Northwind — Paid Acquisition Overhaul

Cut blended CAC by 38% in the first quarter by rebuilding the funnel from ad creative to first-week activation, with proper server-side attribution behind it.

-38%

CAC reduction

4.2x

ROAS

+63%

Lead-to-trial

The starting point

Northwind was spending $28k/mo across Google and Meta with a blended CAC north of $480. Attribution was running through GTM client-side, which meant Safari and iOS 14.5+ users were largely invisible.

What we did

Rebuilt the tracking spine. Server-side GA4 + Meta CAPI through a Cloudflare Worker. Recovered ~22% of conversions iOS was eating.
Rewrote the creative brief. Killed the "feature soup" ads and replaced them with three problem-led concepts. Kept the winners weekly, killed the rest.
Tightened the offer. Free trial → 14-day guided pilot. Same product, very different conversion psychology.

Why server-side mattered

The biggest single unlock was just seeing what was working. Once we could attribute correctly, the optimizer started feeding budget to the ads that were already winning — we didn't need clever bid strategies, we needed honest data.

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