How Uber saved $35M a year on ads

Why you’ll want to read this

We often see case studies and posts about how people increased budgets for their clients and saw $XX in revenue and Y% growth. That’s awesome, but there’s a flip side that is rarely talked about.

What happens when companies optimize their budgets by turning OFF marketing spend?

Recently, I’ve been on 7 different podcasts where I’ve been asked to share this story, and realized there’s a lot of appetite around understanding how larger brands think about ad spending especially when decreasing or turning off spend.

I'm going to go into as much detail as I can and share the behind the scenes of how Uber saved $35M a year by ramping down on Facebook/ Meta for US & Canada Rider Acquisition.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. The context → What was going on with Uber and Marketing at the time

2. The problem → What triggered this analysis

3. The analysis → The work I did and what I saw

4. The postmortem → What we did from the results and with the money saved

The Context

The year was 2018. Uber was now 8 years old and a global house hold name. Things were humming on Uber Rides and growing like crazy on Uber Eats.

I had been promoted to lead US & Canada Rider Performance Marketing Analytics and was also asked to own Uber's US Rider Penetration Analysis. Leveraging 3rd party data, we wanted to understand how many riders had signed up and what our market penetration was in the US.

The Problem

Every week, the Marketing team and I would go over our numbers. Spend. Signups. Trends. You know... the standard weekly business review.

For Q1 2018, we were seeing spend stay flat but signups go up and therefore our CACs going down. Everyone was thrilled. Then enter Q2 2018. After St. Patricks Day, all of a sudden, we hadn't changed anything and our CACs were spiking. Signups were dropping continuously for weeks.

What the f*ck is going on?!

"Sundar, can you dig into this please?!"