The challenge
Cobalt offered business banking to SMBs. Marketing reported a healthy 3.4x blended ROAS; finance reported that customer acquisition cost had grown 60% year over year. Both were using real data. The gap was attribution — every platform was claiming the same conversions, browser tracking was missing a third of events, and nobody could tie a funded account back to the campaign that produced it.
What we did
Rebuilt measurement from the ground up
A server-side GTM container, Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, and offline conversion imports from Salesforce. Crucially, we tracked funded accounts — the event that actually makes money — not application starts.
Exposed where the money was going
With clean data, three campaigns consuming 34% of budget turned out to produce funded accounts at 4x the target CAC. They'd looked profitable for eighteen months on application-start metrics.
Rebuilt the application funnel
The 11-field application form was abandoned by 71% of starters. Progressive disclosure across three steps with a saved-progress feature lifted completion 128%.
Reallocated toward what worked
Budget moved to the channels producing genuine funded accounts. Because the compliance-heavy application funnel now converted, previously unprofitable channels became viable.
The result
Cobalt eliminated $2.1M in annual spend that was producing applications but not customers. True cost per funded account fell 47% while qualified application volume grew 128%. Finance and marketing now report from the same dashboard.
“For two years marketing and finance argued about numbers in every board meeting. Digital Squad ended that argument by building one source of truth. The $2.1M we stopped wasting was almost a side effect.”