Scaling Meta Spend 5x while cutting CAC 70% for Season Health

Intro

Season Health partners with insurance providers to deliver covered nutrition care: chef-designed recipes, pre-made meals, and one-on-one calls with registered dietitians for members dealing with conditions like obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, and hypertension. Their business depends on one downstream metric: appointments attended. Signups don't matter. Even scheduled appointments don't matter. A lead is only real when a member shows up to their first dietitian call.

That constraint made this account unusually hard. Most telehealth performance teams optimize for what Meta can see: lead form submissions, landing page signups, top-of-funnel clicks. None of that correlates cleanly with Season's actual cost to acquire a member. When we first launched the account, CAC was sitting north of $1,000 and the signup-to-attendance rate was hovering around 8%. In 90 days we rebuilt the funnel, scaled spend 5x, and brought CAC down by 70% at peak efficiency.

Funnel and Event Optimization Strategy

The first move was getting Meta's algorithm pointed at the right event. Season was running lead form ads and optimizing for in-platform submissions — the cheapest possible conversion, and almost entirely uncorrelated with attendance. We killed lead forms, stood up a web conversion flow, and walked the optimization event progressively deeper down the funnel: from a top-of-funnel "Get Started" click, to a completed application on the confirmation page, to (once server-side tracking via Freshpaint was in place) appointment attended itself.

Each migration came with a rebuild. Every time we moved the optimization event, the account had to relearn — so we planned the transitions, pre-loaded creative, and held spend flat for three to five days to let Meta's model recalibrate on the new signal. The payoff was the signup-to-scheduled rate climbing from 8% to over 70% within two weeks of the first migration, because Meta was suddenly targeting people who actually completed the application instead of casual clickers.

The second funnel move was matching Meta's conversion event to the quality threshold that actually mattered to Season. Once SubmitApplication was only firing on target insurance + target state + target condition combinations, the algorithm started filtering out unqualified leads at the auction level rather than downstream. That's where the step-change in CAC happened.

Ad Account Optimizations and Scaling

Structure followed strategy. We moved the account into a campaign budget optimization (CBO) framework with one ad set per state, each ad set housing state-specific creative tied to the insurance provider most dominant in that geo. This let Meta dynamically shift budget toward winning states — Texas and North Carolina compounded the hardest — without us manually rebalancing spend every day.

Once CBO was pulling its weight, we layered in an Advantage+ Shopping campaign to absorb broader demand the state-specific structure was too niche to capture. Between the two campaigns we had complementary coverage: CBO for efficient, targeted conversions, Advantage+ for volume at scale.

Scaling then became a rhythm: 15% spend increases every three days as long as cost per appointment scheduled held or improved, with any state-specific ad set that drifted past a $300 CPAS threshold getting paused or rebuilt. When Texas started dominating performance, we broke it into its own campaign so it couldn't cannibalize the rest of the account as budgets climbed. That discipline is what let us take daily spend from roughly $300 to over $1,000 without efficiency breaking down.

Creative Strategy

On the creative side, we built a modular system: three variables — state, insurance provider, and condition — combined into a repeatable format that could be spun up for any new geo Season expanded into. The breakout was an "Apple Notes" style static ("Texas residents with BlueCross BlueShield: Dealing with obesity/diabetes?"). That single ad drove $3,156 in spend at a $39 CPL in one week and became the backbone of the account.

We paired it with a matching video format — the same hook rendered as a scroll-stopping vertical video — and rotated through UGC, testimonial cards built on approved reviews, and a statistic-driven concept to keep the account from fatiguing. New creative got rolled into the live ad sets rather than tested in isolation, so Meta could reallocate spend to winners without us forcing it.

Landing pages moved in parallel. We rebuilt Season's lander in Framer and ran split tests through VWO, which compounded the ad-side gains by lifting conversion rate on the page itself.

Conclusion

Ninety days of disciplined funnel rebuilding, structural rigor, and creative iteration took Season from a $1,000+ CAC with no room to scale, to a 5x spend profile at a 70%+ CAC reduction. The foundation is an account structure and creative system that compounds every time Season expands into a new state or insurance partnership, which is exactly what a performance program should look like.