Cost Per Contact: What "Normal" Actually Means
Comparing your cost per contact with another business's is almost always a meaningless comparison.
It's the question that always comes up: what should a contact cost me. The honest answer is that no benchmark exists, and the numbers circulating in conversations between colleagues compare businesses with nothing in common.
Why the comparison fails
Cost per contact depends on what you sell, the competition for your audience, the season, the geography, and how demanding the step you ask for is. Two businesses in the same sector can differ tenfold, both sustainably.
The only comparison that counts
Yours, over time. If cost per contact falls while contact quality holds, you're improving. If it rises as spend grows, you're scraping the bottom of the reachable audience. Neither needs to know what anyone else is doing.
The threshold to calculate
- How many contacts are needed to close one sale.
- What a sale is worth net of costs.
- What share of that value you're willing to invest in acquisition.
- That result divided by the number of contacts: that's your threshold.
The mistake that skews everything
Counting off-target enquiries as contacts. A campaign producing a hundred useless enquiries cheaply looks better than one producing ten qualified ones, and it's doing worse.
A cost per contact only means something next to what a customer is worth to you, not next to what someone else pays.
Sources and Further Reading
Official documentation and guidelines cited or useful for going deeper.