Small B2B SaaS, ~$48k MRR. We were running ads on Meta, Google Search, LinkedIn, and one industry newsletter sponsorship. About $9,400/month total spend split roughly evenly.
Three months in I was ready to kill the newsletter sponsorship. The reporting from the newsletter was vague — opens, clicks to our site, that was it. No conversion data, no audience data, nothing comparable to what Meta and Google were giving us.
Decided to wait one more quarter and actually instrument it properly. Built a separate landing page just for the newsletter audience. Tracked from click to trial to paid using the customer's email match across our database. Took maybe 2 hours to set up.
Six month results, organized by cost per paid customer.
Newsletter sponsorship: $112 CAC. Conversion from click to paid was about 3.4%. Audience matched our ICP almost exactly because the newsletter was niche.
Google Search: $189 CAC. Predictable, scalable, but hitting diminishing returns above a certain spend.
LinkedIn ads: $407 CAC. Good audience but cost per customer made it hard to justify.
Meta: $516 CAC. The audience matching on B2B has degraded for our ICP specifically. We are killing this in Q2.
The thing I keep thinking about is that I almost killed the best channel because the reporting was bad. The CAC didn't show up on a dashboard until I built one for it. The CAC I trusted on the other channels was real but wasn't comparable because I had no baseline.
The lesson, if I have one, is that "the data we have" is not the same as "the data that exists." There's another lesson about not killing things based on dashboards alone but I haven't quite figured out what to do with it yet.