Outdoor subscription box · reversed a 40% CAC creep in 90 days
New customer cohorts were paying back on order 3. The CEO was throttling spend on acquisition peaks to protect margin — which meant the brand was leaving growth on the table during the only months that mattered.
- Rebuilt attribution around 90-day cohort payback instead of platform-reported ROAS
- Tightened creative testing to weekly releases; killed 4 underperforming evergreen ads the audit flagged
- Moved 38% of budget from branded search into non-brand prospecting once measurement cleared
Most subscription brands in this vertical look interchangeable after the first scroll. We stopped trying to win on aesthetics and started winning on math.
The first unlock was attribution. The client was optimising to platform-reported ROAS and killing anything under 1.8×. By rebuilding measurement around cohort contribution over 90 days, we found that their “worst” campaigns had a 3.1× payback by day 90 — because the subscribers acquired there stuck around 2.2× longer than branded-search buyers.
Budget reallocation happened in week one. By week four we’d replaced half of evergreen creative with founder-led scripts tested against three new hooks. Winners compounded. CAC followed.
By the 90-day mark the spend graph was 2.4× what it had been on day zero and the blended ROAS had climbed 62% — not because we found some magic ad, but because we stopped killing the ads that were actually working.