CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) measures how much you spend on marketing and promotion to win a new customer. It is key to judging whether your marketing actually pays off.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is a marketing metric that measures the average spend needed to get a new customer to visit your restaurant for the first time. It is calculated by dividing total marketing and acquisition spend for a period by the number of new customers won in that same period. In hospitality, CAC includes every acquisition cost: social media advertising (Instagram Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok), Google Ads campaigns, commissions on booking platforms (TheFork, known in Spain as El Tenedor), promotional discounts for first visits, influencer collaborations, launch or relaunch events, flyers and local advertising, and the cost of marketing tools (email marketing, social media management). CAC is especially interesting in restaurants because the business depends on repeat visits: a customer who comes once and never returns represents only the CAC as a loss, but a customer who becomes a regular generates value for years.
That is why CAC should always be analysed together with LTV (Lifetime Value, the value of a customer over their whole relationship with you) and the retention rate. A high CAC can be perfectly profitable if customers come back often; a low CAC can be a disaster if the customers attracted by aggressive promotions never return. Typical CAC in Spanish restaurants varies enormously by channel and type of venue: word of mouth has a CAC close to zero, organic social media very low, Google Ads and paid social between €5 and €20 per new customer, and booking platforms with discounts can shoot up to €10-25 once you add the commission to the discount offered.
CAC = Total marketing and acquisition spend / Number of new customers
The calculation is straightforward: add up all marketing and acquisition spend for a period and divide it by the number of new customers identified in that period. The challenge is attribution: how do you know a customer is new and which channel they came through? The most common methods are: asking directly ('how did you hear about us?'), channel-specific promo codes, tracking online bookings to spot new email addresses, or post-visit surveys. If in a month you spend €1,200 on Instagram Ads, €800 on Google Ads, €400 on TheFork commissions and €600 on a launch promotion (€3,000 in total), and you estimate that 180 of that month's customers are new (they had never been before), your CAC is 3,000 / 180 = €16.67.
For it to pay off, each new customer should generate a contribution margin (not gross turnover) above €16.67 on their first visit, or be very likely to come back and beat that figure over later visits.
You open a new restaurant and set aside €2,500 a month for marketing: €1,000 on Instagram Ads, €500 on Google Ads, €600 on a 20% discount for first bookings through TheFork (which you count as a €600 cost) and €400 on content creation. In the first month you get 420 customers, of whom you estimate 350 are new (the rest are friends, family and quick repeat visits). Your CAC is 2,500 / 350 = €7.14. Your average spend is €28 with a contribution margin of 65% = €18.20 of margin per customer.
Each new customer generates €18.20 – €7.14 = €11.06 of net margin on their first visit. It pays off from day one. But when you analyse by channel, you find that Instagram Ads (€1,000) brought only 50 new customers (CAC €20), while Google Ads (€500) brought 120 (CAC €4.17). TheFork brought 100 new customers (CAC €6).
The action is clear: move budget from Instagram to Google Ads for the following month.
CAC answers a fundamental question: is your marketing making or losing you money? Many restaurants spend on advertising without measuring the results, going on gut feeling ('it seems busier'). CAC forces you to put numbers on it: every euro spent on acquisition must be justified by real customers walking through the door. Knowing your CAC by channel also lets you optimise your marketing budget, concentrating resources on the most efficient channels and dropping the ones that do not work for your type of venue.
In a sector where margins are tight (the net profit of an average restaurant is 5-10% of sales), an uncontrolled CAC can literally eat up all your profit. However, CAC should not be analysed in isolation: a CAC of €25 can be excellent if the customer comes back 10 times a year, but disastrous if it is a one-off visit. That is why CAC's sister metric is LTV (customer lifetime value), and the CAC:LTV ratio should be at least 1:3 for a sustainable business.
Zindra lets you tag customers by acquisition channel and calculate the real CAC of each source. By cross-referencing it with visit frequency and spend per customer, you can see which channels bring in not just more customers, but the most profitable customers over the long term.
Tools and content to go deeper into this concept.
Average spend (the average ticket) is the average amount each customer (or table) spends in your restaurant. It is a key indicator of commercial performance and of how well your menu works.
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your restaurant. It is the most widely used satisfaction indicator because it is simple and closely linked to business growth.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the key metrics that measure a restaurant's performance in its critical areas: sales, costs, productivity, guest satisfaction and profitability.
Every hospitality term with formulas, examples and benchmarks in a handy PDF.
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