Unit economics
Everything spent to acquire customers in a period, divided by the number of customers that spending actually produced.
Also called Customer acquisition cost · Стоимость привлечения клиента
Formula
CAC = (Marketing spend + Sales cost) ÷ New customers acquired
- Marketing spend
- media, agency fees, tooling, content production and the salaries of the people doing it
- Sales cost
- salaries, commission and the tooling of anyone who closes
- New customers
- first-time payers, not leads and not repeat orders
Blended CAC divides by every new customer including those who arrived organically. Paid CAC divides paid spend by the customers paid media produced. They answer different questions and are routinely confused.
CAC is the price of a customer, and it is only useful next to two other numbers: what that customer is worth over their life, and how long the money takes to come back. On its own it is a cost with no scale.
It also rises with volume, and rarely in a straight line. The cheapest demand is bought first — brand search, warm audiences, the people already looking. Each increment after that costs more, which is why a channel that works at AED 60,000 a month can stop working at AED 200,000 without anything else changing.
- Paid media
- AED 60,000
- Agency and tooling
- AED 14,000
- Salaries of the two people running it
- AED 26,000
- New customers, all sources
- 250
- New customers attributable to paid
- 140
Blended CAC = 100,000 ÷ 250 = AED 400. Paid CAC = 100,000 ÷ 140 = AED 714. The same month reports either number depending on which question is being asked, and quoting one while meaning the other is how a channel gets scaled into a loss.
Salaries, agency retainers, production and tooling are part of the cost of acquiring a customer whether or not they sit in the ad account. Leaving them out routinely understates CAC by thirty to fifty per cent, which is exactly the margin by which a channel is declared profitable.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.