How I reduced this brands CAC by 78%

[jeffp]

Sharing this in hopes it helps some other founders in here who are struggling with growth. A few months back this small tech startup came to me through a referral from an old colleague asking for help with their Facebook ads.They were spending almost $100 per app install, a completely unsustainable CAC. My job? Try every trick up my sleeve to try and bring that down as fast as I could. After spending maybe 5 minutes in the ad account, the problem was pretty clear. They had paid for this big branded launch campaign that included assets for Facebook ads, so that’s what they were running. No testing, no iterations or optimizations. Just launch the creative and hope for the best. And when it flopped, they blamed account structure, targeting, audience, etc. Click through rate was 0.2%….They were hesitant to let me test a bunch of new ads and angles all willy nilly, but through some reassurance that their brand image wouldn’t be compromised and they can veto any creative they want, I got them to bite. We tested about 20 ads over the next 2 weeks and found a couple winners (hitting target cost per install, 1.5%+ click through rate, all the good stuff).By the end of the month cost per install was under $20, and month over month they saw a 78% reduction in CAC. Sometimes all you need is to keep trying new creative until you find an angle that clicks. Then when that ad fatigues you do it all over again (really it should be a constant cycle).Launching paid ads and sticking with your first couple ad iterations is just basically handing over a donation to Meta or Google. You HAVE to iterate, a ton.Thanks for coming to my rant. If you’re a founder who needs help with marketing, I’m building an unlimited marketing subscription for startups called Custo