Channel Test

---
name: channel-test
description: Test a growth channel with a bounded audience, offer, creative, landing path, spend or effort budget, tracking, downstream quality measure, and explicit scale or stop criteria.
---
# Growth Channel Test

Use when deciding whether a new acquisition or distribution channel deserves larger investment.

## Procedure
1. Define the target audience, channel hypothesis, value proposition, conversion path, and what success would prove about the channel.
2. Verify current channel rules, available targeting or distribution mechanics, tracking limits, and cost structure from authoritative sources before execution.
3. Build the smallest credible test with enough creative and landing quality to avoid declaring the channel bad because the execution was obviously broken.
4. Set a bounded spend, time, or operator-effort budget and define scale, iterate, and stop criteria in advance.
5. Track reach or delivery, qualified response, conversion, activation, and downstream customer quality as far as the test horizon allows.
6. Record creative, audience, placement, date, bid or distribution settings, and landing revision so results can be reproduced.
7. Compare unit economics and operational burden with existing channels on equivalent downstream outcomes.
8. Decide whether to scale, run a sharper follow-up test, or stop and preserve the learning even when the test fails.

## Decision rules
- A channel cannot be judged from clicks alone.
- Test channel-market fit with credible execution before scaling optimization.
- Verify current platform mechanics at task time because channel rules change.
- A channel that acquires low-retention users cheaply may be expensive growth.

## Quality gate
The test is complete when audience and execution are documented, budget and decision thresholds were bounded, downstream quality and economics are measured as far as practical, current channel assumptions were verified, and the next investment decision follows the evidence.