Squarespace Influencer Campaign Analysis

This is a full breakdown of Squarespace's influencer program (squarespace.com). Squarespace is a website builder, people pay a monthly or yearly subscription to put a site, a shop or a portfolio online without touching any code.

This detailed breakdown explains exactly how Squarespace turned a profit with influencers, with a risk-free system, from vetting talent to developing the offer, all the way to how the creative was structured. This will be valuable for anyone who wants to really expand their influencer program, or is just starting their first influencer program.

Our Influencer Campaigns have led to:

• ✓Higher average customer lifetime value (LTV). Creator-referred buyers arrive on borrowed trust, so they stick around and renew longer than a cold-ad buyer.
• ✓Cheaper than direct outreach. One creator read reaches thousands of warm viewers at once, so the cost to reach each buyer drops well below manual prospecting.
• ✓Higher landing-page conversion with a dedicated influencer page. A page built for that creator's audience matches the message they just heard, so more of the visitors buy.
• ✓Stronger influencer return on ad spend (ROAS). The read lands like a recommendation instead of an interruption, so more of the spend turns into signups.

What this analysis covers

We read this whole program from the outside, in the same database we would use to build your roster, whether you are just starting with influencers or expanding a roster you already have.

Overview for context

• ✓From June 2017 to June 2026, 6,322 sponsored videos with Squarespace across 814 YouTubers alone (more on other platforms).
• ✓692 creators were sponsored 2+ times, and 553 had 3+ sponsored videos.
• ✓Their top creator, Cruise With Ben and David (331K subs), ran 85 Squarespace-sponsored videos.

The creators a brand books over and over tell you the most, so it is worth looking at who your competitors keep sponsoring, how big those creators are, the categories, and how often they run. Even those few things, before you touch any of the underlying data, tell you a lot.

So we broke down the competitors on YouTube, at least on the influencer side, to see which creators keep working for them, study the offers they lean on, and use all of that to guide your own campaigns.

Squarespace's sponsored-video history

This is a slice of what we pulled from our database for Squarespace alone, ranked by how many times the brand re-booked each channel. View-to-sub is average views over subscribers, i.e. the share of the audience that actually watches a video.

A slice of the Squarespace repeat roster pulled from our database. 553 channels in total have three or more Squarespace reads, and the averages here are only over the reads that carry view counts.

Narrowing down the target audience

Whether you are new to campaigns or already running them, we start with the same questions:

The Squarespace customer, in detail

It helps to picture one clear person first. You can serve a broader audience, and a broad message works fine here, but here is how that one person breaks down for Squarespace, and how we actually know.

The same build-your-own-website line lands across all of them, and that is the whole reason Squarespace can book hundreds of creators and keep converting.

Squarespace's 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. The hardest part for a subscription product is getting the first customer in the door, and this fixes that.

It is also built on repeat revenue. Squarespace is subscription-first, so the profit is made over the life of the customer, not the first payment.

How to write your value prop

To nail your own value prop, answer these five, then say your answers back to the creators when you brief them. We cover the brief itself further down.

• 1.If a happy customer described you to a friend in one sentence, what would they say?
• 2.What is the one thing you do that a competitor cannot easily copy?
• 3.Fill in the blank, we are the only ones who ___.
• 4.If you could keep one feature and cut the rest, which would you keep, and why?
• 5.What problem does someone have the moment before they need you?

For Squarespace the answer is roughly this, the one tool that gets a professional-looking site live yourself, fast, with no code.

The goal: break even on acquisition

Because Squarespace is subscription-first, we would not chase a 2 or 3x return in the first thirty days. We aim to break even on the cost to acquire a customer as we scale.

Once you break even on acquisition, you can put a large budget into creator reads, bring in many trials, and let the renewals carry the profit.

This is the carryover effect. The first spike is the direct click. The long tail is brand recall and repeat purchase from people who heard the name and came back later.

The competitor landscape on YouTube

Squarespace has been running roughly 3x the YouTube volume of its nearest competitor, and it is the only one leading with a free trial plus a personal domain, instead of just a discount.

Counts from our sponsorship database, all-time through June 2026.

How we pick the creators

Picking the creators is where most of the money is won or lost.

We start from a roster of past-performing creators, plus more sourced through partner agencies. Then we run every candidate against our sponsorship database, which holds nearly 285,000 sponsored videos across 31,000+ YouTube channels and 44,000 brands, going back years.

First signal we look at is deals

The single best signal that an audience buys is a brand booking the same creator again and again.

Nobody keeps re-booking a creator who does not bring in conversions. For example, Evan and Katelyn (1.63M subs) had:

• ✓TotalBoat (epoxy and marine supplies), 17 sponsored videos
• ✓Raycon (earbuds), 12

Squarespace had ended up booking this maker duo (and has since done it 41 times) after seeing that they had tons of sponsorships, which had all been repeated in different areas, so none of them competed or overlapped in terms of interest.

When this many repeat-buyer brands keep coming back to the same creator, it tells you they have built a strong audience, one that listens to them for advice, not just entertainment.

One caution: make sure they are not also sponsoring your competitors. It reads as inauthentic, especially when the audience sees how many sponsorships they run.

Why long-term partnerships convert

Cruise With Ben and David have read Squarespace 85 times, more than any other channel. They sit at 331K subscribers but average about 253K views a video, so roughly 76 percent of the subscriber base is watching, which is very high.

Here is the part most people miss. Only about 5 to 10 percent of an audience watches any given video. Because each video is a different topic, or people miss it, you can convert a large share of the audience over time as they see the offer again and again.

A one-off read might convert 0.3 percent of viewers. Over a long-term partnership with a creator people trust, getting to 5 percent audience conversion is possible.

That is why these long-term partnerships make sense.

The four creator types

Subscriber counts are easy to buy and easy to forget, so we ignore them as the headline number. Instead we score each creator on signals that are hard to fake, average views on recent videos, the view-to-sub ratio, engagement, recency, and loyalty. We roll those into a single zero to one hundred fit score with stated weights. It sorts the roster into four buckets, and a good program buys from all four.

Checking relative view counts

Jared Polin has 1.52M subscribers, but his recent sponsored videos averaged around 75 thousand views, only about 5 percent of his subscriber base watching a given video. That usually means the channel caught a wave of traction during a viral spike and then slowed down, or it just naturally happens to channels as they get bigger, the same way it does for MrBeast.

The bigger problem here is a value-to-price discrepancy. A channel like this usually costs more, because the creator bases their price on that subscriber count. That matters for whitelisting, when you run ads from their handle, because the ad shows the subscriber number. But for a normal sponsored read, subscribers who left years ago do not help you.

Compare that to Cruise With Ben and David at 331 thousand subscribers, with a subscriber-to-average-view ratio of 76 percent.

That raises the value of the partnership, because a creator like them usually charges far less than a megachannel for better, more targeted exposure. You pay for attention you actually receive, not for a subscriber count that left years ago.

Check the comments

Comments are the closest read on what is going on with an audience. We check whether they are mostly questions or mostly statements. A high rate of genuine questions usually means the audience treats the host as a trusted source, not background noise.

We measure that question to statement ratio across ten sampled videos and compare it against the rest of the shortlist. We also check for fake followers at scale, scoring each channel on how likely it is that bots are in the comments, based on how old and how active the commenting accounts are.

Accounts under a year old with no activity are the tell. A finalist only passes if its commenters are not meaningfully younger than channels we know are clean.

Examples of fake comments. These are pulled from one channel we vetted out. We are confident the comments were bought.

Click into the accounts behind those comments and they are brand new, with no videos and no history. That is what a bought audience looks like up close.

What good comments look like

Good comments are thoughtful, specific, and show the viewer actually acting on what the host said.

Cover the funnel: top, middle and bottom

A winning campaign needs all three levels of the funnel. Here is how we picked creators for each. Throughout, the percentages are the view-to-sub ratio: average views divided by subscribers, i.e. what share of the audience actually watches a video.

Once creators are selected, setting them up

For software there is nothing to ship, so what we send instead is access plus a real reason to care. Where we put the real effort is the onboarding, done right the creator builds their own actual site on camera, which is about the most convincing read you can get.

• ✓A free long-term or lifetime account, fully set up
• ✓A personal onboarding call so they actually build a site on camera
• ✓A handwritten note from the team, and some branded swag
• ✓The creative brief, clear and simple, sent up front

Stay compliant

Squarespace does not carry the cannabis-style fines, but it carries a claims risk, and the Federal Trade Commission has been active in enforcing it.

The main danger: a creator improvises a claim you cannot back up, and the brand is held liable for it.

• ✓Claims have to be provable. No made-up ranked #1, no fake uptime or speed numbers, no cheaper than everyone without the data.
• ✓It has to be true to them. The creator should actually use Squarespace. The best reads show their own real site.
• ✓Disclose every time. A clear spoken disclosure, in the description, and a pinned comment. A promo code is not a disclosure.
• ✓No false comparisons. Do not let a creator claim you beat a named rival on a number without handing over the proof.
• ✓Send them to the site. Every read points to squarespace.com slash the creator, where the real pricing and features live.

For example, we would flag a read like this at review. It's always better to be on the safer side to avoid any fines, especially later down, as YouTube videos stay live forever.

The creative brief

The creative brief is the cheapest thing you can do to stay out of trouble. Here is a sample (note: we don't share our real one, that stays internal with clients):

• 1.Ban made-up superlatives (best, #1, fastest) and any invented metric.
• 2.No cheaper than a named competitor or more secure than a rival without the data that day.
• 3.Require a plain spoken disclosure. A promo code is not a disclosure.
• 4.Show your own real Squarespace site. Do not claim features you have not used.
• 5.Keep it to real benefits, easy to build, looks professional, all in one, free trial.
• 6.Every read points to squarespace.com slash the creator. Never improvise the pricing.

We would catch these things at review and ask for a re-record before it goes live, far cheaper than pulling a video months later.

How we track every signup

When we run a campaign, we always do multi-touch attribution.

• ✓We counted around 1,000 distinct personal slugs, one per creator. A dedicated landing page is low effort and reliably multiplies your conversion rate. Every one follows the same pattern, squarespace.com slash the creator's name, and 5,803 of the 6,322 reads, about 92 percent, send viewers to one.
• ✓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.

Lifetime value

A customer who comes in through a creator is worth more than one who comes in through a cold ad.

• ✓They signed up on borrowed trust, so they stick.
• ✓They keep seeing the product as new creators join.
• ✓On a subscription, that loyalty compounds into months of renewals.

On day one the two customers look identical. By month six they are not close, and that gap decides how much you can pay for the next creator.

The payout plumbing is solved. Off-the-shelf affiliate software tracks each creator's link and pays them their share automatically.

Can you predict the results?

No, you can never guarantee results. But you can estimate them well.

With no fake followers and the right target audience, the numbers land in a fairly tight range. Just expect bigger swings around launches and seasonal peaks.

• ✓Launches and seasonal peaks: apply a 2 to 3x multiplier, because the offer just converts better.
• ✓New region or new segment: apply about a 2x lower multiplier, because it takes time to warm up.

The next slides use Squarespace's real Q1 2025 views and Squarespace's own published revenue per customer. The funnel rates in between are our estimate, labelled as such.

What we measured, January to March 2025

• ✓Squarespace paid for 427 sponsored reads from 171 creators.
• ✓Those reads pulled in roughly 19.4 million views, about 141,704 each.
• ✓Viewers left around 827,000 likes and 50,000 comments, about 4.5% engaged.

Priced at a $20 CPM (what you pay per 1,000 views), the same rate you would pay Facebook for the same views, that is near $388,270 in media value, and at about 4 percent reaching the site, on the order of 776,000 visits to the personal landing pages. Squarespace runs a 14-day free trial with no card, so the next step is a trial rather than a sale.

Q1 2025 in numbers

Reads, creators and views are real, measured from our database. About a quarter of stored reads carry view counts, so the view total is over the reads that have them. The CPM and the rates are our model.

The funnel, modelled

ROAS is how many dollars come back for each dollar in. We price the media at a $20 CPM, then model the funnel, 4 percent of viewers reach the site, 8 percent of those start the free trial, 20 percent of trials go paid, at Squarespace's real $19 a month (their published $228 a year per customer).

First-month revenue near $236,075 on $388,270 of media is a 0.61x return. Under water on month one, and for a subscription that is normal and fine. The renewals are where the money is.

A Facebook ad at the same $20 CPM usually sits at breakeven, because a creator read lands like a friend's recommendation rather than an ad interrupting you. Think referral versus cold traffic.

What a customer costs vs what they are worth

CAC lands near $31, the media cost divided by customers. 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 aims for an LTV to CAC of 3 to 1. This program sits around 15 to 1, because the trust the creator passes along means more people buy, and then keep buying. Even on year one alone, $228 against a $31 cost is already past 7 to 1.

Run the quarter out a year

Now run the same quarter out a year, once the renewals are counted.

Under water in month one, about 7x by month twelve, and still climbing into year two. That is why the program scales the more creator spend you add.

The flywheel

Once you have winners, you double down on them, and then find new creators to fill the pipeline, depending on how fast you're scaling. Many people worry an audience gets tired of the same product. But a growing channel rarely saturates its audience, because only a fraction of subscribers watch any single video, and the channel keeps adding new viewers every month. That is why we like to partner with up-and-coming creators, the audience is fresh and still expanding.

• ✓The 85/15 rule. Keep the top eighty five percent, swap the bottom fifteen for fresh creators every month.
• ✓Do more of what works. Run a winner's best read as a paid ad through their own handle.
• ✓Partner deeper with the best. Many times you can keep partnering with the same creator and get great results, the way Squarespace does with its most-booked channels, some of them past 80 reads.
• ✓Build ambassadors. Bring the top creators into your launches, betas and events (we can help coordinate this if it's your first time).