👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to another article of experiMENTAL, a weekly newsletter on Marketing Strategy and Science in Consumer Tech.

What we’ll dive into today

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:

1. Product Experience

2. Data & Engineering

3. Marketing: Creatives

4. Marketing: Channels & Strategy

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

Investment 1: Product Experience

Why invest here?

1. Retention is the number one predictor of a business's success, and for retention to be at its best, marketing and product need to be aligned.

2. The biggest blocker to retention is activation. It’s where most of the drop off happens.

Tactic 1: Speed up load time (esp. mobile)

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.

Tactic 2: Connect the funnel

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.

Tactic 3: Optimize the flow

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:

1. Reduce friction

2. Increase trust

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

Tactic 4: Personalize experience

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:

1. Tailor landing context by channel or audience.

2. Changing the onboarding survey based on previous answers

3. Delivering a new home page experience based on user persona

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

Tactic 5: Use customer language

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.

Tactic 6: Build referral loops

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!

Investment 2: Data & Engineering

Why invest here?

1. What gets measured gets managed → It's hard to improve what you can't measure.

2. Don't optimize the wrong thing → optimizing what you’ve measured wrong is a recipe for disaster.

CAC improves when data becomes both accurate and instructive.

Tactic 1: Server-side tracking + enhanced conversions

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.

Tactic 2: Enrich your conversion signals

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.

Tactic 3: MOAR data science

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:

• Segmentation

• Root cause analysis

• A/B Testing + Incrementality testing

• Predictive modeling and forecasting

• … and so much more

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!

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