CAC Calculator
Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost in seconds, compare against vertical benchmarks, and see exactly which inputs are dragging your number up.
CAC Calculator
A tool that computes Customer Acquisition Cost by dividing total acquisition spend by the number of new customers acquired in the same period.
A CAC calculator turns two numbers — what you spent on acquiring customers and how many new customers signed up or placed a first order — into a single per-customer cost you can compare against AOV, LTV, and payback period. The math is trivial; the discipline is in scoping the inputs correctly.
Most online stores get CAC wrong on the input side: they mix blended marketing spend with paid-only spend, or they count repeat buyers as new customers. A good calculator forces you to be explicit about both, then benchmarks the output so you know whether €38 per customer is healthy or alarming for your vertical.
Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator
Marketing & ad spend (period)
$
All paid channels: Meta, Google, TikTok, influencer fees, affiliate payouts.
Sales & team overhead (period)
$
Salaries, agency retainers, and tooling allocated to acquisition.
New customers acquired
First-time buyers only — exclude repeat orders.
Average order value
$
Used to calculate CAC-to-AOV ratio.
Customer Acquisition Cost
$42.31
CAC-to-AOV ratio
0.62
Paid-only CAC
$34.62
Use the same time window for both spend and new customers — mixing a monthly spend figure with a quarterly customer count is the most common error.
The widget above does the arithmetic. The rest of this page explains how to scope the inputs, what your output number means against vertical benchmarks, and the three traps that make most reported CAC figures unreliable.
The CAC formula and what each input really means
CAC = (Marketing Spend + Sales Overhead) / New Customers Acquired
Marketing Spend
Paid acquisition spend
All paid media: Meta, Google, TikTok, affiliate payouts, influencer fees, sponsored content.
Sales Overhead
Team & tooling overhead
Salaries of marketers and growth staff, agency retainers, and acquisition-tied software.
New Customers Acquired
First-time buyers
Customers placing their first order in the period. Repeat buyers and reactivations are excluded.
A beauty SKU brand on Shopify reports Q3 numbers: €18,000 in paid media, €4,000 in allocated salary + tooling, and 520 first-time buyers.
Marketing spend: €18,000
Sales overhead: €4,000
New customers: 520
→ €42.31
Fully-loaded CAC is €42.31. With an AOV of €68, you recover 62% of CAC on the first order — viable only if repeat-purchase rate carries the rest.
The denominator is where most teams quietly cheat. If you divide spend by all orders rather than first-time orders, you'll understate CAC by 30-50% on any brand with healthy repeat rates.
On the numerator side, the question is paid-only versus fully-loaded. Paid-only CAC is what your media buyer optimises against day-to-day. Fully-loaded CAC — including the people and tools — is what your CFO uses to model payback period and runway.
Benchmarks: what a healthy CAC looks like by vertical
Typical CAC and CAC-to-AOV ratios for online stores in the €1M-€15M revenue band
| Vertical | Median CAC | Median AOV | CAC-to-AOV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel & fashion | €32 | €72 | 0.44 |
| Beauty & skincare | €28 | €48 | 0.58 |
| Home & decor | €48 | €110 | 0.44 |
| Consumer electronics | €62 | €185 | 0.34 |
| Food & beverage (DTC) | €22 | €38 | 0.58 |
| Supplements & wellness | €35 | €55 | 0.64 |
| Jewellery & accessories | €55 | €140 | 0.39 |
Verticals with high repeat-purchase rates — beauty, supplements, food — tolerate higher CAC-to-AOV ratios because the second and third orders carry the economics. Categories with low repeat rates — electronics, jewellery — need a CAC well under 50% of AOV to break even on the first order.
How to use CAC alongside payback period and LTV
CAC in isolation tells you very little. A €60 CAC is disastrous for a one-time-purchase brand and a steal for one with a €400 12-month LTV. The three numbers that always travel together are CAC, payback period, and LTV:CAC ratio.
Payback period — how many months of contribution margin it takes to recover CAC — is the operational metric. Anything under six months is comfortable for an online store; twelve months means you're funding growth out of cash reserves.
LTV:CAC is the strategic metric. The classic target is 3:1 — for every euro spent acquiring a customer, you eventually earn three back in gross margin. Below 2:1 you're not building a business, you're renting traffic.
The three CAC traps to avoid
1) Reporting blended CAC when the conversation is about paid channels (it makes paid look cheaper than it is). 2) Counting reactivated lapsed customers as new (inflates the denominator, deflates CAC). 3) Using last-click attribution to assign 'new customer' to a channel — first-touch or data-driven attribution will tell a different story, often by 2-3x on the worst-performing channel.
CAC calculator FAQ
There's no universal number — a good CAC is one that produces a CAC-to-AOV ratio under 0.6 and an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. Beauty and supplements brands often run CAC at 50-65% of AOV because repeat rates carry the economics; electronics and jewellery need CAC well under 40% of AOV.
Calculate both. Paid-only CAC (just media spend ÷ new customers) is what your media buyer optimises daily. Fully-loaded CAC (media + salaries + tools ÷ new customers) is what you use for payback period, runway, and board reporting. They typically differ by 20-40%.
CPA (cost per acquisition) usually refers to a conversion event inside an ad platform — a lead, a signup, an add-to-cart. CAC refers specifically to a paying customer. Meta might report CPA of €12 on signups while your actual CAC on first-time buyers is €45.
Blended CAC divides total marketing spend by all new customers, including those from organic and referral channels. Paid CAC isolates spend and customers attributable to paid channels. Blended is honest about real cost; paid is what you control through bid changes.
Monthly at minimum, weekly during a scaling push or after launching a new channel. Acquisition costs drift quickly when you push spend up — the marginal customer almost always costs more than the average one, so a monthly recalculation will hide deteriorating efficiency.
Yes — count a new customer as someone making their first subscription payment, not someone starting a free trial. For subscription economics specifically, also calculate CAC payback in months using monthly contribution margin rather than first-order margin.
ROAS measures revenue per ad euro within a platform window; CAC measures all-in cost per real customer. A 3.5x ROAS on Meta can coexist with a CAC that's underwater if you're paying to acquire many low-AOV first orders. ROAS is a media metric, CAC is a business metric.
For paid CAC by channel, use data-driven or first-touch — last-click systematically over-credits bottom-funnel channels like branded search. For blended CAC across the business, attribution doesn't matter: total spend ÷ total new customers is unambiguous.
Three usual causes: creative fatigue is dropping conversion rates, you're saturating your best audiences and the algorithm is reaching colder traffic, or your site conversion rate has dropped. Recalculate site-wide conversion rate first — a drop from 2.4% to 1.9% will move CAC up 25% with no change in spend.
Run the calculator once per channel with that channel's spend and attributed new customers. You'll get a per-channel CAC, but interpret cautiously — branded search will always look cheap (it captures demand you already generated), and prospecting channels will always look expensive (they create the demand).
Track CAC, channels, and funnel conversion in one place
Metricuno connects ad spend, funnel events, and revenue so you can see CAC by channel, cohort, and campaign — without stitching together five tools.