct visits, where last-click analytics give the advertising no credit.

THE SOLUTION:

A full-funnel demand engine, measured rigorously

We ran Goldback as one integrated program. Paid search and PMax captured active intent across branded, non-brand, shopping, and distributor demand. Paid social educated cold audiences with product-proof creative and rebuilt retargeting pools, feeding a dedicated FreeGoldback acquisition funnel. Connected TV through MNTN and out-of-home carried brand and state-launch moments to household scale. Then we tied it together with GA4, Search Console, platform exports, and tracking checks so the program could be judged the way leadership judges it: not on clicks, but on whether the media actually moves site traffic, leads, and downstream organic and direct demand. When it came time to prove the point, the data did it for us.

Results Summarized:

Across nine months the program delivered more than 40 million ad impressions across Google, Meta, and connected TV, drove 1.46M website sessions and 24,700 leads, and supported a durable base of organic search demand at 287,400 clicks. When media scaled in January, demand scaled with it: 324,100 site sessions and 163,600 paid sessions in a single month, the strongest of the period. Over the campaign window, branded search interest for Goldback climbed to new highs, the downstream demand a full-funnel program is built to create.

The clearest proof came when the media paused. In February, Google spend fell 95.3% and Meta spend fell 92.8%, and paid sessions fell 88.1% while total site sessions fell 54.7%, even though organic search barely moved. The pattern repeated in May on the FreeGoldback funnel: turn the paid layer off, and direct, organic social, and display all decayed in lockstep within a week. That is what advertising looks like when it creates demand rather than only capturing it.

Connected TV added household-scale reach on top, 6.05M impressions to 1.1M households at a $1.97 cost per verified visit, tying brand-building to measured site visits. For leadership the takeaway was simple. Keep an always-on national baseline and optimize toward quality, because the demand is real and it responds to pressure.