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Glossary of Mobile Advertising Terms

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

What is CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)?

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action) is a metric that measures the cost needed to acquire one paying customer through various paid channels. To put it simply, CPA measures how much the conversion from a visitor to a customer costs.

How is CPA Calculated?

CPA can be calculated by dividing the cost with the conversion. This metric is important in various marketing fields like content marketing, social media marketing, and many others. For advertisers, CPA advertising is an important part as it is usually less risky than the other advertising techniques.

With CPA advertising, they also only pay when they achieved what they aimed for. For example, a visitor filling out a form with their email address which can then be added to a list of potential clients. Since a lot of online businesses operate differently, there isn’t a default way to determine a “good CPA” and basically, it all depends on your average revenue per customer.

Of course, there are other factors like budget or current business stage that can influence your CPA. Another similar metric is eCPA (effective cost per action) which is used to measure advertising inventory effectiveness, which is usually bought via CPC (cost per click) or CPI (cost per impression).