Cost per acquisition

Cost per acquisition (CPA) answers a blunt question: what did each sale cost you to win? You add up everything you spent on a campaign — agent wages, lead costs, telecom, dialer time — and divide by the number of acquisitions, whether those are sales, appointments, or signups. A lower CPA means you are buying customers more cheaply, and the figure is one of the clearest ways to judge whether a campaign earns its keep.

CPA is downstream of your Conversion rate and Close rate. If agents close more of the people they reach, the same fixed costs spread over more wins and the CPA falls. It is also sensitive to lead quality: a cheap Lead list that almost never converts can end up with a worse CPA than a pricey but well-targeted one, because you pay the agent wages either way and only the good list turns those hours into sales.

Comparing sources

CPA is most useful broken out by Lead source. Tag leads when you load them and you can compare which vendor or channel produces sales most cheaply, then shift budget toward the winners and away from the duds. A source with a low Contact rate often hides a high CPA, because agents burn paid time dialing numbers that never pick up, and that wasted effort lands on the cost side of the equation.

Read CPA next to Revenue per agent to see both sides of the ledger — what each customer costs versus what they bring in. CPA on its own can mislead: a campaign with a high cost per sale can still be your best one if those customers are worth far more over their lifetime. Treat it as one key performance indicator, or KPI, in a small set rather than the only number that decides where the budget goes.