The other axis CAC varies on
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.
Each number below is a B2B SaaS median pulled from a named 2025 source. CAC dollars are per-acquired-customer at the channel level, before LTV adjustment.
$802
SourcedGoogle 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.
$230
SourcedMeta's targeting works well for B2C SaaS and SMB B2B with self-serve flows. iOS 14.5+ attribution changes reduced measurable conversions but the underlying acquisition still happens.
Low absolute CAC; works best when the buyer can complete purchase without a sales conversation.
$982
SourcedLinkedIn 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.
$1,980
SourcedFirst Page Sage / Optifai 2025
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.
Highest absolute CAC; justified only by high ACV.
$480-$942
SourcedOrganic search, blog content, programmatic SEO, video. Capital intensive upfront; very low marginal CAC once content ranks. The CAC denominator is fuzzy because content-acquired customers are often impossible to attribute reliably.
Highest LTV:CAC of any channel for SaaS that gets it right.
$150
SourcedOptifai Sales Ops Benchmark Q1-Q3 2025 (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.
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.
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