As marketers, we work tirelessly to move the needle on what often seems like a laundry list of metrics. We look at website visits, conversion rates, generated leads per channel, engagement on social media platforms, blog post shares, email click-through rates… and the list goes on and on.

When the time comes to present the impact of your marketing efforts to your boss, you can’t present him or her with everything you measure.
While many bosses theoretically understand that a solid marketing team can directly impact your company’s bottom line, 73% of executives don’t believe that marketers are focused enough on results to truly drive incremental customer demand.

If the majority of executives think marketing programs lack credibility, it simply doesn’t make sense to bombard them with metrics that don’t indicate bottom-line impact.

When it comes to marketing metrics that matter to your execs, expect to report on data that deals with the total cost of marketing, salaries, overhead, revenue, and customer acquisitions.

This guide will walk you through the six critical marketing metrics your boss actually wants to know.

1: Customer Aquisition Cost (CAC)

What It Is: The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric used to determine the total average cost your company spends to aquire a new customer. 

2: Marketing % of Customer Acquisitions Cost

What It Is: The Marketing % of Customer Acquisition Cost is the marketing portion of your total CAC, calculated as a percentage of the overall CAC.

3: Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC

What It Is: The Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC is a way for companies to estimate the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer. 

4: Time to Payback CAC

What It Is: The Time to Payback CAC shows you the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers.

5: Marketing Originated Customer %

What It Is: The Marketing Originated Customer % is a ratio that shows what new business is driven by marketing, by determining which portion of your total customer acquisitions directly originated from marketing efforts. 

6: Marketing Influenced Customer %

What It Is: The Marketing Influenced Customer % takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.

How to Calculate Each of the Six Metrics, and Why They’re Important – please download our Cheat Sheets for all the formulas and examples.

Conclusion

As marketers, we track so many different data points to better understand what’s working and what’s not that it can become easy to lose sight of what’s most important.

Reporting on your business impact doesn’t mean you should no longer pay attention to site traffic, social shares, and conversion rates. It simply means that when reporting your results to your executives, it’s crucial to convey your performance in a way that your C-suite can get excited about.

Rather than talking about per-post Facebook engagement and other “softer” metrics, use the six metrics we detailed in this cheat sheet to report on how your marketing program led to new customers, lower customer acquisition costs, or higher customer lifetime values.

When you can present marketing metrics that resonate with your decision-makers, you’ll be in a much better position to make the case for budgets and strategies that will benefit your marketing team now and in the future.