A good cost per acquisition (CPA) is any CPA that stays below what you can afford to pay to win a new customer while still hitting your profit goal.
In PPC, “acquisition” has to be defined before CPA means anything. For an Orlando service business, one team may call a form fill an acquisition, another counts only phone calls over 60 seconds, and the owner cares about booked jobs and new customers. Those are totally different CPAs. We usually set CPA targets in a ladder: lead, qualified lead, booked appointment, and closed customer, then we optimize toward the stage that matches how you actually get paid.
| What you count as an “acquisition” | When it’s the right CPA to use | What can break the number |
|---|---|---|
| Lead (form fill, call, chat) | Early campaigns, new offers, top-of-funnel volume goals | Spam leads, weak tracking, poor follow-up, low intent keywords |
| Qualified lead (meets your criteria) | Local services, legal, dental, B2B, anything where quality matters more than volume | Loose targeting, broad match without guardrails, unclear ad messaging |
| Booked appointment (or estimate scheduled) | When your front desk or sales process is the real bottleneck | Slow response time, no-show rate, limited scheduling options |
| New customer sale | Best view of profitability and growth | Offline conversions not imported, CRM gaps, long sales cycles |
How we set a “good” CPA in a way you can trust is simple math: (1) estimate gross profit from a new customer (not revenue), (2) decide what portion of that gross profit you’re willing to spend on ads, then (3) work backward through your close rate. Example: if a new patient is worth about $900 in gross profit over the first year, you’re comfortable spending 25% of that to acquire them, and your lead-to-patient close rate is 30%, then your maximum CPA per new patient is $225, and your maximum cost per lead is about $67.50. If you have repeat business or memberships, you can base the math on your average lifetime gross profit instead of just the first job.
What affects CPA most in Central Florida is usually not the ad platform, it’s the conversion path. A slow page, confusing offer, weak proof, or a form that’s painful on mobile will raise CPA fast. That’s why we often pair campaign work with web design improvements that remove friction on the landing page.
If you want a practical rule without overthinking it: call your CPA “good” when you can scale spend and still stay under your break-even CPA for at least 30 to 60 days, with stable lead quality. If CPA is low but the calendar is full of price shoppers or no-shows, it’s not good, it’s just cheap traffic.
To keep the number honest, track CPA at two levels: platform CPA (what Google Ads or paid social reports) and business CPA (what your CRM and booked jobs report). If you want help setting up the right targets and tracking, our PPC management process starts with defining what counts as an acquisition for your business, then we build campaigns around that. For quick metric guardrails, review what KPIs you should track for PPC, and if you’re still deciding whether to optimize for leads or customers, what is a good cost per lead can help you set the right “first rung” before you move deeper into booked and closed CPAs.
