influencer campaign analysis · saas marketing
Squarespace 5-C Influencer Campaign Analysis
A thorough breakdown of Squarespace's influencer marketing program, the offer, the creator strategy, vetting every creator and reading their metrics, walked through our 5-C System.
Key takeaways
- Squarespace booked 6,033 sponsored videos across 794 YouTubers, with 656 creators booked 2+ times and a top creator read 83 times.
- It leads with a free 14-day trial plus 10 percent off the first purchase, on a personal link, not a heavy discount code.
- We score creators on real views, view-to-sub ratio, loyalty and comment quality, not subscriber counts.
- On Squarespace's own published $228 a year per customer, a $31 cost to win against a two-year value of $456 is about 15 to 1.
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Influencer campaign analysis · Squarespace
You run a SaaS company.
Maybe you sell to other businesses, maybe straight to consumers, maybe you already book a few creators and just want better ones.
It does not matter much.
Squarespace has paid more YouTubers than almost any software brand alive, so it is the cleanest program to copy. Here is exactly how they do it, walked through our 5-C System: Chart, Cast, Comply, Convert, Compound.
One honest note before we start. The counts in here are real, pulled straight from our sponsorship database. The money math later is our own model, built on Squarespace's own published revenue per customer, not their internal books.
The scale of the program
The thing worth copying is not one big read. It is the repeat.
From June 2017 to June 2026, we count 6,033 sponsored videos with Squarespace across 794 YouTubers in our database alone, and that is just YouTube.
656 of those creators were booked two or more times. 536 were booked three or more. That is about 7.6 videos per creator. Their most-booked creator, Cruise With Ben and David, has read Squarespace 83 times.
When a brand books the same person eighty times over a few years, that audience is quietly buying. Nobody pays for a read that does nothing, twice, let alone eighty times.
The offer
The offer is a free 14-day trial plus 10 percent off the first purchase, on a personal link, squarespace.com slash the creator's name.
You build the whole site for free first, then save on the first payment. The scariest part of any subscription is getting someone through the door the first time, and a free trial removes it.
It is built on repeat revenue. Squarespace bills yearly and keeps people for years, so the profit comes from the life of the account, not the first payment.
Two real reads:
- Odd Animal Specimens (4.98M subs): "Go to squarespace.com/oddanimalspecimens to get a free trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain."
- Evan and Katelyn (1.63M subs): "Thanks to our sponsor Squarespace, go to squarespace.com/evanandkatelyn for 10% off your first purchase."
The goal: break even, then let it ride
Here is the part that trips up most founders. You do not need the first month to pay you back.
Squarespace bills yearly and holds customers for years, so you can spend right up to break even on the first sale and let the renewals carry the profit.
Once you break even on winning a customer, you can pour budget into creator reads, bring in a flood of trials, and bank the renewals behind them.
The competitor landscape
Squarespace runs roughly three times the YouTube volume of its nearest website-builder rival, and it owns the free-trial-plus-personal-domain offer at a scale nobody else matches.
| Brand | Reads | Creators | How they buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | 6,033 | 794 | Broad reach plus a deep multi-year repeat roster |
| Hostinger | 1,866 | 552 | High volume, cheaper hosting, discount-led |
| Shopify | 605 | 227 | Ecommerce-led, business and maker creators |
| Framer | 286 | 112 | Designer and no-code niche, growing fast |
| Bluehost | 127 | 31 | Repeat on a small set of tech channels |
| GoDaddy | 101 | 52 | Broad one-off, single reads |
| Wix | 87 | 53 | One-off, scattered |
| Webflow | 46 | 20 | Designer niche, deep on a few |
How we pick the creators
Cast is where most of the money is won or lost.
We start from creators who have performed before, plus names from partner agencies. Then every candidate runs against our sponsorship database, nearly 285,000 sponsored videos across 31,000 plus channels and 44,000 brands, going back years.
Signal 1: they keep getting re-booked. The single best sign that an audience buys is a brand booking the same creator again and again. Take Evan and Katelyn at 1.63M subscribers. Squarespace booked this maker duo 41 times. Other brands in completely different lanes keep paying them too, TotalBoat for 17 videos and Raycon for 12. When repeat buyers in different categories all keep coming back to the same channel, the audience is acting on what they say, not just watching. One thing to watch: make sure your creator is not also reading your direct competitor. It reads as fake, fast.
Why the long partnerships convert. Cruise With Ben and David have read Squarespace 83 times, more than any other channel. They sit at 331K subscribers but average about 253K views a video, roughly 76 percent of the base watching, which is very high. On any single video only about 5 to 10 percent of an audience shows up. But because they keep hearing the same offer over months, you convert a big share over time. A one-off read might move 0.3 percent of viewers. A long partnership with a trusted creator can get you to 5 percent.
Signal 2: the four creator types. Subscriber counts are easy to buy and easy to forget, so we ignore them as the headline. We score each creator on what is hard to fake: average views on recent videos, the view-to-sub ratio, engagement and recency, and loyalty. Those roll into one fit score, and a good program buys from all four buckets.
| Bucket | What it is | Squarespace examples |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | High reach and high loyalty | Evan and Katelyn (41 reads, 1.63M subs), Anne of All Trades (74 reads, 669K subs) |
| Workhorses | High loyalty, mid reach | Katelynn Nolan (71 reads, 81K subs), Brae Hunziker (68 reads, 73K subs) |
| Reach plays | High reach, lighter loyalty | Odd Animal Specimens (4.98M subs), Matt D'Avella (4.02M subs) |
| Smart bets | Small but very engaged | cherrien (38 reads, 65.8K subs, ~27% view-to-sub) |
Signal 3: read the views, not the subscribers. Jared Polin has 1.52M subscribers, but his videos average about 75K views, roughly 5 percent of his base showing up. A big-subscriber channel charges more, because the creator values themselves on that number, and the subscribers who left years ago do nothing for a plain read. Compare that to Cruise With Ben and David at 331K subscribers and near 76 percent watching. You pay for the eyes you actually get, not a number that left.
Signal 4: read the comments. Comments are the closest read on what is really going on with an audience. We check whether they are mostly questions or mostly statements, and we score each channel for bots based on how old and how active the commenting accounts are. Accounts under a year old with no activity are the tell.
How we track every signup
Multitouch attribution. We counted 767 distinct personal links for Squarespace, one per creator, all the same shape, squarespace.com slash the creator's name. A dedicated page is low effort and reliably lifts the signup rate.
Every trial and paid account is tagged to the exact channel it came from, with the free trial as the hook. When a viewer clicks, a pixel fires, so they become the warm audience you retarget later. The payout side is solved too, off-the-shelf affiliate software like PartnerStack, Rewardful or Impact tracks each creator's link and pays them on its own.
The money math
A customer who comes from a creator is worth more than one from a cold ad. They signed up on borrowed trust, so they churn less. On a yearly subscription, that loyalty turns into renewal after renewal.
Here is one real quarter, January to March 2025, all counted from our database. Squarespace paid for about 412 videos from 165 creators. Those videos pulled in roughly 19.4 million views, about 141,704 each, with around 827,000 likes and 50,000 comments, about 4.5 percent engaged. Priced at a $20 CPM, that is near $388,270 in media value, and at about 4 percent reaching the site, on the order of 776,000 visits.
From there we model the funnel, with the rates clearly labelled as our estimate, on Squarespace's real $19 a month (their published $228 a year per customer).
| Step | Rate | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Views | actual | 19,413,509 |
| Media cost (at a $20 CPM) | $20 CPM | $388,270 |
| View to site | 4% | 776,540 visits |
| Site to free trial | 8% | 62,123 trials |
| Trial to paid | 20% | 12,425 customers |
| First-month revenue (at $19) | $19 / mo | $236,075 |
| 30-day ROAS | 0.61x |
First month you are under water at 0.61x. For a subscription, that is normal and fine. The renewals are where the money is.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Customers won | 12,425 |
| Cost to win a customer (CAC) | $31 |
| Revenue per customer per year (Squarespace's real ARPUS) | $228 |
| Two-year value (modelled) | $456 |
| Value to CAC ratio | about 15 to 1 |
CAC lands near $31. Squarespace's own filings put revenue per customer at $228 a year. Keep that customer two years, which is conservative for them, and they are worth about $456. You paid $31 to win them. A healthy SaaS wants 3 to 1. This is near 15 to 1, and even on year one alone, $228 against a $31 cost is past 7 to 1. Run the quarter out a full year and the program returns about 7.3x once renewals are counted, and it keeps climbing into year two.
The flywheel
Once you have winners, you double down on them, then add new creators to keep the pipeline full. Squarespace's 536 creators with three or more reads is that flywheel running.
People worry an audience gets tired of the same product. A growing channel rarely runs out of audience, because only a slice watch any one video and new viewers show up every month. That is why we like up-and-coming creators, the audience is fresh and still growing.
Keep the top 85 percent and swap the bottom 15 for fresh creators every month. Run a winner's best read as a paid ad through their own handle. Move top creators to an always-on ambassador deal, the way Squarespace does with its 80-plus-read channels.
The takeaway
Squarespace did not win website builders on YouTube by overpaying one big name. It won by booking the right creators again and again until the roster itself became the moat. The 536 creators it has read three or more times is the whole strategy in one number.
This is the same breakdown we would run for your brand, from a team that spends nine hours a day, five days a week, doing nothing but taking influencer campaigns apart and running them.
Already eyeing creators for your SaaS? Send us your shortlist. We will tell you free which channels actually convert and which ones just look big.
Produced from Influencer Advisory's sponsorship database, June 2017 to June 2026. Revenue per customer is Squarespace's own published figure ($228 a year, 2023 filing). The funnel rates are our model, not Squarespace's books.
Frequently asked
How does Squarespace structure its influencer marketing program?
Squarespace books a large roster of YouTube creators and re-books the best performers many times, running 6,033 sponsored videos across 794 channels from 2017 to 2026. It leads with a free 14-day trial plus 10 percent off the first purchase rather than a heavy discount, and sends every read to a personal landing page like squarespace.com slash the creator's name.
How do you vet creators for a SaaS influencer program?
Score signals that are hard to fake, not subscriber counts. We look at average views on recent videos, the view-to-subscriber ratio, engagement and recency, how often the brand and others re-book a creator, and comment quality. Real questions in comments signal a trusted host, while brand-new commenter accounts signal bought engagement.
Why do long-term creator partnerships convert better than one-off reads?
A one-off read might convert about 0.3 percent of viewers, since only 5 to 10 percent of an audience watches any single video. Over a long partnership the audience hears the offer again and again across different topics, so reaching about 5 percent audience conversion over time is genuinely possible. Squarespace's top creator has read it 83 times.
How should a SaaS brand budget for an influencer campaign?
Aim to break even on the cost to win a customer, not a 2 or 3x return in the first month, since profit is made over the subscription's life. In the modeled quarter, cost to win lands near $31 against Squarespace's own published $228 a year per customer, about 15 to 1 over two years, well above the healthy 3 to 1 bar.