WARC DC Series on Metrics & Measurement: Understanding CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric that represents the total cost to a retailer of acquiring a new customer.

What’s CAC?

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost to a business of acquiring a new customer. It includes not just the cost of any advertising they responded to, but also fixed costs like the salaries of staff in the sales and marketing team, as well as the cost of logistics if the business has to get a product from their warehouse to that customer.

CAC is expressed as a dollar value, calculated by dividing the total spending on sales and marketing by the number of customers acquired in a given period under scrutiny – typically a month, quarter...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands