Strategy & economics
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Also known as: customer acquisition cost · cost per acquisition
The fully-loaded cost of acquiring a paying customer — paid media, creative production, tooling, and attributable headcount divided by customers won in the same window.
CAC captures what a business spent to acquire each paying customer. Fully-loaded CAC includes paid media spend, creative and production costs, acquisition tooling (ad platforms, landing-page builders, MMPs), and a share of marketing headcount attributable to acquisition work. Some teams compute a "blended CAC" (all marketing spend ÷ all new customers) and a "paid CAC" (paid-media spend ÷ paid-attribution customers) side-by-side — the gap between the two indicates how much organic and referral acquisition is subsidising the paid channel. CAC alone is a weak metric. Its importance is as the denominator of LTV:CAC and the numerator of payback period: a rising CAC is only a problem if LTV doesn't rise in proportion, or if the payback period stretches beyond the business's working-capital tolerance.