Marketing interviews test whether you can connect activity to numbers — channels, funnels, attribution, and unit economics. Below are the most common questions with model answers. Junior: core theory, definitions, and simple practical cases.
CPC is cost per click, CPM cost per thousand impressions, CPA cost per acquisition. CPC misleads when the clicks are cheap because the audience is wrong — you pay less per visit and more per customer. CPM misleads on placements nobody looks at. CPA is closest to the truth but hides what happens after: an acquisition that churns in a week cost more than it looks.
They tag a link so analytics can say which campaign a visitor came from — source, medium, campaign. Without them everything arrives as direct or referral, and you cannot tell whether the article, the newsletter or the ad brought the sign-up. The common mistake is inconsistent naming: Facebook, facebook and FB become three separate sources in the report.
Awareness, interest, consideration, action — or in practical terms, saw it, clicked, tried, paid. The largest drop is almost always between click and try, because that is where the promise made by the ad meets the actual page. Measuring the funnel matters more than naming its stages: a 2% drop at the top costs more absolute users than a 20% drop at the bottom.
Clicks divided by impressions. It is a bad sign when the creative promises something the page does not deliver — clickbait raises CTR and lowers everything after it. That is why CTR is never read alone: paired with bounce rate or with conversion it tells you whether the traffic was interested or merely curious.
Reach counts people, impressions count times shown — one person seeing an ad five times is reach 1, impressions 5. The ratio between them is frequency, and it matters because past a certain frequency you are paying to annoy the same audience rather than to find a new one. For a launch you want reach; for a reminder you want frequency.
Because the homepage has to serve everybody and therefore convinces nobody in particular. A landing page repeats the promise of the ad, removes navigation that leads away, and asks for one action. The measurable effect is usually large enough that running the same campaign to both is the first test worth doing.
Paid stops the day you stop paying; organic compounds and takes months to start. SEO is not free — it costs content, technical work and time, and the bill arrives before the traffic does. The honest way to describe it is an investment with a long payback, which is why a company that needs customers this quarter should not start there.
Product is the feature set and the plan tiers; price is the pricing model — subscription, usage, seats — which shapes the business more than the number does; place is distribution, meaning the app store, the website or a partner; promotion is everything that brings attention. The awkward one is place, because software has no shelf, and treating the sign-up flow as the shelf is usually the useful translation.
Targeted advertising picks the person — age, interests, behaviour, a lookalike of your customers. Contextual picks the surroundings — the search query or the page content — regardless of who is reading. Contextual is having a comeback because privacy changes made behavioural targeting weaker, and because someone searching for a solution right now is a better prospect than someone who fits a profile.
A marketing qualified lead has shown enough interest to be worth contacting — downloaded something, requested a demo. A sales qualified lead has been talked to and confirmed to have budget, need and authority. The distinction matters because it is where marketing and sales argue: if MQLs never convert, either the qualification bar is too low or the definition was never agreed in writing.
B2B has few buyers, long cycles and a committee — the person who signs is rarely the person who uses. So the content has to serve several audiences and the measurement window is quarters, not days. B2C is many buyers deciding quickly and mostly alone, which makes testing fast and creative more decisive. Applying B2C playbooks to B2B is the usual mistake, and the symptom is a lot of leads that sales cannot use.
Check whether it is real before acting: analytics breaks more often than traffic does, so confirm the tracking still fires. Then segment by channel — a fall in one is a campaign, a ranking change or a broken link; a fall in all at once usually means the site or the tag manager. Look at Search Console for a manual action or an indexing drop, and at what shipped that week.
In a real interview you speak under pressure. Cam asks these same questions, scores every answer, and shows exactly what to fix.
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