You Can't Measure Marketing Success With Marketing Metrics

If you ask most founders whether their marketing is working, they'll answer with marketing numbers. Clicks are cheap. CAC is down. We're getting more conversions than last month.

But here's the problem: none of those numbers tell you whether your marketing is actually helping your business.

You can have a fantastic cost per click while losing money on every customer. You can hit your ROAS target while your bank account heads to zero. You can double your conversions while your margins collapse under the weight of discounts and shipping costs.

Marketing metrics tell you how your marketing is performing. They don't tell you how your business is performing. And if you can't connect the two, you're flying blind. It's why I wrote Margin of Growth—to bridge the gap between what the dashboard says and what's actually happening to your cash.

The Dashboard Tells One Story. Your Bank Account Tells Another.

Ad platforms are designed to measure ad performance. They answer questions like: Did people click? Did they convert? How does this campaign compare to that one?

These are useful questions for optimizing media. They are not useful questions for understanding whether your business is healthy.

Consider a scenario: You run a campaign that generates a 3.5x ROAS. Your agency celebrates. Your dashboard looks great. But what actually happened?

You spent $10,000 and generated $35,000 in revenue. After cost of goods, shipping, fulfillment, payment processing, and returns, you kept $14,000. You spent $10,000 to make $14,000. A $4,000 profit—before you've paid rent, salaries, or software.

Is that good? It depends entirely on your fixed costs. And no ad platform is going to tell you that.

Marketing and Finance Are Not Separate Conversations

Most businesses treat marketing and finance as two different departments with two different languages. Marketing talks about impressions, clicks, and conversions. Finance talks about margins, cash flow, and runway.

But they're looking at the same system from different angles.

When you spend money to acquire a customer, you're making a financial decision. When that customer buys, their contribution margin either covers your acquisition cost or it doesn't. When they come back and buy again, your payback window either shortens or stays the same.

Marketing is the input. Financial health is the output. Measuring only the input is like judging a recipe by its ingredients without ever tasting the meal.

What Does Success Actually Look Like?

If marketing metrics don't tell you whether marketing is working, what does?

The answer is contribution margin dollars—the actual cash left over after every variable cost associated with a sale. Not a percentage. Dollars.

If your marketing generates $100,000 in revenue at a 40% contribution margin, you have $40,000 to cover acquisition costs, fixed expenses, and profit. If you spent $35,000 on marketing, you have $5,000 left. That's your real result.

Then there's payback window—how long it takes for a customer's cumulative margin to exceed what you paid to acquire them. A 30-day payback means your cash recycles quickly. A 120-day payback means you're financing customer acquisition for four months before seeing a return.

And finally, cash flow. Revenue is an accounting concept. Cash is what pays your bills. A business can be "profitable" while running out of money because the timing of cash in versus cash out doesn't match.

These are financial metrics. But they're the only way to measure whether marketing is actually doing its job.

The Integration

When you start measuring marketing success by financial outcomes, your decisions change.

You stop celebrating a low CAC if the customers you're acquiring have terrible payback windows. You stop scaling campaigns just because ROAS looks good. You start asking different questions: Is this customer cohort profitable? When do they become profitable? Can we afford to wait that long?

This isn't about replacing marketing metrics. It's about connecting them to the numbers that actually determine whether your business survives.

Marketing and finance are two views of the same machine. Integrate them, and you'll finally know whether what you're doing is working.