How Catalina Crunch Decreased CAC by 24% in 30 Days with Prescient

Catalina Crunch is a low-carb, keto-friendly snack brand that makes delicious food healthy. The brand's cereals, snack mix cookies, and chocolate bars are available online and at 30,000 retailers nationwide.

Challenge: Building MMM in-house was incredibly time-consuming

Nick Osborn, Catalina Crunch's Head of Growth, tried a variety of marketing mix models throughout his five years at the company. Unfortunately, all of them were extremely overpriced relative to their values and were difficult to trust. The standard MMM didn't even use Catalina Crunch's data—instead using a larger data set of brands in different categories and external data modeling.

After trying a variety of MMM without success, Nick pivoted and built his own internal model based on multipliers, last-click conversions, and post-purchase surveys. In parallel, he also built a multi-regression model to understand how DTC ad spend impacted Amazon sales. The correlation between Meta impressions and Amazon revenue was strong, but his model just scraped the surface of the insights he wanted.

Building these projects was exceptionally time-consuming. He used to put data sets into Excel workbooks that were 600k rows long and took up to 15 minutes to open.

Solution: Modeling spend for optimal campaign returns

After onboarding with Prescient, Nick gained granular visibility into Catalina Crunch's monthly ad spend channels, from Meta to Google to TikTok — right at the campaign level. With those insights, the team was able to improve its ability to effectively forecast and reallocate spend budgets for optimal performance.

Using Prescient's Amazon Halo-Effects, he can see how campaigns traditionally tracked with returns on DTC impacted Amazon performance. Nick and his team don't have to own any of this time-consuming work manually — instead getting access to actionable data insights at the click of a button.

Results: CAC lowered 24% within a single month

After implementing Prescient, Catalina Crunch decreased CAC across its blended business — spanning both DTC and Amazon. Nick leveraged Prescient's optimization engine to make simple paid spend adjustments. The brand's March CAC came in 24% lower than historical averages — yielding immediate ROI.

• 24% decrease in CAC within 30 days
• Scaled DTC bottom-line operating income
• Validated 15% of Amazon gross sales driven by Halo-Effects
• 40+ hours saved per month manually pulling data sets