Acquisition Keeps Getting More Expensive. Here Is What That Actually Means For You.

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

The cost of buying a customer has been going up for years. Everyone in ecommerce knows this, mostly from feeling it rather than reading it.

I went looking for a defensible number to put on it, and I want to be honest about what I found, because it changes what this post can responsibly say.

What the data does and does not support

Search for ecommerce customer acquisition cost benchmarks and you get confident figures. One page told me the average is $68 to $84. Another told me it rose from $274 to $318. Those are not competing estimates of the same quantity, they are different universes, and neither page shows a methodology you can inspect.

So I am not going to hand you a CAC benchmark. There is no honest one to hand you, and “average CAC” was always a strange idea anyway: it averages a $19 candle with a $4,000 mattress.

What is well-supported is the direction, and one piece of it is properly sourced. WordStream publishes Google Ads benchmarks from about 13,000 real search campaigns across 23 industries, running April 2025 through March 2026. In that data, cost per click rose for 87% of industries, and the average sits at $5.42.

That is a real finding, from real accounts, with a stated method. Clicks are getting more expensive nearly everywhere.

Why it goes up, and why it will keep going up

Ad auctions are auctions. The price is set by the willingness of your competitors to pay, and every year there are more of them, better capitalised, using better automation.

Nothing in that sentence gets better with time. There is no version of the future where the auction gets cheaper because you deserve it. The structural direction of a rented channel is upward, because the landlord has no reason to charge less.

Meanwhile the tracking got worse. Post-ATT, the signal that made those auctions efficient is thinner than it was, so you pay more for a click and you know less about what it did.

The response most stores have

Most stores respond by getting better at the auction. Tighter creative, cleaner tracking, smarter bidding, better landing pages.

All of that is correct and you should do it. It is also, structurally, running to stay still. You are getting better at renting, in a market where rent is rising faster than you are improving.

The other response

The other response is to make each acquired customer worth more, so you can afford the rising price.

This is the part people skip, because it is slower and it does not have a dashboard that updates every hour. But look at what it does to the arithmetic. If a customer buys once, you must win the auction profitably on that single order, which means your breakeven ROAS is one divided by your gross margin, and you are stuck with it.

If a customer buys three times, you can pay more than a competitor who only gets one purchase, and still make more money. You can outbid them for the same click, on purpose, because the click is worth more to you.

That is the whole strategic point of retention, and it is not a soft one. Retention is what lets you win an auction you would otherwise lose.

What that looks like concretely

It looks like the six flows: welcome, browse abandon, cart abandon, checkout abandon, post-purchase, win-back. Emails that fire because a person did something, rather than because it is Thursday.

Klaviyo’s benchmarks across 183,000+ brands report that flows drive about 41% of total email revenue from 5.3% of sends, with click rates of 5.58% against 1.69% for campaigns. The reason is timing, not copy.

For consumables, the post-purchase flow matters most, and it is the one almost nobody builds properly. Someone bought something that runs out. Know how long yours lasts, then show up slightly before it does.

The uncomfortable version

If your ad account is the only thing making sales, then rising CPCs are not a marketing problem, they are an existential one. Your costs are set by an auction you do not control, and your revenue stops the moment you stop paying.

A list changes that. Not because email is magic, but because it is the only channel where the price of reaching someone does not go up every year.

What I am not going to tell you

I am not going to tell you your CAC should be a particular number, or that retention will reduce it by some percentage. Both would require me to know your margin, your price point, your purchase frequency and your category, and I do not.

What I will say is the thing the sourced data does support: clicks got more expensive for 87% of industries in the last year, and there is no reason to expect that to reverse. Plan for the auction to keep getting worse, and build the thing that does not depend on it.

Sources: WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks (~13,000 campaigns, 23 industries). Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks (183,000+ brands).