Customer acquisition cost

Sales and marketing spend divided by the number of customers acquired in the period.

A company spending ₹240 crore to acquire 16,00,000 customers has a cost of ₹1,500 each.

The measure is easy to state and hard to compute honestly. Marketing spend that builds the brand benefits future periods as well; some customers would have arrived anyway; and a discount funded to win the first order is an acquisition cost that most companies book as a revenue reduction rather than as marketing.

Fully loaded, including discounts, is the only version worth using.