Hyde & Hare | Customer value by acquisition channel

We followed every customer acquired between August 2024 to July 2025 for a full year after their first order, and traced each one back to the very first ad click that brought them to the site. A customer whose journey started with a Google ad goes on to spend £244 in their first 12 months. A customer whose journey started with a Meta ad spends £185. That is a 32% gap, and it is already visible by day 90.

How customer value builds over the first year

Average revenue per customer (excluding VAT and shipping) by how long they have been a customer, split by the channel of their first ever click.

Google Ads Meta All customers

The numbers

Customers acquired August 2024 to July 2025. All three value columns describe the same group of customers, so the channels can be compared fairly. Only 5 of the 3,846 customers could not be traced to any first click; they are counted in the all customers row but are too few to show separately.

First click that brought them in	New customers	Value at 90 days	Value at 6 months	Value at 12 months
Google Ads	1,780	£223	£229	£244
Meta	659	£156	£164	£185
Everything else	1,402	£226	£238	£261
All customers	3,846	£213	£221	£240

Everything else covers customers whose first touch was organic search, social, email or direct. The all customers row matches the figures on your KPI dashboard exactly.

What each channel paid for those customers

Ad spend over the same window divided by the new customers each channel brought in. Profit payback is how quickly a customer's profit (after product cost, fees and fulfilment) covers what we paid to acquire them.

Channel	Ad spend in window	New customers	Cost per new customer	12 month value	Value to cost ratio	Profit payback
Google Ads	£88,820	1,780	£49.90	£244	4.9x	under 2 months
Meta	£35,899	659	£54.47	£185	3.4x	under 2 months

What this means

Both channels are comfortably profitable. A Google customer returns 4.9 times what they cost, a Meta customer 3.4 times, and both cover their acquisition cost with profit inside two months. This is not a case for cutting either channel.
Meta targets should be set against Meta value. A Meta customer is worth £185 over a year, not the blended £240. Judging Meta ads against the blended figure quietly overstates what we can afford to pay there.
Google customers spend more from the very first order. The gap is already £67 at day 90, so it is driven by bigger first baskets and stronger early repeat, not by something that emerges slowly.
Meta customer quality is trending up. The 90 day value of a Meta customer has improved from around £155 in late 2024 to around £212 in late 2025, the best quarter on record, though it remains more volatile than Google.

Is customer quality improving?

90 day value of new customers by the quarter they were acquired. Recent quarters give an early read on cohorts that are not yet 12 months old.

Google Ads Meta All customers

How solid is this

99.9% of the 3,846 customers in the window were traced to a first click, which is unusually complete tracking. We also re ran the whole analysis under a second attribution model (linear, which shares credit across every ad click in the journey instead of giving it all to the first). The story does not change, which is what makes us confident in it.

Channel	First click model		Linear model
Channel	Customers	12 month value	Customers	12 month value
Google Ads	1,780	£244	1,680	£240
Meta	659	£185	550	£180
Everything else	1,402	£261	1,611	£261

Two honest limitations. First, click based tracking cannot see Meta ads that were watched but never clicked, so some customers counted under Google or organic may have first discovered the brand on Meta. Second, a first click on a Google brand search means the customer already knew the name and went looking for it. Both effects mean the true gap between the channels is likely somewhat smaller than the raw numbers suggest, which is why we treat this as a case for channel specific targets rather than for moving budget wholesale.

Methodology

Who is included. Every customer whose first ever order fell between August 2024 to July 2025 (3,846 customers, 3,846 traced). The window ends in July 2025 so that every customer has had a full 12 months to spend.
Value. All revenue from that customer's orders inside 90, 182 and 365 days of their first order, excluding VAT and shipping, after refunds. The same basis as the KPI dashboard, whose figures (£213 at 90 days, £221 at 6 months, £240 at 12 months) this report reproduces exactly.
Channel assignment. Triple Whale's full journey tracking, taking the first recorded ad click before the customer's first order (first click attribution). The linear model in the comparison table shares each customer fractionally across every channel that appeared in their journey.
Cost per customer. Platform reported ad spend over the same window divided by the number of new customers whose first click was that platform. Spend that assisted journeys won by other channels is still charged to the clicked platform, so these are conservative, fully loaded figures.
Profit payback. Uses your product margin, payment fees and fulfilment cost per order to convert revenue into contribution profit before comparing it with acquisition cost.