Who chose your channels? If the honest answer is "habit", keep reading

Ask why your biggest acquisition channel gets the budget it gets. If the answer is some version of "it's always been Meta", or worse, "our competitor just launched on TikTok", you've found the leak. Channel mixes are rarely chosen. They accumulate: a channel that worked once, a channel an agency recommended, a channel someone senior likes. Then budget follows last year's budget, forever.

At one B2C company I worked with, LTV:CAC stood at 0.26. Every pound spent on acquisition returned twenty-six pence over a customer's lifetime. The channels themselves weren't exotic; the problem was that nobody could say why any of them was on the list. Spend was allocated by precedent, measured by CPI, and defended by 'well those are the main channels'. The mix wasn't a strategy. It wasn't targeted to defined segments. It was channel selection by perception.

Channel selection and mix is the second result area we assess in acquisition, directly after audience clarity, and the order matters. You cannot pick where to show up until you know who you're looking for.

What this result area actually is

Channel selection and mix means your acquisition budget lives where your ideal customer actually spends time, in proportions you can defend with data, and moves when the data says move. The thinking follows Lenny Rachitsky's Racecar Growth Framework and Reforge's growth systems work: channels are engines with different economics, not interchangeable buckets for spend. The test is simple to say and rare to pass: can you explain why your best channel outperforms your worst, and would you know when to move the money?

The four levels of maturity

Every result area in the Revenue Engine framework is assessed on a four-tier ladder, from Foundation to Optimise. For channel selection and mix, the climb looks like this:

Two things worth noticing. First, T1 is a quarterly decision, not an identity. "We're a TikTok brand" is a habit wearing a strategy's clothes; a mapped, prioritised list with reasons is the actual foundation. Second, the ladder ends in defensibility, not breadth. T4 isn't more channels. It's economics that survive a competitor matching your spend, because the advantage lives in the fit between audience, message and channel, not in the media buying.

Best practice and worst practice, from the real world

Gymshark is the reference case for choosing rather than inheriting. In 2012 there was no influencer-marketing playbook to copy. Ben Francis picked the channel because his audience, young lifters watching YouTube fitness creators, demonstrably lived there, and the incumbents weren't. Free gear and payments as small as $500 a month to creators with intense followings took the brand from $450 of sales a day to $45,000, and by August 2020 to a $1.45 billion valuation when General Atlantic bought in. The channel advantage was defensible for years precisely because it wasn't a spend decision. It was an audience insight competitors couldn't buy their way into copying.

The counter-example arrived for a whole cohort at once. When Apple shipped App Tracking Transparency in 2021, some 62% of iPhone users opted out of tracking, and Meta warned the change would cost it around $10 billion in 2022 revenue. Downstream of that number sat thousands of consumer brands whose entire acquisition engine was one auction. Concentration wasn't the sin; Gymshark was concentrated too. The sin was unexamined concentration. Teams who understood why Meta worked for them, which audience, which message, which moment, could rebuild the mechanism elsewhere. Teams who only knew that it worked watched CAC double and had no map.

Where to start this week

One move: the channel audit one-pager. List every channel you're live on. For each, write one sentence covering who it reaches, what a retained customer costs from it, and why it outperforms or underperforms the rest. Any channel that can't get its sentence is a candidate for losing its budget.

If half your list has no sentence, that's not a failure. It's a diagnosis, and it arrived cheaper than another quarter of spend.

Fix the leaks. Fix your world.

Target audience clarity is one of six result areas in the Acquisition module, and Acquisition is one of eleven modules in the Revenue Engine diagnostic. If any of this resonates, our diagnostic maps your entire growth funnel and shows you where the real leverage sits. No deck. No pitch. Just clarity on where the engine is misfiring.

Book a discovery call

Jonathan Stanton-Humphreys is Founder and CEO of Revenue Engine. He spent a decade as a commercial executive in B2C and B2B tech, and built Revenue Engine after watching revenue leak through strategic and implementation dysfunction, and the joins that nobody owned.

FAQ

How many acquisition channels should a B2C app run? Fewer than you think. Early on, one or two proven channels plus one live experiment is usually right. Concentration with reasons beats coverage without them; every additional channel divides attention, budget and creative effort.

How do I measure CAC by channel properly? Price each channel by cost per retained or paying customer, not blended CAC or cost per install. Last-click attribution flatters whichever channel touches users final; even simple multi-touch or incrementality checks change the picture, and usually change the budget.

When should I add a new channel? When an existing channel shows saturation, rising marginal CAC at the same quality, or when retention data shows your ideal customers demonstrably live somewhere you're not. Add it as a test with a hypothesis and a kill threshold, not as a new line in the budget that never leaves.