Practical example

Campaign and portfolio practice pack

A worked, fictional local business campaign from brief to results, with the calculations marketers use and a template you can copy for your own portfolio project.

Illustrative example. The café, its campaign and every number below are fictional practice material created by LSBUK. They are not a real client, a learner's project or a result anyone should expect.

The brief

A small independent café wants more customers on weekday mornings, its quietest period. The owner has £100 to test one idea over 14 days. Your job is to plan the campaign, track it honestly and report what happened.

The plan

Element	Example decision
Business problem	Fill weekday morning tables
Audience	Remote workers and parents within 2 km of the café
Offer	Free pastry with any coffee before 11am, Monday to Thursday
Channel hypothesis	Local social ads will reach nearby weekday customers more cheaply than search ads
Budget	£100 over 14 days
Tracking plan	Lead = voucher claimed on the landing page; sale = voucher redeemed in store

The results and the calculations

Measure	Formula	Example result
Click-through rate (CTR)	Clicks ÷ impressions × 100	200 ÷ 10,000 × 100 = 2%
Cost per click (CPC)	Spend ÷ clicks	£100 ÷ 200 = £0.50
Cost per lead	Spend ÷ leads	£100 ÷ 10 = £10
Cost per acquisition (CPA)	Spend ÷ sales	£100 ÷ 2 = £50
Return on ad spend (ROAS)	Revenue ÷ spend	£240 ÷ £100 = 2.4

A ROAS of 2.4 means the campaign brought in £2.40 of revenue for every £1 of advertising. It is not profit. The café still has to pay for the coffee, the free pastries, staff time and the voucher system, so a campaign can show a healthy ROAS and still lose money. Always state which costs a figure includes.

What a good write-up says

What happened: the ads reached people cheaply, but only 2 of 10 vouchers were redeemed.
What it might mean: the offer interested people, but redeeming it may have been too awkward.
What it cannot show: 14 days and 2 sales are far too few to judge the channel; redemptions were counted by hand.
What to test next: a simpler redemption step, then one new audience, changing one thing at a time.

Using this for your portfolio

Copy the template, choose a real or realistic small business, and complete every field before you look at results. Employers reading a portfolio look for clear reasoning, honest measurement and what you learned, not large numbers. Keep fictional work labelled as practice.

Field guide

Field	What to record
Business problem	The specific result the business needs, in one sentence.
Audience	Who you are trying to reach, what they need and where they spend time online.
Offer	What you are asking the audience to do, and why it is worth doing.
Channel hypothesis	Which channel you expect to work and why. Write it so it can be proved wrong.
Budget GBP	The maximum you will spend in the test period.
Tracking plan	What counts as a lead or sale, how each is recorded, and over what date range.
Impressions	How many times the advert or post was shown.
Clicks	How many times people clicked through. Clicks are not the same as website sessions.
Spend GBP	What you actually spent.
Leads	Enquiries or sign-ups that meet your definition. Button clicks are not leads.
Sales	Purchases you can attribute to the campaign under your tracking plan.
Revenue GBP	Revenue from those sales, before any costs.
Limitations	What the numbers cannot tell you: sample size, attribution, seasonality, tracking gaps.
Portfolio reflection	What you would change next time and why, in three or four sentences.

Download

Everything here is illustrative practice material created by LSBUK. It is not real client, learner or cohort data.

Subject guide

Scholarships
Available

Professional Short Courses

Lead the AI Revolution

English for Professionals