Acquisition & ad economics
Know your acquisition economics.
From first click to paying customer. Check what you can afford to spend, then build a growth plan from your own numbers.
01 · Your inputs
Use revenue and gross margin from the same period. Gross margin = (revenue − delivery costs) ÷ revenue × 100. Include variable fulfilment costs. Fixed overhead, taxes and repeat purchases are excluded unless reflected in your inputs.
Edit conversion rates in the growth planner →Plan a controlled test (optional)
Set your own test size and duration. These choices do not establish statistical significance.
02 · Your decision
Add your customer economics
Gross contribution per customer × overall conversion
Break-even cost × (1 − your reserve)
This is a contribution check, not net profit or a guarantee. Use measured conversion and acquisition cost when available. For click-led funnels the allowance is per click; for lead-led funnels it is per lead.
Choose a business-specific funnel (optional)
Start here
What kind of business is this?
Choose a structure that fits your business. It changes labels and funnel stages only. Every number stays yours to enter.
Nothing here fits?
Plan growth, inspect the funnel and compare scenarios
01 · The outcome
What would it take to acquire more paying customers?
Every number here is editable and labelled by where it came from. Change the ones you know; the whole model recalculates. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing here is a forecast.
02Define the target
Translate your growth target into new customers.
Before sizing any campaign, settle what the target actually is. Change any number here and every section below recalculates.
Where you are, and the goal
Customer mix: three readings of the same goal
03Funnel requirement
Work backward through each conversion stage.
04Acquisition cost
Connect acquisition volume to budget and cost.
Work from
Budget against the funnel target
05Scenario economics
The economics depend mostly on conversion and on cost per acquired customer.
What a customer is worth
Nothing is assumed here. Use first-purchase value for a conservative view, or 12-month value for a fuller one, and be clear which you used.
Add customer economics to examine contribution.
Cost per acquired customer as one conversion rate changes
Other stages and the cost per lead stay at their current values. The dot is your current assumption.
06Scenario comparison
Compare scenarios by changing your assumptions.
Conservative and upside are not guesses. They are your own inputs moved by the two spreads on the left, so every number can be traced back.
How the scenarios are built
Each stage moves by the spread relative to its own rate (30% at −10% becomes 27%), so across several stages the effect compounds.
07What AP3 builds
AP3 connects acquisition activity to measurable, paying customers.
A model is only as good as the system that produces the data behind it. AP3 is the commercial growth layer: the architecture that links every unit of spend to leads, to conversions, to paying customers, and learns from what it measures. Below is how the roles usually divide.
Measurement and learning feed back into acquisition every cycle
Acquisition architecture
Which audiences, channels and offers feed the funnel, and how spend is allocated between them.
Funnel design
How leads are captured, answered and moved to the next step, without anyone chasing them by hand.
Measurement
Every stage from first contact to paying customer, by channel and by location.
Experimentation
Structured tests aimed at the stage that constrains growth most.
Commercial visibility
One view of spend, customers and cost per customer that leadership can act on.
Optimization
Moving effort toward the stages and channels that produce customers at acceptable cost.
System improvement
Each cycle replaces a planning assumption with your own operating data.
08How the system learns
The first numbers are assumptions. Your own data replaces them, one cycle at a time.
Nobody knows your final cost per customer before the system runs. The work is building the measurement that finds it.
- LaunchStart on the planning assumptions in this model.
- Measure
- DiagnoseFind the stage that loses the most people or costs the most.
- AdjustChange that constraint rather than everything at once.
- ScaleAdd budget where cost per customer holds.
What this model runs on right now
How quickly: illustrative pacing to the monthly run-rate
09What success looks like
Success is counted in paying customers and cost per customer, not in reach or likes.
One board, reviewed monthly. The plan column comes from this model. The observed column fills in once the system is live.
Tracked for diagnosis, never as success: Impressions Reach Followers Likes Clicks
10What to confirm before you spend
These answers turn a planning model into your operating model.
Most of them are already in your ad platform, your booking system or your point of sale. Pull them once, and every number on this page stops being an assumption.
Replace planning assumptions with your operating data.
Every figure on this page recalculates from the inputs shown. None of them is a forecast or a promise. They show what would have to be true, and what to measure first.
Want the measurement behind these numbers built properly?
Talk to AP3