// CASE STUDIES · August 12, 2026

What a 68% CAC drop actually took

Cutting CAC from $22 to $7 was not one clever campaign. It was a tracking migration, a set of guardrails, and the discipline to pause things that were working on paper.

By Topan Adi Pamungkas · Performance Marketing Manager · Gotrade (YC S19)

Cutting acquisition cost from $22 to $7 while pushing volume from 1.9k to 9.1k funded accounts a month reads like a single win. It was not.

The guardrail came first

Before any structural change, CAC ceilings went in: ≤$5 on Google Ads, ≤$4 on DSP. A guardrail is not a target — it is the line where spend stops without a meeting.

Then the tracking

Migrating the MMP from Branch to Adjust, and validating the Firebase, Meta and TikTok SDKs behind it, meant the CAC number was worth acting on. Optimising against attribution you have not personally verified is guesswork with a dashboard.

Then pausing what looked fine

Traffic-quality work — pausing underperforming ad networks that still showed acceptable in-platform numbers — improved blended CAC 25–35% and moved ROAS from 300–350% to 400–440%. The channel-level report had looked healthy the whole time.

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// ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Topan Adi Pamungkas

PERFORMANCE MARKETING MANAGER · GOTRADE (YC S19)

Performance Marketing Manager at Gotrade (YC S19), running paid acquisition for the Indonesian market as sole contributor. I started in frontend engineering in 2013 and spent three years in technical support before moving into growth, which is why I read a tracking stack as fluently as a media plan. I also build XerAds, an AI-native growth platform. I am as comfortable debugging a tracking pixel as optimising a campaign budget.

Performance marketing Paid user acquisition Mobile attribution Google Ads Meta Ads TikTok Ads Apple Search Ads Adjust MMP Technical SEO Agentic AI Laravel Python

CERTIFIED: Apple Search Ads Certified; Full-Stack Digital Marketing Program (RevoU); Advanced SEO Programme (RevoU)
EDUCATION: BINUS University — Bachelor of Information Systems, Computer Science; Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB) — Diploma, Computer Engineering

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