averagecac.com

The other axis CAC varies on

CAC by Acquisition Channel

CAC by industry and stage gets most of the airtime. CAC by channel is the other big axis: paid search, paid social, outbound, content/SEO, partnerships, events. The spread across channels for one company is often 5-10x, which is why blended CAC alone can hide a lot.

B2B SaaS CAC by channel (2025 published figures)

Each number below is a B2B SaaS channel figure pulled from a named 2025 source. CAC dollars are per-acquired-customer at the channel level, before LTV adjustment.

Paid Search (PPC/SEM)

$802

Sourced

First Page Sage 2025 (CAC by Channel)

Google Ads, Bing Ads, search retargeting. The most measurable channel: every click has a CPC, every conversion a CPA. CAC is fast to compute, easy to optimise, and highly elastic. Bid higher, get more customers at higher CAC.

Mid CAC; saturates fast; bid-up dynamics push CAC up over time.

Paid Social - Facebook / Meta

First Page Sage marks Meta/Facebook CAC as not applicable for B2B SaaS: paid social B2B spend concentrates on LinkedIn, where job-title and company-size targeting fits the buyer. Meta works better for B2C SaaS and SMB self-serve flows, which sit outside the B2B channel benchmark.

No published B2B SaaS figure; treated as a B2C / self-serve channel.

Paid Social - LinkedIn

$982

Sourced

First Page Sage 2025 (CAC by Channel)

LinkedIn CPMs are 3-5x Meta CPMs because the targeting (job titles, company size) is more precise and the audience has higher buying intent for B2B products. LinkedIn paid CAC for B2B SaaS is the highest of any paid social channel.

High absolute CAC, justified by high-ACV B2B conversion quality.

Outbound Sales (SDR-driven)

$1,980

Sourced

First Page Sage 2025 (CAC by Channel)

BDR/SDR teams cold-emailing or cold-calling target accounts, plus the AE close. Fully-loaded outbound CAC includes BDR salaries + tooling + commission. For high-ACV products this is often the only economic channel. Optifai's separate n=939 benchmark reports a lower $400 for outbound, reflecting a lighter-weight cost definition.

Highest absolute CAC; justified only by high ACV.

Content / SEO (thought-leadership)

$647

Sourced

First Page Sage 2025 (CAC by Channel)

Organic search, blog content, thought-leadership SEO. Capital intensive upfront; very low marginal CAC once content ranks. First Page Sage puts thought-leadership SEO at $647 and basic SEO at $1,786; the efficient end depends on content quality and attribution rigour.

Highest LTV:CAC of any channel for SaaS that gets it right.

Referral / Partner Programs

$150

Sourced

Optifai CAC-by-Channel Benchmark (n=939)

Resellers, integrations, marketplace partnerships, affiliate programs. Pays a revenue share or referral fee per customer. CAC is fixed per customer (the rev share) but quality is usually high because partners have screening incentive.

Lowest absolute CAC by far; growth bounded by partner capacity.

Why public companies don't disclose this split

The SEC S&M line is a single aggregate. Companies that wanted to disclose channel breakdown would have to volunteer it, and almost no public company does. The reason is competitive: channel mix is a strategic detail that helps competitors copy what's working. The few companies that have shared channel data publicly (HubSpot in older INBOUND keynotes, ConvertKit's old open-blog reports) eventually stopped.

This is why our benchmark grid publishes by industry × stage × ACV in its own dedicated cells. Channel-level CAC is surfaced here, on this page, from third-party survey aggregators rather than from the SEC filings themselves: First Page Sage and Optifai are the primary published sources for channel-cut B2B SaaS CAC. Public-company filings cannot break out this split.

How operators actually optimise channel mix

The standard pattern: track CAC per channel internally on a 30-day moving window, rank channels by LTV:CAC (not just CAC), and reallocate marginal dollars from the lowest-LTV:CAC channel to the highest until they converge. The optimisation rarely hits a true equilibrium because channels saturate at different rates, but the allocation discipline keeps CAC creeping down rather than up.

See practical CAC reduction levers for the specific things operators actually do.

Common questions

Channel CAC questions

Which channel has the lowest CAC?
Long term, content/SEO and partnerships usually have the lowest CAC for SaaS, because the marginal acquisition cost is low once the channel is established. Paid social can have low CAC for B2C consumer SaaS in early-funnel optimisation. Outbound and events almost always have the highest CAC; they're justified only by high ACV.
Why is LinkedIn paid social CAC so high?
LinkedIn CPMs are 3-5x Meta CPMs because the targeting (job titles, company size) is more precise and the audience has higher buying intent for B2B products. First Page Sage's B2B channel benchmark puts LinkedIn paid CAC at $982 per customer; Meta/Facebook, by contrast, isn't a meaningful B2B SaaS channel in that benchmark (marked N/A) and skews to B2C and self-serve SMB. The trade-off is qualification: LinkedIn customers convert at higher rates and close at higher ACVs.
How do I track CAC by channel?
Set up channel-level UTM tracking on every campaign, integrate with your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce), and build a simple multi-touch attribution model that distributes credit across touches. First-touch and last-touch attribution miss different things, so most operators use a blended model. Tools like Dreamdata, Bizible, or HockeyStack do this off the shelf.
Why isn't there a CAC-by-channel benchmark grid on this site?
Public companies don't disclose channel-level CAC in their SEC filings (only the aggregate S&M line), and the surveys that capture channel data privately (HubSpot State of Marketing, OpenView SaaS Benchmarks) don't publish raw numbers we can cite. Building a channel-cut benchmark grid is on our phase-2 roadmap once we have defensible primary data.