Your customer acquisition cost went up again last quarter. The explanation you received was external. Platform costs. Competitor aggression. Creative fatigue. Seasonality.
All of those things are real. None of them is why your CAC is structurally trending upward over eight quarters while the explanations change every ninety days.
CAC trends upward for one durable reason. The system acquiring customers is paying more because the system converting and retaining them is not working well enough to make acquisition efficient. When conversion is strong, acquisition becomes cheaper because the platform algorithms reward it. When retention is strong, acquisition becomes cheaper because you are replacing less churn. The CAC problem is almost always a downstream expression of a conversion and retention problem that nobody has named at the system level because it does not sit cleanly inside any one team's metrics.
The explanation you received last quarter was accurate about the channel. It was not accurate about the cause. Those are different things and the difference between them is where your budget is going.
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