Eric DeeranOne mission — help agency owners build businesses they actually love running.

Stop Judging Ads By Cost Per Call

18 Oct 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:37

In this segment, Eric Deeran discusses why evaluating an ad solely by its cost‑per‑call (CPC) can be misleading. He points out that a particular ad has a high CPC of about $1,000 yet delivers a strong return on ad spend (ROAS) of 6.49 and one of the lowest net customer acquisition costs (CAC) the company has seen. He warns that many marketers would shut the ad down based on the high CPC, but that would ignore the ad’s overall profitability. Deeran emphasizes that advertisers should consider the actual CAC, ROAS, and net profit rather than a single metric. He suggests that if such high‑ROAS ads can be replicated each month, they could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

Chapters

You can see that our cost per call was actually fairly high on this. It was about $1,000 on this specific ad, but the ROAS is 6.49. And so many people are looking at this cost per call. We've only booked 8 calls from this. We're still currently running this, but a lot of people will look at this and say, oh man, that cost per call is just way too high. And then they turn off the ad. And the problem with that is this is the ad that's generating us one of the higher returns on ad spend and has one of the lowest net CACs that we've had. And so you cannot only judge things based off of cost per call. You also have to look at what is the actual CAC, what is the ROAS, and what is the actual profit you're making off of this ad? Because if you can just make a couple of these ads every single month, you could be doing multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in profit.