as far as clicks are concerned. That's an evolving area. We continue to invest in how we show up when these search engines or when the LLMs are being turned to, whether it's Google, whether it's OpenAI, whether it's Claude. So that's one area. The other area is also where they don't have reach currently. Never say never, but things where people are looking for guidance, whether it's ratings, reviews, conversations. Also, how do we make sure that our presence over there is robust is the other way we're looking to beat the system. So there's more around how do we show up well in AI and then when people are not turning to AI but turning to other people, how do we show up well over there as well?
Operator
Understood. Thank you for answering my questions. I'll return to the queue.
Your next question comes from the line of kyle bowser with titan partners please go ahead hi good morning thanks for taking my question um maybe could you talk a little bit more about some of the newer procedures that you talked about in the past like standalone skin tightening and skin removal and you mentioned more today on the call um how many of the 31 centers are conducting these and how How does the economics or margins kind of compare with the existing services?
So, Kyle, I'll bucket it into three groups, essentially. We have…we do skin tightening, which is your…as the name suggests, you're going in just slightly underneath the skin, tightening it. We do it either as standalone or in most cases, actually, along with fat removal and fat transfer. first. That's available in all of our centers. The second bucket would be skin removal or skin excisions. So there is four or five body areas where we do skin removal, skin excisions. Those are roughly in, I would say, 20 out of our 30 locations or so, 20 out of the 31 locations that we have. That number continues to go up, and certain procedures are in some locations It all depends upon surgeon availability, surgeon preference, and we're working with our surgeons to expand that further. The third bucket is aloe clay, which we just announced on the call today. That's going into pilot later this quarter, so our first centers will start treating patients with aloe clay sometime later this quarter. As far as the economics are concerned, skin tightening and skin removal, The gross margin profile and the economics of that are very similar to our core fat removal, fat transfer business, so roughly a gross margin of 60-ish percent, which has been ticking up of late, if you might have noticed. So that we continue to expect to have a similar gross margin profile. Now, many of these are combined with other procedures, so the average ticket ends up being higher. So while we do have some patients who are doing standalone skin tightening, for example, most are combining it with either fat removal or fat removal and fat transfer. So anytime it's an add-on, we see the ticket price is higher for those. Same dynamic on skin removal as well. It's too early to know how Alloclay would work. Once we have it in our clinics, we have more insights. Alloclay does have a product cost, So, the gross margin profile over there would be different. Gross margin percentage would be lower. The expectation is that the gross margin dollars would go higher so that net is accretive to the business on a dollar perspective.
Got it. Appreciate that. And, Yogi, you mentioned, you know, the marketing to become a bit more efficient as you learn how to better market to GLP-1 patients moving forward. I think the customer acquisition cost, you mentioned $3,500, pretty similar with the last couple of quarters, maybe a slight step up. How should we anticipate the customer acquisition cost trending over the balance of the year based on investments you're making in marketing?
Yeah, this is Michael. Yeah, I can take that one. Yes, as you alluded to, CAC was approximately $3,500 in the quarter, which was up roughly relative to Q2 of last year, which was $2,900 a year ago. So it's a consistent step up in marketing investment, as we discussed. A meaningful portion of that spend is top-of-the-funnel brand-building investments that don't necessarily show up in this quarter's case volume. But over time, it's designed to lower CAC as we expand our reach, improving lead quality and the like. And so, as CaseLine builds and these investments mature, we do expect CAC to come down and marketing turn back towards our lower percentage of revenue as well as some of the way we look at it, which, you know, last year was around 18%. And here today, we've been around 20% of revenue.
Okay, great. Thanks so much.
Operator
Thanks for taking the question.
Operator
This now concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to management for closing comments.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. We look forward to connecting with many of you at investor events over the next few days and weeks, and then also report back on our third quarter in a few months.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. so you may disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.
