Marketing spend
$12,000
Free calculator
Type marketing spend and new customers won over the same window, CAC updates live. No email, no gate, nothing leaves this page.
The calculator
The boxes start filled with an illustrative example, not a benchmark. Replace it with your own numbers. Use one consistent window, like a calendar month, for both figures.
Ad spend over the window you're measuring. Add creative, tooling, or salary costs too if you want a fully-loaded number.
Customers won for the first time in that same window. Returning customers do not count.
Cost to acquire one new customer
At $12,000 in spend and 150 new customers, each new customer cost $80.00 to acquire.
CAC = marketing spend / new customers
This is a blended CAC across every channel in the spend figure you typed in. It is the standard starting-point definition, not a channel-level number.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
This is a blended average across every channel and every customer in the window. Real CAC varies enormously by channel: paid social, paid search, organic, and referral rarely cost the same to acquire a customer through.
Blending them into one number hides which channel is actually worth the spend and which one is quietly dragging the average up. A channel-level breakdown is a bigger, connected calculation, this two-number version is deliberately the simple starting point.
Questions
At minimum, ad spend. Some businesses also add creative production, marketing tooling, and the salary cost of the marketing team for a fully-loaded CAC. Either approach is defensible, the important thing is being consistent about which one you're using when you compare CAC over time.
There is no universal good number here. It is entirely relative to your margin and to customer lifetime value: a $200 CAC can be excellent for a product with high margin and repeat purchases, and unsustainable for a low-margin product bought once. CAC only means something next to those two other numbers.
Blended CAC, which this calculator produces, divides total spend by total new customers across every channel at once. CAC by channel isolates spend and customers for one channel at a time, paid social versus organic versus referral, which usually reveals a wide spread the blended number hides.
No, by definition. CAC measures the cost of acquiring a new customer specifically. Spend that drives a repeat purchase from an existing customer belongs in a retention or repeat-purchase metric, not CAC.
They're often used interchangeably, and in a lot of everyday usage they mean the same thing. In some contexts CPA (cost per acquisition or cost per action) refers more narrowly to a single ad platform's own reported cost per conversion event, which may or may not line up exactly with a company-wide CAC figure. Worth checking which definition the other person means before comparing numbers.
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Upstream reads real marketing spend and new customer counts from your store and your ad platforms, broken out by channel, not blended into one number.