Every month we spend money to win clients — on Google Ads, and on the placement team's phone shifts. This report puts the five acquisition costs side by side: what a customer costs, what a booking costs, what a call costs, and how well the calls convert. Scan this page once and the report should never need explaining again.
One row is one month. Two kinds of spend go in — ad spend and the placement team's shift cost. That spend buys activity — bookings and calls — which turns into outcomes — customers and new clients. Every number in the report is just one of those pounds divided by one of those things.
Five costs, plus a conversion rate. The figures below are the real Mar–Jun 2026 average — the report shows this row alongside every month.
What we paid Google to win one client we can prove came from an ad.
The honest all-in figure: ads and the phone team, spread across every new client that month.
What a booked placement call from the ads costs us.
The phone team's cost to convert one customer.
What one completed call costs to staff, whatever its outcome.
Of the calls that happened, the share that bought sessions.
The most-asked question about this report. Both are real; they answer different questions. Paid CAC only counts clients whose email is tied to an ad click. Blended CAC gives up on attribution — it takes all the acquisition money and divides by all the new clients.
Each bar is what a client cost all-in that month. The dashed line is the Mar–Jun average. The current month is hatched — it's still filling, so it always reads high early (shifts are paid up front, customers are still being counted).
The bottom row of each table isn't the mean of the monthly rates — it's the ratio of the totals, so a busy month counts for what it actually cost. It only uses complete months that have both ad spend and rota cost.
Ad data starts Feb 2026, but shift-cost data starts Mar 2026. February has no team cost, so it can't carry a blended CAC or a cost-per-call.
Both ingredients present, month complete. These are the four the average is built from.
The current month is only counted up to today, so it's part-formed. It shows as MTD but stays out of the average until it closes.
It counts clients whose email is tied to an ad click whose first purchase lands on or after it. Ads that helped but couldn't be traced are invisible to it — which is exactly why blended exists.
Support and training blocks are excluded on purpose — they fund the operation, not client-winning. So this is acquisition cost, not the team's full cost.
Shifts are paid across the month while customers are still being counted, so early MTD figures read high. Don't treat them as final.
Same ad spend, rota cost and cohort sizes feed the Cohort payback and Revenue reports — one source underneath, checked to the penny.