Glossary
Total creator cost (fee plus seeding plus coordination) divided by attributed conversions. The number that lets you rank creators and decide where to reinvest.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the most useful single number for ranking creators within a campaign, and it is the number most commonly miscalculated because the cost side is incomplete.
CPA lets you compare creators of different sizes and fees on the same scale, which is how you decide where to reinvest. The mistake teams make is counting only the creator fee in the numerator. An honest CPA includes the full cost side: creator fee, product seeding, internal coordination time, and usage rights. Spreadsheets usually capture the fee and forget the rest, which makes the channel look cheaper than it is and skews creator ranking, because the hidden costs are not distributed evenly across creators. A creator with a low fee but high coordination burden is not actually cheap. Read the ROI guide for the full cost normalization.
Infmap records the deal value and platform fees against each collaboration, and the attribution window is set per deal, so the CPA is computed from the full cost side and the full conversion side. The CPA is per creator, per deal, which is the granularity you need to rank creators and rebook the top performers while dropping the bottom. See how brands use Infmap for the analytics view.
A campaign attributes 540 conversions to a creator who charged $7,500 with $1,500 in seeding. The honest CPA is ($7,500 plus $1,500) divided by 540, or $16.67. A second creator charged $4,000 with $500 in seeding but drove only 90 conversions, for a CPA of $50. The first creator looks more expensive on fee alone but is 3x cheaper per acquisition. Without the full cost side and per-creator attribution, the brand would have rebooked the wrong creator.