Paid acquisition only. Last 30 days.
New customer ad spend
Prospecting only. Exclude retargeting and existing audiences.
New customers acquired
First-time orders from paid channels, last 30 days.
Average first order value
AOV across new customers.
Every dollar that helped land that customer counts. Last 30 days, leave at 0 if not applicable.
Agency or freelancer retainer
Total monthly retainer. Acquisition split below.
↳ % attributable to acquisition
Most agencies manage both acquisition and retention. What share is acquisition?
Creative production
UGC payments, video shoots, photography.
Acquisition tools & SaaS
Triple Whale, Northbeam, Motion, etc.
Welcome discount
% off first order. Set to 0 if you don't offer one.
↳ Welcome discount utilization
% of new customers who actually use the code.
Affiliate commission rate
% paid to influencers / affiliates on first orders through their code.
↳ % of new customers via affiliate code
Pull from Refersion, Shopify Collabs, UpPromote, etc.
Free shipping subsidy per order
What it costs you to ship for free.
Free samples & gifting
Seeding spend, samples, PR boxes.
Payment processing rate
% of first order revenue. Stripe / Shopify default ≈ 2.9%.
Customers who didn't actually stick. Subtract from the denominator.
Returns & refunds rate
% of first orders refunded or returned.
Reported CAC is what your ads dashboard tells you. It treats the ad as the only acquisition cost. It isn't. Every dollar spent helping you land a paid customer counts. Most founders are off by 40 to 80%.
Most agencies manage acquisition and retention together. Take a clear-eyed view of the split. If 60% of their time is acquisition, 60% of the retainer is acquisition cost.
UGC payments, video shoots, ad photography, brief writers. The creative isn't free, even when the platform is.
Attribution platforms, creative analytics, ad-buying tools. Anything you'd cancel if you stopped paid acquisition tomorrow.
A 15% off welcome code on a $80 order is $12 you didn't collect. Multiply by every new customer who actually uses the code, then add it to acquisition cost. The biggest miss for most brands.
Some brands pay influencers a % commission on first orders made through their code, on top of the customer discount. Pull the spend from Refersion, Shopify Collabs, or UpPromote and split out first-order commissions.
If your shipping costs $6/order and you charge $0, you're paying $6 to deliver each new customer. Acquisition cost.
Seeding programs, PR boxes, sample-with-purchase. Inventory cost plus shipping plus packaging, all attributable to acquisition.
Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal all skim 2.5 to 3% off the top. On a first order, that fee is part of what it cost to land them.
A customer who returns isn't a customer. If 5% of new customers refund their first order, your effective acquisition is 5% lower than your headcount suggests.
You can only afford to acquire customers up to your contribution margin. Reported CAC tells you nothing useful here. True CAC tells you exactly when you're buying revenue you can't profit on.
Payback is true CAC ÷ contribution margin per customer per month. With reported CAC you'll think payback is 60 days. It might be 110.
Reported CAC by channel hides which one is actually working. Add the agency split, the creative split, the discount split per channel. The losers usually become obvious.
Knowing your true CAC is step one. Bringing it down without sacrificing volume is the work. EcomIQ is hands-on mentorship for DTC founders who want operator-level eyes on their account, not another course.
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