Ads keep getting more expensive
What does a new customer actually cost you?
Cristian Lascu
November 12, 2026
Lately I've been thinking about how much it costs to reach a new client, and I have a theory about it.
I think it will become more and more expensive. Everyone is doing ads now. With AI you can make an ad in a few minutes, and there are a lot of tools and connectors that push it to every platform with a couple of clicks. So more businesses are competing for the same people, and each click costs more.
I might be wrong, so I wanted to check it against some numbers. I also wanted to compare it with the organic content test I ran a few weeks ago, because organic is usually presented as the free alternative.
Paid: what the numbers say
WordStream publishes Google Ads benchmarks every year across a lot of industries. In their 2025 report:
the average cost per click went up almost 13% compared to the year before
it went up in 87% of the industries they looked at
the average cost per lead was around $70
If one in four or five leads becomes a customer, that's roughly $280 to $350 per new customer. And that doesn't include paying someone to make the ads or run the campaigns.
Organic: what my test showed
A few weeks ago I wrote about my content pipeline that posted to Instagram and TikTok around twice a day.
The result: almost 6,000 views, around 10 visits to the website.
Making the posts cost me almost nothing. But people watched for less than three seconds on average, so very few of them got to the point where they would click.
I ran the math for a full month at the same pace, which would be around 25,000 to 50,000 views:
With my hooks so far | If 1% clicked through | |
|---|---|---|
Website visits | 40 to 85 | 250 to 500 |
Calls booked (5 to 8% of visitors) | 2 to 7 | 12 to 40 |
New customers (1 in 4 or 5 calls) | 0 to 2 | 2 to 10 |
So organic can work, but only if a lot more people stay long enough to click. With my current hooks, it doesn't bring much. So of course I will need to iterate more through the hooks and call to action.
Where both lose people
When I put the two next to each other, I noticed they lose people in the same place.
With ads you pay for every click. If the person lands on a slow page, waits a day for an answer, or can't easily see how to contact you, you paid for that click and they're gone.
With organic you pay with your time. If the post doesn't keep people watching, or the next step isn't clear, you did the work and they're gone too.
So in both cases the problem is what happens after you reach someone. And that's usually the cheapest part to fix, because you've already paid for the reach.
That's where the topics from the last weeks come in:
Answer fast. Companies that replied within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead.
Make the next step clear. One page, one obvious way to get in touch.
Be named when people ask AI. If someone asks ChatGPT who to call in your city and gets your name, you didn't pay for that click. Here's the two-minute test if you missed it.
You still need to reach people in the first place. But these three decide how much each new customer ends up costing you.
How to check your own number
You can do this in five minutes.
Take what you spent last month on ads, content or anything else meant to bring in new customers. Divide it by the number of new customers you got that month. That's your cost per new customer.
Then think about how many people you reached last month who never turned into anything. My guess is that's where most of the money goes.
If you'd like help with this
If you want to work out what a new customer costs you, and where you lose the people you already reached, book half an hour with me. We'll go through it with your own numbers.
Or reply with your cost per new customer, if you know it. I'd like to see how much it differs between businesses.
The One Thing
Reaching people is getting more expensive, whether you pay with money for ads or with your time for content. In both cases most people are lost after you've reached them. Fixing that part is usually cheaper than buying more reach.
Fix what happens after the click first.
What I'm Thinking About This Week
Where this goes in the next few years. If AI makes ads cheaper to produce and easier to launch, more businesses will run them, and the clicks will keep getting more expensive. At some point I think the businesses with good follow-up will do better than the ones with the bigger budget. We'll see if I'm right.
If you have ten seconds, reply with one line: how do you find most of your new customers right now?
What resonated? What did I get wrong? Hit reply: I read everything and I'm building this with you and with your input.
P.S. The toolkit, in the order I would use it: Scout → Visibility Audit → GEO/AEO Audit Checklist → How to Get Cited by AI → SEO Strategy Playbook → Title & Meta Audit → Sovereign Idea Workflow. All free.
P.P.S. Know someone whose ad bill keeps going up? Forward this, the calculation takes five minutes. They can subscribe at thesovereigntechnologist.com.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Thursday.
