finance, customer-developmentDo you include opportunity/discount in the cost of user acquisition? What factors do you take into account when measuring the cost of user/customer acquisition?
The most important thing with KPI metrics is that they are calculated consistently within an organisation (in order that trends can be identified) and that their calculation methodology is clearly articulated to any user of it.
Personally, I might look at CPA in two different ways:
Backward-looking: what has been the average cost of acquiring existing customers? Simply put, take total marketing expenditure and divide by total customers: thus I would include historical discounts etc in this calculation.
Forward-looking: how much is it expected to cost, on average, to acquire the next customer? This might differ from the the backward-looking metric, especially as one builds goodwill—however, one might still include discounts (for example, where one estimates that x% discounts will be offered in y% of cases).
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