Paid CAC

What is Paid CAC?

Paid CAC isolates the cost of customers won specifically through paid advertising, stripping out organic, referral, and brand, so it is the number that tells you whether ad spend itself is working while blended CAC can look healthy over the top.

The formula and a worked example

Paid CAC = paid media spend ÷ customers acquired through paid channels in the same period. Work an example with round, illustrative numbers. A telehealth brand spends $60,000 on Meta and Google and signs 200 patients it can attribute to paid, so paid CAC is $60,000 ÷ 200 = $300. Fold in another 100 patients from organic search, email, and referral that carried no incremental media cost and blended CAC drops to $200, even though paid economics did not change at all. The gap between the two is the size of your organic engine.

Track paid CAC by platform

A single paid CAC hides which channel is efficient, so split it. Illustratively, a $180 Meta paid CAC beside a $320 Google paid CAC on the identical offer usually points at the offer or the landing experience, not the channel, because a well-matched offer rarely costs twice as much on one platform. When one platform’s paid CAC drifts up on a stable offer, read CPM and hook rate first: rising CPM means the auction got more expensive, while a falling hook rate on flat CPM means the creative is fatiguing.

Blended CAC vs paid CAC

Read the two together and set campaign bid targets on paid CAC, never on blended, because a blended goal quietly rewards ad sets that ride existing demand (branded search, warm retargeting) and starves the cold prospecting that feeds the funnel.

Why it matters for health and DTC brands

Benchmark paid CAC against your vertical rather than a universal figure. Across AdBoost Health partner accounts, blended CAC runs $150–350 for GLP-1 and $80–180 for hair and dermatology (illustrative ranges, not guarantees), with blended sitting 30–50% below paid once an organic engine compounds. On those bands a $250 paid GLP-1 CAC is comfortably inside range, while the same $250 on a hair offer signals a broken funnel, usually the intake flow where 40–60% of clickers are lost before checkout. Pair paid CAC with ROAS and POAS for the efficiency side, and with CAC payback for cash timing. Run your own with the CAC calculator.

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