Cost per investor

Cost per investor (also cost per investment or cost per completed investment) is the marketing spend of a capital raise divided by the number of completed investments it produced. It is the measure that connects a campaign budget to the outcome of an equity crowdfunding offering, as opposed to measures of attention or interest.

How it is calculated

The numerator is campaign spend for a defined window. The denominator is the count of investments in the intermediary's transaction records, not the ad platform's conversion count, which can include duplicates, modeled conversions, and events that never became a transaction.

Because commitments in a live Reg CF offering can be cancelled or fail reconfirmation after a material change (see investment-cancellation), the number exists in two forms:

• Cost per active commitment during the raise, a provisional figure used to steer spending.
• Cost per completed investment after close, calculated from the intermediary's reconciled final ledger. This settles the campaign's economics.

Related measures

• Cost per reservation divides spend by valid indications of interest collected while testing-the-waters. It is a learning measure; a cheap list that rarely invests can be more expensive per investor than a smaller, qualified one.
• Average investment determines what a given cost per investor is worth. Dividing spend by dollars raised gives a cost-per-dollar view of the same data.

What a good number is

There is no universal benchmark. The acceptable ceiling comes from the issuer's average investment, platform fees, production costs, target, and budget. Attribution by channel is only as credible as the link between ad data and investment records; see cross-domain-tracking and server-side-tracking. Investments that cannot be matched to a source should stay unattributed.

Further reading

• The measurement dashboard for a raise
• Pixels, server events, and consent in a raise
• Cross-domain tracking for a raise
• investor-acquisition