---
name: paid-acquisition
description: Buy traffic profitably by measuring against payback and lifetime value rather than cost per click. Use when considering paid channels or when spend is rising without profit.
---

# Paid acquisition

Paid channels buy attention at auction, which means costs rise until
marginal buyers are unprofitable. Discipline comes from knowing what a
customer is worth and refusing to pay more, which requires unit
economics before the first campaign.

## Method

1. **Know your allowable acquisition cost first.** Derived from
   contribution margin and payback period, since without it there is no
   basis for deciding a bid is too high (see unit-economics).
2. **Start with the highest-intent channel.** Search captures existing
   demand and converts far better than interruptive channels that must
   create it.
3. **Match the landing page to the ad.** A mismatch between promise and
   page is the most common and most expensive conversion leak (see
   landing-page-strategy).
4. **Measure to the outcome that matters.** Cost per activated or
   retained customer, not per click or per signup, since cheap signups
   that never activate are a cost.
5. **Test creative and audience separately.** Changing both makes
   results uninterpretable, and creative usually matters more than
   targeting.
6. **Expect rising costs and diminishing returns.** Scaling spend means
   reaching less interested people, so efficiency falls as volume grows.
7. **Set a kill threshold before launching.** The spend at which an
   underperforming campaign stops, decided in advance rather than in
   the moment.

## Boundaries

Paid acquisition buys volume and does not create product-market fit;
scaling spend on a leaky funnel accelerates loss. Attribution is
imperfect and platform-reported conversions are self-graded (see
marketing-attribution). Privacy changes have materially reduced
targeting and measurement accuracy.