Measure Brand Marketing’s Revenue Impact.
Marathon Data connects paid, organic, search, social, and revenue data to show which brand investments create future incremental revenue.
We don’t list our customers’ names. As founders, that’s what we would have wanted—to be protected from the endless calls that come from being on a vendor’s site. Just know that many of your favorite brands are already on Marathon.
- Branded Searches Up 78% Since Campaign Start A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Daily branded searches went from 497 to 883 — pre-campaign baseline (Jan 1–21) vs. week of Mar 9. YoY flipped from -50% to +70%. Steady upward trend every week since campaign start.
- 1.93x Validated Incremental Brand ROAS A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand 6-month causal geo-holdout isolating brand awareness campaigns only. Every $1 in brand spend returned $1.93 in proven incremental revenue. 90% CI: 1.45x–2.41x — entire range above breakeven.
- Branded Search Reversed from Negative to +40% YoY A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Branded search volume was trending negative year-over-year for months. After implementing Marathon’s brand measurement framework, the trend reversed to +30–40% positive comps within the analysis period.
- 2.5x Causal Revenue Lift at Major Retail Partner An Outdoor Brand Built for the Backcountry Geo-holdout test measuring brand campaign impact on wholesale sell-through at a major retail partner. Excludes all direct-to-consumer channels (Shopify, Amazon) to isolate the brand halo effect on retail distribution.
- Contribution Margin Growth Accelerated from +22% to +68% YoY An Apparel Brand You Already Wear CM dollar year-over-year growth rate accelerated from +22% in late January to +68% by early March—the biggest positive comp on record—improving every single week. Driven by disciplined reallocation from DR prospecting to brand-building channels guided by Marathon’s Brand Value signal.
- 2.4x Causal Lift Across Three Sales Channels A Beauty Brand Your Friends Keep Recommending A 6-month causal geo-holdout incrementality test measuring brand impact across Shopify DTC, Amazon marketplace, and TikTok Shop simultaneously. 97% statistical confidence. Proves brand investment reverberates across every channel, not just the one you target.
- Follower Growth Multiplied 341x in Two Months A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Social follower acquisition went from approximately 2 new followers per day in January to 683 per day by March. Marathon’s Brand Value signal identified the inflection point before it showed up in revenue, giving the team time to double down.
- 2x Revenue Lift at Walmart from Brand Investment A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand Geo-holdout test showed brand awareness campaigns lifted Walmart sell-through at 2x the rate of Shopify and Amazon combined. Brand reverberates everywhere—the channels you don’t target still benefit.
- New Customer Revenue +20% YoY on a Multimillion-Dollar Base An Automotive Brand Going Viral Total new customer revenue and contribution margin dollars grew +20% year-over-year on a multimillion-dollar base. Brand investment expanded the top of funnel while maintaining efficiency—more customers acquired at a sustainable cost.
- Brand Value Doubled Year-Over-Year A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Marathon-measured Brand Value grew from $29.9K to $62.8K year-over-year—a 110% increase. This leading indicator correlated with downstream revenue growth that appeared 4–8 weeks later, giving the team predictive visibility into future performance.
- Daily Social Shares Up 629% in Two Months A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Organic social shares jumped from 22 per day in January to 161 per day by March. Marathon tracks these micro-engagements as brand equity inputs, connecting each one to downstream branded search and baseline revenue impact.
- Weekly CM$ +68% YoY — Biggest Positive Comp on Record An Apparel Brand You Already Wear Weekly CM$ grew +68% year-over-year on a multimillion-dollar base. CM% expanded from 18% to 26%—the highest on record. Contribution margin has not declined week-over-week since the team began using Marathon to measure and optimize spend.
- Brand Search More Than Doubled in Under 2 Months A Heritage Footwear Brand Built to Last Organic branded search impressions grew from ~6K to ~14K per day (2.25x) in under two months. Contribution margin up 37% YoY and revenue up 20% YoY simultaneously.
The measurement layer for proving brand spend creates revenue.
Marathon Data turns fragmented marketing signals into one product view: how much future revenue your brand activity is creating, where it is coming from, and what to do next.
Brand Value Score
Quantifies the future incremental revenue your brand activity is creating across 30, 60, 90, and 180-day windows.
Baseline Revenue
Tracks the direct, branded search, organic, marketplace, and retail revenue that grows when demand is building.
Campaign & Creative Scoring
Shows which campaigns, creatives, channels, and posts generate the most Brand Value per dollar.
Geo-Holdout Proof
Uses causal holdout tests to validate model output and show the incremental revenue created by brand investment.
Spend Recommendations
Recommends where to reallocate budget so brand spend builds owned demand, improves CAC, and protects contribution margin.
Keep your attribution stack. Marathon adds the brand measurement layer: which marketing creates future baseline revenue instead of only assigning credit to clicks that already happened.
Performance dashboards can’t show the demand your brand is building.
Most measurement tools are built to explain short-term clicks. That leaves the highest-leverage question unanswered: which investments are growing future baseline revenue, branded search, and unpaid demand?
Paid acquisition keeps getting more expensive
Direct-response platforms can optimize the next click, but they rarely tell you which activity is creating new demand before someone is ready to buy.
Your most profitable revenue is hard to see
Direct traffic, branded search, organic, and retail halo effects are where brand strength shows up. Traditional dashboards often bury that lift or credit it back to paid media.
Finance needs proof, not brand theory
When brand spend is defended with awareness metrics alone, it is the first budget to get cut. Marathon ties brand activity to incremental revenue and contribution-margin outcomes.
Marathon Data is the platform. Marathon Engine is the operator team.
Use Marathon Data when your team wants the measurement layer. Use Marathon Engine when you want operators to run the full growth system: brand media, direct response, creative, CRO, and demand planning, all powered by the same Brand Value model.
Led by Tom Montgomery (Co-Founder & CEO) and Preston Rutherford (Co-Founder & President) — the co-founders of Chubbies Shorts.
95% of Your Future Customers Aren’t Ready to Buy Today
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute proved it: at any given time, only about 5% of your market is actively in-market. The other 95% will buy later—from whichever brand they remember first.
Performance marketing only reaches the 5%. Brand building reaches the 95%.
Performance-only strategies eventually hit a ceiling because they compete for the same in-market shoppers. Brand investment creates future demand by making buyers search for you, visit directly, and choose you when they enter the market.
Marathon measures which brand investments are actually moving that demand curve—and expresses the output in Brand Value, baseline revenue, and validated incremental lift.
Math that ties brand actions to revenue.
The Marathon Brand Value Model is a Bayesian time-series model. It learns how every brand action — likes, comments, shares, and follows on paid ads, organic posts, and creator placements, plus changes in branded search — connects to your actual baseline revenue. Three stages: a panel model trained across every Marathon brand, a client-specific model that maps engagements to organic searches, and a second that maps engagements and searches to revenue. The output: a 180-day Brand Value in real dollars for every campaign, ad, post, and creator placement, validated by geo-holdout experiments and re-trained as new data arrives. Built by Chris Dolan (PhD Statistics, Columbia) and Tom Montgomery, with collaborators from Shopify, Amazon, Google, and Uber.
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Follows
- Brand searches
- $Per campaign
- $Per ad set
- $Per ad
- $Per organic post
Brand value for every paid, organic, and influencer action — measured in dollars.
Marathon attaches a 180-day Brand Value to every campaign, ad, post, and creator placement — incremental baseline revenue, not platform-attributed clicks. One ledger across every channel.
Optimize paid spend against a CFO-approved Brand ROAS.
Brand ROAS is incremental, not cookie-attributed. The confidence range tightens as the model trains on geo-holdout experiments — cut what platforms over-credit, scale what the math actually backs.
| Campaign | Spend | Platform conv | Brand ROAS | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linen Tee — Awareness USA | $48,200 | 3.8x | 3.4x | Scale |
| YouTube Subs — Spring Collection | $22,640 | 1.2x | 2.7x | Scale |
| Wide Leg Pant — IG Creator | $14,800 | 2.1x | 1.9x | Hold |
| Summer Dress Drop — Conversion | $31,500 | 4.2x | 0.8x | Cut |
| Silk Blouse — Awareness CAN | $18,920 | 2.6x | 2.2x | Scale |
6 Signs You’re Ready for Brand Measurement
These are the moments when attribution alone stops being enough. The team does not just need more reporting; it needs a measurement layer that can show whether brand activity is creating future demand.
If you checked 3 or more, you’re exactly where Marathon customers were before they started. Every one of these is solvable—and measurable—once Brand Value is connected to your own data.
Every Brand Hits the Same Wall. Here’s What’s on the Other Side.
Every brand follows the same growth arc. The playbook that built you will eventually stop working—CAC climbs, margins shrink, and the algorithms get more expensive. The question isn’t if. It’s whether you recognize it before it’s too late.
Stage 3: What You’re Feeling
- Growth is slowing, and questions abound about why
- Is it marketing? Product? Competition? The economy?
- Metrics that were improving are now clearly getting worse
- CAC is increasing. Multiple instances where Meta just stopped delivering.
- Realizing that measuring everything via 1-day click forces short-term behavior
- Marketing calendar built around discount events just to keep growing
Stage 4: Where You’re Going
- Finally able to define + measure brand’s impact on financial performance
- New customer acquisition from owned and organic traffic growing
- Resilient baseline revenue that keeps showing up—even if you slow promos
- Seeing how brand-building video content drives short-term KPIs and feeds the flywheel
- Contribution margin going up as you acquire more people via owned channels
- Confidently investing in brand actions and engagements that drive future revenue—not passive views and reach
Three Brand Myths Holding You Back
Picture this: you’re leaving millions on the table because of beliefs that sound reasonable but are dead wrong. Here’s the thing—the research has debunked all three. The smartest teams we discovered are already abandoning these assumptions in 2026.
Reality: Brand drives the highest-margin revenue you have—direct traffic, branded search, and organic deliver significantly higher contribution margin than paid acquisition. Marathon customers have seen contribution margin improve from the first weeks of brand investment—with no short-term revenue drop. That’s not awareness—that’s your most profitable growth engine.
Reality: You couldn’t—until now. Marathon’s Brand Value Model connects hundreds of millions of brand engagements to downstream revenue using geo-holdout testing and causal inference at 95% confidence. Not surveys. Not proxies. The same methodology Procter & Gamble and Unilever use—now available to every brand.
Reality: Every company already has a brand—the question is whether you’re measuring and growing it intentionally. The brands that start measuring brand value early build compounding advantages their competitors can’t catch. Marathon brings enterprise-grade brand analytics to growth-stage companies—no $500K research budget required. See exactly where your brand stands in your first 30 days.
Brand Value is future incremental revenue.
Marathon gives brand a financial metric. Instead of treating awareness, engagement, and branded search as loose proxies, the platform models how those signals translate into baseline revenue over the next 180 days.
Vague proxies. No revenue connection.
Measurable. Actionable. Tied to outcomes.
What Exactly Is Brand Value?
Brand Value isn’t awareness, preference, or NPS. It’s the dollar amount of incremental revenue your brand-building activities will generate over the next 180 days—measured through real behavioral signals like branded searches, direct visits, organic engagement, and share of voice, validated by causal geo-holdout incrementality tests at 95%+ confidence.
Think of it as the leading indicator of your baseline revenue. When Brand Value goes up, baseline revenue follows. When it goes down, you know to act before the revenue impact shows up in your P&L.
A Strong Brand Delivers:
Paid Efficiency
Creates a sustainable customer pipeline—Marathon customers have seen paid media efficiency improve by 2x or more
Margin Protection
Insulates margins from competitive pressure and rising CPMs
Organic Revenue
Shifts revenue from expensive paid clicks to high-margin organic traffic
Less Discounting
Reduces reliance on promotions and markdowns to hit growth targets
Compounding Asset
Builds a moat that compounds over time—one competitors can’t copy
Geo-holdout validation for brand investments that used to be invisible.
Marathon validates Brand Value with causal tests across real markets, real spend, and real revenue. That is how brand spend becomes a defensible growth lever instead of a budget debate.
You’re building your moat and paying off the costs from day one. The marginal DR dollars you redirect weren’t generating profitable return where they were. Shift them to brand and the payoff starts day one.
Geo-Holdout Test
Test markets receive brand spend. Control markets don’t. The gap is your causal lift.
Chart showing geo-holdout test results over 6 months. Test markets receiving top-of-funnel brand spend show significantly higher revenue growth compared to control markets with no brand spend. The gap between the two lines represents the causal lift attributable to brand investment.
Building Your Brand Moat
Each layer of brand investment compounds into a defensible asset.
Diagram showing concentric rings around "Your Brand" at the center. From inside out: Brand Searches, Organic Traffic, and Baseline Revenue. Each layer of brand investment compounds into a wider, more defensible moat.
New customer CAC has come down 30%.
After 2 months measuring with Marathon
Profit is up 4x. We just had our best day ever outside of BFCM.
After 6 weeks of brand-optimized spend
This ad has the lowest CAC of any ad I’ve run in 4 months—and it’s on my most expensive product.
An organic post they never would have used as an ad without Marathon
From connected data to brand revenue decisions in 4 steps.
Marathon plugs into the stack you already run, models Brand Value against revenue, validates the signal with experiments, and turns the output into budget and creative decisions.
Connect Your Stack
We ingest your ad platform data, organic social, and revenue from Shopify, Meta, Google, TikTok, and more. No pixel. No engineering. Most customers are connected within 48 hours.
Model Brand Value
The platform maps paid, organic, search, and social signals to projected baseline revenue over 180 days.
Validate Incrementality
Geo-holdout tests confirm whether brand activity is creating real lift across the business, not just modeled attribution.
Optimize Spend
See which campaigns, creatives, and channels drive the most Brand Value per dollar, then reallocate to what compounds.
The flywheel effect: Brand Value is a statistically significant leading indicator of Baseline Revenue growth—typically 4–8 weeks ahead. When Brand Value goes up, Baseline Revenue follows. More baseline revenue means more profit, which funds more brand building. It compounds quarter over quarter—and it starts the moment you connect.
Connects to 10+ Platforms You Already Use. Zero Engineering Required.
Marathon ingests the marketing and revenue data your team already trusts, then adds the missing product layer for brand-driven demand. No pixel installation, no developer tickets, no six-month services implementation.
- Shopify
- Meta Ads
- Google Ads
- TikTok Ads
- GA4
- Klaviyo
- YouTube
- X / Twitter
- + More
Marathon connects behavioral signals across your entire stack. See intent building before it converts, then tie those signals to baseline revenue and validated lift.
Works alongside your existing tools—it’s not a replacement. Keep Triple Whale, Northbeam, or RockerBox for direct-response attribution. Keep GA4 for site analytics. Marathon adds the brand measurement layer none of them provide—the one that shows which marketing builds future baseline revenue vs. which just rents short-term clicks.
Brand Value Leads. Baseline Revenue Follows 4–8 Weeks Later.
When you push Brand Value up, Baseline Revenue responds—predictably, measurably, and with 95%+ statistical confidence. It’s not a hunch. It’s a proven leading indicator validated across every Marathon customer.
Line chart showing Brand Value (Marathon's core metric) and Baseline Revenue over time. Brand Value spikes first with volatile upward movements, and Baseline Revenue follows with a smooth, monotonically increasing curve. This demonstrates that Brand Value is a statistically significant leading indicator of Baseline Revenue growth.
Here’s what this means for you: You now have a measurable lever for incremental growth. When you push Brand Value, you create net new demand that flows through your entire business—lowering CAC, raising margins, and scaling spend profitably. One customer saw Brand Value double year-over-year ($29.9K to $62.8K), predicting the revenue surge 4–8 weeks before it hit.
The Reverberation Effect
One investment cascades through every metric you care about.
This is how you scale past your plateau—a new source of incremental, profitable growth that doesn’t require bidding wars with your competitors.
The Brand Value Model turns scattered signals into a revenue forecast.
Every day, your audience is signaling intent—branded searches, social mentions, shares, follows, site visits. Marathon’s Brand Value Model tracks these signals and maps them to future baseline revenue impact—validated by causal geo-holdout tests across 30+ brands.
Before Marathon, you were making million-dollar brand decisions on gut feel. After Marathon, you’ll see exactly which brand investments are driving real revenue—not clicks, not impressions, but incremental dollars you can trace back to specific campaigns. That’s the difference between hoping it works and proving it to your CFO.
This kind of causal brand measurement used to require a Fortune 500 budget and a dedicated data science team. Marathon’s model improves with every customer on the platform—which means you get enterprise-grade incrementality measurement at a fraction of the cost, validated by geo-holdout tests across 30+ brands.
Your Brand Is the 1 Thing Competitors Can’t Copy—And It Compounds
The truth is, competitors can match your bids, copy your creatives, and undercut your prices tomorrow. But here’s the thing: they can’t replicate 10 years of trust you’ve built with your audience. We discovered that trust is a measurable financial asset—one that compounds every quarter you invest in it. Imagine a moat no amount of ad spend can buy. That’s your brand.
More Efficient Paid Media
A stronger brand means lower CPAs, higher click-through rates, and better conversion on every dollar you spend. Marathon customers have seen weekly contribution margin grow +68% year-over-year (+68% YoY)—that’s what brand efficiency looks like.
Less Reliance on Algorithms
Stop renting attention from Meta and Google. Build owned demand through branded search, direct traffic, and organic—revenue that comes to you without paying per click. One customer reversed their branded search trend from –50% to +70% year-over-year.
Resilient Baseline Revenue
Baseline revenue—from direct traffic, branded search, and organic—is your most profitable revenue. It doesn’t disappear when you pause ads. Marathon grows it systematically and proves exactly which actions drove it, validated by causal holdout tests. Start measuring your moat today.
Meet the Marathon Team: 6 AI Agents That Never Sleep
Imagine having six specialist analysts who never sleep. They never miss a signal. They get smarter with every brand they study. Marathon’s AI team processes millions of data points daily. They validate each other’s findings. You get insights in hours that used to take consultancies weeks. That means faster decisions, lower costs, and better outcomes for your brand.
Carl
Brand Model
Signature Move: The Brand Signal
Quantifies your brand's revenue impact
Sally
Paid Media
Signature Move: Brand ROAS
Runs ads to brand ROI, not just clicks
Otto
Social Revenue
Signature Move: The Revenue Post
Measures the $ behind every organic post
Isabel
Influencer ROI
Signature Move: The Creator Signal
Tracks revenue lift from every creator post
Max
Creative Intel
Signature Move: The Split
What's working for brand vs. performance
Gus
Incrementality
Signature Move: The Proof
Geo-holdout tests that prove causation
“Brand and activation work in synergy, each enhancing the other. Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity.”
Les Binet — Author of The Long and the Short of It
“People largely use their memories when buying, rather than searching. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought.”
Jenni Romaniuk — Ehrenberg–Bass Institute
We Almost Went Out of Business Because of This Problem
At Chubbies, we built a brand because we had to. We had no money and no budget for paid media. So we got scrappy, got creative, and built one of the most recognizable DTC brands of the 2010s—growing from a garage to 9-figure revenue in under 5 years.
Then we made the mistake every scaling brand makes: we convinced ourselves that paid media was the source of our growth. We poured more into performance. CACs doubled. Margins collapsed. We watched our most profitable revenue shrink while desperately pumping money into channels that were eating us alive. We were wrong—and we almost lost everything because of it.
Here’s the thing: we discovered that the brand we’d built was driving the majority of our revenue all along. We righted the ship by going back to brand-first fundamentals—and built, brick by brick, to a >$100M exit culminating in a >$1B IPO. We learned the hard way. You shouldn’t have to.
We looked around and realized there wasn’t a single tool on the market that connected brand-building actions to actual revenue outcomes. Nothing that gave you validated, measured data to justify brand spend to your CFO with real numbers—not surveys, not sentiment scores, not vibes. Research shows most brands fly blind on brand ROI. So that’s exactly what we built. If this story sounds familiar, Marathon was built for you. See what your brand is really worth in your own stack.
Tom Montgomery
Co-founded Chubbies Shorts alongside Preston. Led media strategy and budget optimization through the brand’s turnaround. Now applies those hard-won lessons to every Marathon customer.
Preston Rutherford
Co-founded Chubbies Shorts. Scaled from a garage to a >$100M exit and >$1B IPO over 10 years. Proven track record building brands that last. Learned through experience that performance marketing alone nearly killed the business. Brand measurement was the missing piece that turned it around. That’s when we built Marathon.
The only way out of rising acquisition costs is to build your own audience. When you own the audience, you control the conversion—no auction, no rising CPMs, no competitor bidding on your buyers.
What gets called “performance marketing” often performs worse than brand investment when measured by the same incremental standards. The data is clear across Marathon customers: brand campaigns drive better business outcomes than conventional DR.
Marathon was built because we did not want another partner paid to spend more media dollars. We wanted to spend less and produce better results. Our compensation is tied to business outcomes, not media spend.
There is no trough of despair. Contribution margin improves in weeks, not months or years. Every client we’ve taken on has seen immediate improvement from the first weeks.
Your First 30 Days With Marathon
Most analytics platforms take 3–6 months to implement. Marathon connects in minutes, delivers your first proven Brand Value Score in a week, and reaches full measured insights by day 30—no engineering resources required. Data shows that brands using Marathon see validated results before most platforms finish onboarding.
Measure Brand Value with your own marketing and revenue data.
See which campaigns, creatives, channels, and organic signals are creating future incremental revenue. The answers are already in your stack. Marathon connects them into a product your growth and finance teams can use.
Get a demo →