Week of April 6 – April 12, 2026

Blended CAC dropped 6% WoW to $95 — moving in the right direction but still $10 above the $85 target. The improvement came from a spend pullback (down 3% to $354K) while NCs ticked up to 522/day, but that NC number is still 13% short of the 600/day goal. CPMs spiked 35% YoY to $34.01 — this is the single biggest headwind right now; the only reason CAC isn't worse is that CTR nearly doubled YoY (1.10% vs 0.75%), which is absorbing the CPM inflation. Revenue softened to $997K (below the $1M floor for the first time in 4 weeks), so maintaining volume while pushing CAC below $85 is the priority this week.

The funnel is fattening in the middle but leaking at the bottom. Add-to-cart surged 11.1% WoW and checkout jumped 14.6%, but purchases only grew 3.0% — meaning checkout-to-purchase conversion is degrading. CVR dipped 0.18 points to 2.47%, still above the 2% floor but trending the wrong way. The mid-funnel gains suggest creative and targeting are working; the drop-off is likely a checkout experience or pricing friction issue. → Run a checkout audit this week — look at payment failures, shipping cost abandonment, and any Easter promo code expiration confusion.

Facebook is the elephant in the room: 83% of spend, $147 CAC — that's 1.7x the $85 target and it's dragging the entire blended number up. Meanwhile, Google at $16 CAC with 535 NCs on only $8.3K spend is by far the biggest scaling opportunity in the mix. → Shift at least $15-20K/week from Facebook into Google Search non-brand and YouTube immediately. YouTube at $86 CAC is right at target with 131 NCs and has room to run. FB Canada at $279 CAC on 12 NCs is burning money — cut that budget in half or pause entirely. Axon/AppLovin at $175 CAC needs a hard efficiency check before next week's budget lock.

Meta CPMs exploded to $36.49 this week — the highest in 13 weeks and 62% above the 13-week average. This is the root cause of the $147 CAC. Every single top-5 campaign is above target: ABO Scaling at $120, ASC Top Ads at $166, Persona Testing at $187. The "Creatives to Kill" list is alarming — SHA_COF_Coffee_If_You_Love at $1,457 CAC, Coffee_Making_product_AIVO at $1,431, and Pikes-Place-Vs-Mud-Easter at $299 are all still spending. → Kill all five underperforming creatives today. The two scale candidates worth pushing: FOUNDER vs MushroomCoffee July 3 V1 at $82 CAC and Can't Afford_OG_Adapt at $80 CAC — increase budget on both by 30%. ING matt mudvsmushcof has a monster 44.3% thumb stop but $119 CAC; test new LP routing before scaling.

Google is the star of the week and it's not close. $16 blended CAC across 535 NCs on just $8,348 in spend — that's 5x more efficient than Meta. Brand Search is doing the heavy lifting at $7 CPA with 389 conversions, but even Search Conquesting is crushing it at $49 CPA. NB Mushroom Coffee ($28), NB Beta ($36), and NB Coffee Alternative ($25) are all green — every single non-brand campaign except US Non-Brand Top Keywords ($140 CPA, 6 conversions) is performing. → Double the budget on Conquesting and NB Mushroom Coffee — these have headroom. Pause US Non-Brand Top Keywords or restructure the keyword set; $769 for 6 conversions is unacceptable. YouTube Relaunch #2 at $88 CAC with 126 NCs is right at threshold — keep running and monitor.

Site health looks solid on the surface: 251K sessions (+3.4% WoW), engagement rate up to 71.4%, and purchaser CVR at 2.69% (well above the 2% floor). But the GA4 CVR is masking a landing page problem. Two of the highest-traffic paid LPs are converting below floor: /pages/rise-2 at 1.32% CVR on 45,905 sessions and /pages/compare-listicle-og at 1.50% on 33,728 sessions. These two pages alone represent ~32% of total site traffic and are dragging blended performance.

→ /pages/rise-2 gets the most paid traffic of any page and converts at 1.32% — that's 34% below the 2% floor. This single page is the biggest CVR drag on the entire site. Prioritize a CRO sprint on rise-2 immediately: test hero copy, above-fold CTA placement, and social proof positioning. /pages/calm-seeker-listicle-og is even worse at 1.14% CVR with a 34.7% bounce rate — low volume (1,488 sessions) so it's less impactful, but still sending the Calm Seeker persona targeting ads to a dead page. Meanwhile, /products/30-servings-tin at 3.28% and the homepage at 3.24% are proving that direct product pages convert — route more paid traffic there.

The retention story is trending positive and worth watching closely. Every cohort from Oct 2025 onward is beating targets across all measured months — the Jan 2026 cohort is the standout with 67.1% Month 1 retention (6 points above the 61% target) and 51.5% at Month 2. The earlier 2025 cohorts (Apr-Jun) underperformed targets, which suggests product/onboarding improvements made in H2 2025 are paying off. Consider whether the Jan cohort spike is driven by New Year resolution buyers (higher intent) or a structural improvement — if Feb and Mar hold at 63.7% and 61.2% respectively as they age, it's structural. Worth investigating whether any onboarding flow changes in late 2025 correlate to this shift.

Email drove $199K this week (~20% of total revenue) on just 5 sends — strong contribution with zero ad cost. The Easter Promo sends were the workhorses: the original pull at $59K revenue and the re-send at $57K show this audience responds well to urgency-driven promos. Open rates held strong across the board (49.9%-54.6%), but click rates are consistently low (0.25%-0.73%) — opens are inflated by Apple MPP, so click rate is the real signal. The Albertsons Promo to 7K recipients generated $0 revenue with a 0.25% click rate — that segment or offer isn't working. TWB Newsletter had the highest open rate at 54.6% but only 0.45% clicks, which suggests the content is engaging but the CTA or offer isn't compelling enough to drive action.

Instagram data is incomplete this week — the Insights API didn't return post-level metrics. Follower count sits at 377,945, but without reach, engagement, or individual post data, there's no way to assess organic performance for this period. This is a data gap that needs to be flagged with the analytics team — if the API is consistently failing, consider a fallback manual export process. The follower number alone doesn't tell us much without engagement context.

Good earned media week: the WIRED roundup is the biggest win — mainstream tech/culture placement alongside competitors positions MUD\WTR in the premium tier of the category. The Popdust three-way comparison and Korean press coverage of Gen Z's caffeine shift signal that the "mushroom coffee" category is gaining international mindshare. Competitive note: Four Sigmatic launching a creatine-infused coffee is a play for the performance/fitness segment that MUD\WTR doesn't currently target — worth monitoring whether this expands the category or fragments it. Ryze continues to get trade press mentions. The category is getting crowded; brand differentiation through content and community (not just product) is increasingly important.