Why "what is a good CAC" is the wrong question by itself
A 200 dollar customer acquisition cost is a disaster for a 7 dollar low-ticket offer and a bargain for a 5,000 dollar service with a 3,000 dollar margin. Any number you find online without context attached is close to useless. The number that actually matters is your CAC relative to your lifetime value, not CAC on its own.
The ratio that actually tells you something
A commonly used healthy benchmark is a lifetime value to CAC ratio of at least 3 to 1. Spend 100 dollars to acquire a customer worth 300 dollars or more over their time with you, and the math generally works once you account for overhead. Below 2 to 1, most businesses are losing money on growth even if the front-end numbers look fine. You can check your own ratio in about a minute with our free LTV and LTV:CAC calculator.
The mistake we see most often is judging a front-end offer's CAC in isolation. A 7 dollar product that costs 60 dollars to acquire looks terrible until you know 1 in 20 of those buyers converts into a 375 dollar a month backend offer. Judge the CAC against the full customer journey, not the first sale.
A quick way to check your own number
Take your total ad spend for the last 30 days and divide by actual closed customers from your CRM, not platform-reported conversions, which routinely overcount. Compare that to what a customer is actually worth to you over 6 to 12 months. If you do not have that LTV number yet, that is the real gap to close before optimizing CAC any further. This is exactly the kind of cross-check we build into KenjiAI reporting.