01 / Introduction

 The month closed. Here is where it left you.

This is the first issue of October, so before the weekly grids, this one does something the series has not done before: it closes out a full month. Five weeks of verified data covered the Labor Day run-up, the holiday itself, two clean recovery weeks, and now the first week of Q4 proper. Every one of those weeks moved some channel around. The question that matters for planning is what survived the round trip.

The answer is below, followed by the same four verified grids as every week: new customer acquisition, first click versus last click, overall channel performance, and new customer lifetime value. All first-party, order-verified data aggregated across hundreds of Wicked Reports accounts. No modeling, no surveys.

02 / Analysis

One chart, the whole month 

Here is September in a single picture: verified nCAC for the two largest channels, all five weeks. 

Two stories ran through September, and they ended differently. Google's story was the holiday: Labor Day pushed its new customer cost from $161 to $179, and three consecutive declining weeks brought it back to $160, with conversion up 3% this week. A complete round trip. If you panicked about Google in mid September or celebrated it this week, you were reacting to the calendar both times.

Meta's story was not the holiday, and that is the part worth carrying into Q4. Its decline ran through the holiday weeks and the clean weeks alike, $85 to $74 over four weeks, before ticking up 2% to $76 this week on softer conversion. One week is a data point, not a reversal, so the honest read is that the slide has stopped and the channel has settled at a level about 11% below late August. The quality held the entire time: 91% of Meta's tracked customers are verified first-time buyers, same as every week this month, with the markup over blended CAC now at 9%. The cause of the slide is still what it was last week, a mix story rather than cheaper auctions, and still unproven. The level itself is verified either way.

Why this matters right now: the Q4 ramp is the next structural event on the calendar. As BFCM spend floods the auctions over the coming weeks, costs will climb, and every brand will face the same question at every weekly check-in: is this seasonal inflation I planned for, or is my account deteriorating? You cannot answer that without knowing precisely where you started. This month-end snapshot is the market's starting line. Yours is in your own account.

03 / New Customer Acquisition 

The full acquisition picture, by channel

Beyond the two headliners: Microsoft drifted up again to $191 and has now round-tripped the holiday in the wrong direction, the one major channel entering October more expensive than it entered September. YouTube settled a second week in the low $400s, still well below its August range, with a soft conversion week. TikTok collapsed back to thin-data status with a new-buyer share that fell to 51%, its fourth violent swing in four weeks, which is exactly why thin channels never anchor a conclusion here. 

04 / First Click vs Last Click 

Who starts the sale vs who takes the bow

This grid is a measurement reconciliation, not an investment case. It explains why the platforms' own dashboards disagreed with the verified numbers all month: last click shifts credit from the channels that open journeys toward the channels that close them, so a last-click view understated Meta's September and flattered the search channels. When you compare your Q4 numbers against a baseline, make sure both were measured under the same model, or the comparison is meaningless before you start. 

05 / Overall Channel Performance

Where the money goes, and THE TRUE COST OF A NEW CUSTOMER 

The standing pattern survives the month-end accounting intact. Google's ROAS is 2.7x Meta's, and a new customer still costs 111% more there, because its 54% markup between blended CAC and true new customer cost is repeat demand doing the flattering. Meta's 9% markup is the tightest in the grid. Whatever the Q4 auctions do to these numbers, the ROAS column will keep ranking the channels in the wrong order for growth, and that does not change with the season. 

06 / New Customer Lifetime Value

What a new customer becomes over a year

The value side barely moved all month, which is the point of this grid. Acquisition costs swung with the calendar while what a new customer becomes stayed steady: Meta's one-year value sat within a few dollars of $108 every week, Google's near $243. That stability is what makes the cost side plannable. Your Q4 question is not whether customers will be worth less, it is what you will pay to get them. The standing caveat applies: this grid blends brands at very different price points, so treat it as a directional market benchmark, not a promise for any one store. 

07 / Conclusion 

Write down your starting line this week 

The market enters Q4 with Meta around $76 and 11% cheaper than late August, Google flat at $160, Microsoft slightly elevated, and YouTube settled well below its summer range. Clean entry conditions, about eight weeks out from BFCM, with the spend ramp ahead of it.

The move this week takes twenty minutes. Pull your own verified September numbers per channel, nCAC and new-buyer share, and write them down as your Q4 baseline before October data starts piling on top of them. Then judge every week of the ramp against that line. When your Meta nCAC reads 30% higher in early November, the baseline is what tells you whether that is the seasonal inflation everyone pays or a problem that is yours alone. Brands that skip this step spend November arguing about numbers nobody wrote down in October.

See your own version of these four grids.

Your real nCAC next to your aCAC, your first versus last click gap, your new customer LTV by channel, in your own account.

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How this week's numbers were built. Aggregated across hundreds of Wicked Reports client accounts for the week of September 27 to October 03, 2026, except first click vs last click, which uses a rolling 90 day window. New versus repeat is verified at the order level against first party order IDs, not modeled and not surveyed. The new visit to new customer conversion rate credits the channel that originated the new visit. Channels without cost data, including email, SMS, organic, and influencer, are left out of the cost comparisons. Snapchat is excluded for negligible spend. Pinterest is marked with an asterisk because it ran on a small number of new customers this week, so it is not used to anchor any headline. The channel labeled Facebook in the underlying platform data is shown here as Meta. Charts and tables carry meaning through direction, labels, and contrast rather than color alone.