Paid Media
Blended CAC Calculator
Blended CAC is the number your investors and your bank account both care about: every dollar you spent to get customers, divided by the customers you got. Platform CAC is useful for steering, but this is the one that is true.
Result
FormulaBlended CAC = (paid media + other marketing + sales costs) ÷ new customers acquired
Worked example
$40,000 of media, $12,000 of other marketing and $18,000 of sales costs is $70,000 against 250 new customers, so blended CAC is $280. Paid-only CAC is $160 and marketing-only is $208, which means sales carries $72 per customer. The gap between $160 and $280 is exactly the number that gets forgotten when someone quotes the platform figure in a growth meeting.
What to watch for
Decide once whether new customers means first purchase or first paid subscription, write it down, and never change it silently. Redefining the denominator is the most common way CAC charts become fiction.
Blended CAC rising while paid CAC stays flat usually means your organic and referral engine has stalled, not that media got worse. That is a content and product problem wearing a media costume.
For agency clients I report blended and paid CAC side by side every month. Showing only the flattering one destroys trust the first time finance runs their own numbers.
Frequently asked questions
Should salaries be included in CAC?
Include the fully loaded cost of people whose job is acquiring customers, which normally means the marketing and sales teams. Leave out product, engineering and general overhead, which belong in operating costs rather than acquisition.
What is a good blended CAC?
Judge it against gross profit per customer rather than against a benchmark. In subscription businesses a common rule of thumb is that lifetime gross profit should be at least three times CAC and payback should land inside twelve months.
Why is blended CAC higher than platform-reported CAC?
Because platforms count only their own spend and generously claim conversions other channels helped create. Blended CAC counts every dollar and every customer once, which is why it is the number worth planning against.
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This calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged, or stored. Figures are for planning and do not constitute financial advice. See disclosures.