This week is part 3 (Part 1, Part 2 ) of my CAC series where I’m sharing 21 tactics across four investment pillars you MUST make if you want your CAC to be as efficient as it can be:

Take my hand and let’s go on a magic carpet ride!

Why invest here?

Every millisecond of delay impacts conversion, which obviously impacts CAC.

For example, at the last company I was at, we rolled out a bug which spiked our load time and our conversion imploded while our CAC exploded. These are real impacts with real costs.

It's pretty simple: match what the ad promises, the copy, and the CTA from click to landing. Create a single narrative that carries momentum. That’s it. That’s the tactic.

I have no idea why this still doesn’t happen, but my best guess is because of silos and this idea that speed is the most important thing when shipping.

When people hear "optimize," they often think "cut," but that's not all it can be. When you optimize the flow, you should do one of 2 things:

Getting people to activate quicker is one of the best ways to improve CAC.

This is an extension of Tactic 2 and 3, but has its own separate nuance as well. Tactics 2 and 3 talk about the general experience, and this goes one step further focusing on personalization.

For example:

When your customer feels like the experience is designed for them, conversion goes way up (and CAC down)

The basis of all great products is deeply understanding your customers. Once you talk to customers, you can then use the way they talk to attract new customers.

For example, you can use a quote from them in ads, or a way they've described your product on landing pages, or simplify existing copy based on how that specific audience would talk.

Talking to customers has infinite benefits.

While referrals do come at a cost, they help accelerate word of mouth virality and are a more effective way of controlling marketing spend. Also, the quality of users that come in through referral are generally better.

Next, we step into the part that’s closest to my heart!

Why invest here?

CAC improves when data becomes both accurate and instructive.

Server-side tracking is almost a must in 2025. The only reason you wouldn't is if you're just starting out and you're just getting into ads. But the reality is server-side tracking increases the quality and quantity of signals that you can pass back to ad platforms.

The more ad platforms have information, the better they are at driving impact.

Enhanced conversions is a flavor of this.

Don’t just report conversions. Layer in metrics like order value, LTV, or engagement milestones to give ad platforms richer feedback loops.

A good example in eCommerce is to include AOV in the conversion signal. You can even take it one step further and include margins if different AOVs have different margin structures. The point is, the more information the better.

This naturally helps ad platforms deliver impressions to higher-quality users, which in turn increases the value of each conversion.The complexity here is keeping the data updated and regularly sent, which of course requires a bit more technical work.

As a data scientist, it pains me when companies don't see the value in data science teams. Often, it's the company and their culture, but often, it's the data science team and their inability to affect change.

Data science can get involved in everything from:

so there's no abundance of ways that data scientists can help you.

Note: If you're a marketing leader and you're thinking about building in your data science team but don't know where to start, reach out to me.

Now we’ve covered the 2 non marketing investments, it’s time soar to new Marketing heights!

Why invest here?

In one of my favorite LinkedIn posts, Dale Harrison shows in some pretty basic math that if you were to target 100K users with 3 ads and assume a 20% ad view rate *higher than normal), only 35% of the 100,000 will see even a SINGLE ad.

Every impression counts.

Creative pretesting used to be reserved for campaigns that were going to be huge budgets, omni channel, and last 3-6 months. But, there’s a brand new way to do creative pre-testing and it’s one of the best “hacks” I’ve ever heard:

Use your organic social to validate message-market fit organically before scaling paid. If the message, design, and value prop don’t resonate, it’s unlikely to do so on a paid ad. It’s exactly what Claudia Whyte, VP of Growth at Howbout (fast growing Series B social network) talked about in our podcast episode.

Platforms like Meta have dynamic creative optimization which allows you to upload as many creatives as you want, and it will find and choose the best one. Take advantage of this by going diverse on your creative mix. Test out one extreme to another, one header to another, as well as best practices.

Lol. This one seems like such a nobrainer BUT I will continuously restate it again and again because your first 3 seconds decide your CAC..

Here’s what that means:

In a fantastic analysis by System1, they show that consistency leads to creative quality, stronger brands, and greater profits. What this means is having templates or consistent branding or something that even as you're experimenting allows your customers to know it's you that they're seeing.

It's not enough to just experiment; you have to document the experiments and learn from them. One way to do this is by maintaining a creative learning doc and sharing wins and losses weekly. This also helps for maintaining institutional knowledge as new marketers come in and old ones leave.

Now that we’ve explored how to improve creatives, let’s take it up a notch and talk about Channels & Strategy.

Why invest here?

Every channel has an efficiency curve, and finding the point where that channel starts to experience diminishing returns is a great way to improve your CAC. If you're above this diminishing return point, you'll want to lower spend on that channel. If you're below that point, you can explore scaling.

Diversifying channels helps you avoid channel saturation and hitting diminishing returns, but also gains you new audiences. Channels like TikTok, Reddit, and influencers all serve different market needs.

If you're at the point where your first channel is saturated when you start exploring, then you're going to have a period where you ramp up and explore the new channel where the old channel will still be inefficient.

Start exploring earlier.

One of the easiest ways to burn money is retargeting. Often it's encouraged because it appears efficient, but the more important question is “Is it Incremental?”. Sometimes a person does not need to see your ad for the 50th time.

A good way to improve CAC is to cap frequency and validate the incremental lift of different frequencies.

A lot of people set their bid strategies and think it's set it and forget it. However, many of the experts that I've spoken to actually experiment with their bid strategies. They'll change between ROAS and CPA because the algorithms change, the information that the platform has changes, and even your own business changes.

Test bidding strategies and test more often than you think (say every 6 months)

Global businesses need to take a portfolio approach. It's important to evaluate geos and the audiences that you're targeting. The obvious key here is to reinvest in geos or segments with superior LTV to CAC, which means cutting geos or segments that are doing the opposite.

It might seem counter-intuitive to say "invest in more spend" to lower CAC, but the truth is, brand awareness is the only route to keeping CAC stable at higher volumes. It also has tangential benefits to better conversion and retention, and the impacts are quite well-documented.

It is prohibitively expensive to re-acquire a churned customer. So the best way to keep costs down is to prevent them from churning. While churn is often a broader business challenge, marketing can obviously help by leveraging owned channels.

Even in acquistiion, a well designed push notification or onboarding flow can nudge a customer into converting which also improves CAC.

So that’s it for this week! 21 tactics over 4 different investment themes to inspire you to go talk to your CFO and become a rockstar when your CAC starts plummeting.

See you next week!

Sundar

Here it is: 7 brutal truths about CAC