CAC Benchmarks

There's no single good number — it depends on your AOV and LTV. As a quick rule, your blended CAC should be under one-third of your 12-month customer LTV. For a mid-AOV apparel store (€60-€100 AOV) that usually lands somewhere between €35 and €65.

Use blended for strategic decisions and channel-level CAC for tactical optimisation. Blended (all spend ÷ all new customers) is the only number that tells you whether the business is profitable. Channel CAC tells you which lever to pull next.

CPMs on Meta have roughly doubled since 2021 across most online-retail categories, post-iOS 14 attribution loss made optimisation noisier, and category saturation means more brands bid for the same audiences. Expect Meta CAC to be 40-80% higher than your 2021 baseline at the same creative quality.

Add all customer-acquisition costs over a period — paid media, agency retainers, affiliate payouts, creative production, acquisition-team payroll — and divide by net new customers in the same window. Exclude retention spend (loyalty, win-back email flows) or you'll understate retention ROI and overstate CAC.

CPA (cost per acquisition) usually refers to ad-platform-reported cost per conversion, where the conversion can be any event — add-to-cart, lead, purchase. CAC specifically measures cost per new paying customer, blended across all channels and including non-media costs. CAC is always higher than reported CPA.

Directly. If your contribution margin per order is €25, a €40 CAC means you lose money on the first order and depend entirely on repeat purchases to recoup. Higher AOV gives you more first-order margin to spend on acquisition, which is why €200+ AOV brands tolerate €100+ CAC.

For subscription or high-repeat-rate categories (beauty, supplements, coffee), aim for 3-6 months. For lower-repeat categories (apparel, home), 1-3 months because you can't count on a fast second purchase. Anything over 12 months requires external financing to scale.

GA4 reports conversions by attribution model, not true blended CAC — it doesn't know your spend unless you import it, and last-click models undercount upper-funnel channels like YouTube. For accurate channel CAC, combine GA4 conversion data with spend from each ad platform and reconcile manually or via a unified analytics tool.

Improve conversion rate on the traffic you already pay for — landing-page testing, checkout optimisation, and PDP improvements compound directly into lower CAC. A 25% lift in conversion rate equals a 20% cut in CAC at constant spend. That's typically faster than negotiating cheaper media.

Quarterly is the sensible cadence. Monthly is too noisy — small campaign launches and seasonal swings will make every month look like a crisis. Quarterly review lets you see real trend movement against category benchmarks and decide whether channel mix needs to shift.