CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

What is CAC?

CAC is the total sales and marketing cost to win one paying customer, and in health it is the yardstick every other unit-economics metric is measured against, so getting its denominator right matters more than almost any optimization downstream.

The formula and a worked example

CAC = total acquisition spend ÷ new customers acquired in the same period, where spend means media, agency fees, tooling, and creative, not the ad account alone. Work an example with round, illustrative numbers. A GLP-1 brand spends $50,000 in a month (ads, tools, and agency combined) and signs 200 paying patients, so CAC is $50,000 ÷ 200 = $250. Count only the $40,000 of media and CAC reads $200, but the missing $50 is real cost the P&L still pays, which is exactly how a media-only CAC flatters the model.

Fully-loaded CAC vs lead or consult CAC

The single most common misreport in telehealth is quoting the cheaper number. Always separate fully-loaded CAC (cost per paying patient) from consult or lead CAC (cost per intake start or booked consult), which typically runs 40–60% lower. Illustratively, one GLP-1 program can show a $90 consult CAC beside a $250 paying-patient CAC, and only the second can be checked against LTV or the standard 3:1 LTV:CAC bar. Report the lead number to feel good; underwrite the business on the paying-patient number.

Benchmark CAC against your vertical

There is no universal “good” CAC, because affordable cost scales with order value and margin. Across AdBoost Health partner accounts, blended CAC typically lands in these illustrative bands (ranges, not guarantees):

Why it matters for health and DTC brands

A paying-patient CAC sitting well above your vertical band, even with healthy platform ROAS, usually points at the intake flow, where 40–60% of ad clickers are commonly lost before checkout, not at the media buying. That is why CAC is a funnel metric as much as a media one: more traffic into a leaky intake just buys more expensive misses. Read fully-loaded CAC next to blended CAC and paid CAC to separate whole-business cost from channel efficiency, and against CAC payback to see how long the money is tied up. Because most health first orders only break even, the CAC you can afford is set by retention, so pressure-test it on real cohort economics with the CAC calculator.

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