Marketing cost calculator.
Calculate your cost per lead per channel, total marketing spend, blended customer acquisition cost, and your channel mix. Useful when you want to know which channels are actually carrying the lead-gen weight versus which ones just feel busy.
What does this calculate? Enter your monthly spend and leads (or close-rate-adjusted customers) for each marketing channel you run. The calculator returns your cost per lead per channel, your blended CAC across all channels, the share of total leads each channel produces, and a comparative ranking. The single most useful output is the comparative one: it surfaces which channels are subsidizing which, and which look efficient on their own but only because adjacent channels are doing the heavy demand-generation work.
Your channels
Results
Channel breakdown
| Channel | CPL | Lead share |
|---|
Enter your channel numbers to see the analysis.
How to read the results.
- Total monthly spend: the sum of every channel's monthly cost. This is the marketing budget the business is actually deploying, including both paid media and the loaded cost of organic channels (agency fees, content team, tooling).
- Total monthly leads: total leads produced across all channels. Define a "lead" consistently — typically form submissions plus phone calls plus chat conversations, not raw traffic.
- Blended cost per lead: spending divided by leads, treating every lead the same regardless of channel. Useful as a budget-planning input. Less useful for channel-mix decisions, because not all leads are equal.
- Blended CAC: blended cost per lead divided by close rate. The true cost of acquiring one paying customer. If your CAC exceeds your customer LTV, the program is unprofitable in aggregate even if individual channels look fine.
- Channel CPL: each channel's individual cost per lead. Useful for identifying outliers — but the cheap channels often only look cheap because more expensive channels are doing the upstream demand creation.
- Lead share: each channel's percentage of total leads. Concentration risk lives here. A program where 80% of leads come from one channel is fragile.
What blended CAC misses.
Blended CAC is useful but limited. The blind spots:
- Channel interaction effects. Upper-funnel channels (brand, content, video) create demand that lower-funnel channels (Google Ads on commercial keywords) harvest. Pausing the upper-funnel channel makes the lower-funnel channel's CPL spike. The "low CPL" channel was never independent.
- Customer LTV variance by channel. Customers from referrals often have higher LTV than customers from cold ads. Two channels with the same CAC produce dramatically different actual returns.
- Attribution windows. SEO content published this quarter generates leads for years. Charging this quarter's SEO cost against this quarter's leads understates the long-term ROI of organic.
- Brand effect. Mature brand programs reduce the cost of every other channel by raising click-through rates, conversion rates, and direct visits. The CAC of "brand" is hard to isolate but it's not zero.
Use blended CAC as one of several lenses, not the single number that determines what to cut.
Related reading.
- CAC and LTV calculator — calculate customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and the ratio that determines whether your unit economics work.
- ROAS calculator — return on ad spend, break-even ROAS, target CPA.
- Google Ads management — paid search audits, account architecture, weekly optimization.
- Marketing acronyms reference — CPL, CAC, LTV, ROAS, and the rest, defined.
Want a marketing program audit?
If your channel mix looks off and you are not sure which channel to cut, scale, or rebuild, we can audit the program top to bottom.