Case Studies · SaaS · 6 months

SaaS B2B Reduces CAC 42% While Doubling Pipeline

How a Series B SaaS company cut CAC 42% and doubled qualified pipeline by replacing platform-reported attribution with rigorous marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing.

Challenge

A Series B SaaS company was hitting CAC payback periods of 22+ months as paid acquisition saturated and competitive pressure increased. Existing attribution models were attributing 70% of revenue to branded search — a clear sign of last-touch over-credit, but no way to prove it without rigorous measurement.

Approach

Empire325 deployed a unified measurement stack: GA4 with custom event taxonomy, server-side tagging via GTM Server, marketing mix modeling using Meta's Robyn framework, and quarterly incrementality holdouts on branded search and retargeting. Paid media was rebalanced based on incremental ROAS rather than platform-reported metrics.

Outcome

Within 6 months, the unified stack revealed branded search was 60% incremental (not 100%) and broad-targeted PMax was 40% over-credited. Reallocating to upper-funnel programmatic CTV and LinkedIn ABM increased qualified pipeline 2.1x while reducing blended CAC 42%. Payback period dropped from 22 to 13 months.