Five marketing metrics that actually help you make decisions
Followers and likes are easy to count, but they rarely tell you whether a campaign is working. These are the metrics to look at first.
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A good marketing dashboard is not the one with the most numbers, but the one that helps you decide what to do next week. These five metrics are a good place to start.
1. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
How much it costs, on average, to win a new customer. Add up what was spent on marketing and sales in a period and divide it by the new customers in that period.
Comparing it by channel shows where the budget works hardest. This is a hypothetical example of an online store, in Chilean pesos:
Source: Illustrative example prepared by InfoByData
View the data as a table
| $4,500 | |
| Organic search | $6,000 |
| Paid social | $12,500 |
| Google Ads | $15,800 |
| Influencers | $21,000 |
2. Customer lifetime value (LTV)
How much money a customer brings in over their whole relationship with the company. Compared with CAC, it shows whether growth is profitable.
3. Conversion rate by channel
What percentage of visits from each channel (search, social, email) ends in a purchase or a lead. It helps decide where to put the budget.
4. Return on ad spend (ROAS)
How much revenue each peso invested in advertising generates.
5. Retention rate
What percentage of customers buy again. Keeping customers is usually cheaper than acquiring new ones. This is what retention for a group of customers looks like month by month, also in a hypothetical example:
Source: Illustrative example prepared by InfoByData
View the data as a table
| Month 1 | 100% |
| Month 2 | 42% |
| Month 3 | 31% |
| Month 4 | 26% |
| Month 5 | 23% |
| Month 6 | 21% |
What it means for you
- Measure CAC by channel, not just in total: an overall average can hide a channel that is losing money.
- Always compare LTV with CAC: if a customer brings in less than it costs to win them, growing faster only grows the loss.
- Check retention before raising acquisition spend: if customers don't come back, every peso spent on ads goes less far.
Sources
- The figures in this article are a hypothetical example to show how the metrics are calculated, not real market data.
- marketing
- metrics
- ROI