Customer acquisition cost calculator: count only the new ones
Divide marketing spend by every customer who ordered and acquisition looks cheap, because returning customers are in the count. Divide it by first-time customers only and you get what a new customer really costs. This calculator shows both, then how long margin takes to repay it.
Everything you spent on marketing in the period: media, agency fees, affiliate commissions, creative.
Every distinct customer with an order in the period, new and returning.
Customers whose first order ever fell in the period.
Revenue per order, after discounts.
Share of revenue left after landed COGS, fulfilment and fees. Work it out here.
Including the first order.
Returning customers make acquisition look 2.5 times cheaper than it is. A new customer costs A$75.00 and takes 8.3 months of margin to pay back.
One spend, two denominators
The spend is the same in both numbers. Only the count underneath changes. Returning customers mostly come back through email, organic search and habit, so crediting them to acquisition spend makes every new customer look cheaper than they were.
Payback is worked on contribution margin, not revenue or gross margin, because that is the cash that actually comes back. The three CACs compares blended, new-customer and marginal CAC.
A$30,000.00 of spend over 1,000 customers who ordered is A$30.00 a buyer. But only 400 were new, so each new customer cost A$30,000.00 ÷ 400 = A$75.00.
A A$90.00 order at a 40% margin leaves A$36.00. At 3 orders a year that is A$9.00 of margin a month, so the new customer pays back in A$75.00 ÷ A$9.00 = 8.3 months, not the 3.3 months the cost per buyer suggests.
These are your live inputs from the calculator above, not a canned example. Change a number up there and these paragraphs follow.
Questions operators ask
Divide marketing spend for a period by the number of new customers acquired in the same period. A$30,000 of spend and 400 first-time customers is a CAC of A$75. The common error is dividing by every customer who ordered: with 1,000 buyers the same spend reads A$30, because 600 returning customers were counted as if the spend had won them.
Definitions vary. Some reports divide spend by every buyer, which is the cost per buyer here. Our blended CAC definition divides total spend by all new customers from every channel, which matches the new-customer figure on this page. The narrower new-customer CAC divides paid spend by customers acquired through paid channels only. State which one you mean.
There is no universal answer. Payback measures how long acquisition spend is tied up before a customer turns profitable, so the right length depends on how much cash you can keep tied up. Shorter is safer. Calculate it on contribution margin, since gross margin overstates the cash that comes back. See CAC payback and the CM payback calculator.
Every cost of winning customers in the period: paid media on every platform, agency fees, affiliate commissions and paid creative. Leaving out fees and creative makes CAC look lower than it is. Keep spend and customers on the same dates, so a month of spend is divided by that month's new customers.
Related: New-customer CACWhen does a customer pay back?Find more of your best customersBlended CAC and LTV:CACLTV calculatorAll free tools →
What each channel really pays for a customer
This page runs one blended average. Blufire computes this per order, customer and SKU, reconciled to your ledger, and S2 Unit Economics shows what each channel really pays to acquire a customer, and how long that customer takes to pay it back.