Two months ago, a mid-sized retail company showed me its monthly digital marketing report. Page after page of charts: reach, impressions, likes, new followers, engagement rate, frequency, share of voice… The report had 47 slides.
I asked one simple question: “How many attributable sales did the campaigns generate this month?”
Silence. It wasn’t in the report.
That scene repeats itself every week across Chilean and Latin American companies. The digital marketing industry has spent years producing more data than decisions. And that happens because most teams are measuring the wrong things — not out of bad faith, but because vanity KPIs are easy to show, while business KPIs are harder to explain.
If you are a business owner or Head of Marketing, this is the moment to audit which metrics you are actually tracking. These are the six that truly matter.
1. CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost is how much it costs you, on average, to acquire a new customer. It is calculated by dividing the total amount invested in marketing and sales over a given period by the number of new customers acquired during that same period.
If you spend USD $10,000 on ads and sales in one month, and you acquire 50 new customers, your CAC is USD $200.
Without CAC, you don’t know whether your campaigns are profitable. A campaign with a brilliant CTR and a CAC of USD $800 for a USD $100 product is a disaster disguised as success. If your CAC is higher than the gross margin of the first purchase, you are funding growth at a loss.
2. LTV — Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is how much revenue, in total, an average customer generates throughout their entire relationship with your brand. It is calculated by multiplying the average ticket by annual purchase frequency and by the average duration of the relationship.
If a customer buys USD $50 four times a year and stays with you for three years, their LTV is USD $600.
LTV is the metric that justifies CAC. The best-known rule in modern SaaS and e-commerce, popularized by David Skok of Matrix Partners, is this: a healthy company should have an LTV/CAC ratio of at least 3:1 [1]. Below that, unit economics start to become strained, and scaling means losing money faster. Above 5:1, you are probably under-investing in acquisition and leaving growth on the table.
3. ROAS — Return on Ad Spend
Return on Ad Spend tells you how many pesos of revenue each peso invested in advertising generates. It is calculated by dividing the revenue attributable to campaigns by the media spend.
If you invested USD $5,000 in Meta Ads and generated USD $20,000 in attributable sales, your ROAS is 4x.
ROAS tells you whether your campaigns are profitable at a channel level. But be careful: ROAS is not the same as profit. A 3x ROAS with a 30% gross margin means you barely covered your costs. The ROAS you need varies by industry, but the general rule is: ROAS > 1 / gross margin. If math isn’t your thing and you got lost here, ask us and we’ll review it together.
4. Conversion Rate by Funnel Stage
Measuring overall conversion is not enough. What matters is knowing where people drop off in the funnel: from ad to landing page, from landing page to cart, from cart to checkout, and from checkout to completed purchase.
When conversion is measured by stage, problems become obvious. A brand with a 2% CTR — good — an 8% landing page conversion rate — excellent — and a 78% cart abandonment rate — terrible — knows exactly where to reinforce its investment: not in more media spend, but in fixing the cart process.
This metric separates campaigns that are adjusted according to real needs from campaigns that simply get more budget.
5. Brand Lift
Brand lift measures the change in brand metrics — awareness, purchase intent, associations — attributable to a campaign. It is measured through pre- and post-campaign surveys among exposed and non-exposed audiences.
Why does it matter? Because awareness campaigns are not designed to sell today: they are designed to build brand memory that sells tomorrow. Without brand lift, brand campaigns cannot be justified — and that is why many companies cut them unfairly.
Brand lift is what distinguishes a campaign that “didn’t convert” from a campaign that “built future pipeline.”
6. NPS or CSAT by Cohort
Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction Score measures how likely your customers are to recommend you, or how satisfied they are. But the useful version is not the average: it is the breakdown by cohort.
If customers who joined in January have an NPS of 60, and customers who joined in September have an NPS of 30, something changed in your value proposition or in the context between those two moments. That signal — invisible in the average — is gold for preventing churn before it happens.
NPS connected to cohorts is one of the strongest predictors of retention and organic growth.
The Metrics You Should Stop Looking At
at least as your main metric
To finish, here are three metrics that appear in almost every report and, on their own, mean nothing.
New followers. Having more followers does not mean having more business. Accounts with one million followers and a 0.1% CTR prove it.
Likes and reactions. The like is the most devalued currency in digital marketing. Platforms reward the algorithm, not the brand.
Reach and impressions. If nobody did anything after seeing your content, reach is advertising noise, not a result.
These metrics have their place — but as diagnostics, not as objectives. Confusing them with success is the reason so many companies invest in digital marketing and still do not see results in the bottom line.
How to Change the Internal Conversation
If your team delivers reports where reach and impressions are the main metrics, the solution is not to change the team. It is to change the question.
In your next marketing meeting, instead of asking “how did we do?”, ask:
- What is our CAC this month, and how is it evolving?
- What does the LTV/CAC ratio look like in each channel?
- Where are people dropping off in the funnel, and what are we going to do about it?
- Are our brand campaigns moving brand lift?
When the questions change, the reports change. And when the reports change, decisions change too.
Measuring well is not complicated. It is discipline and knowledge.
And it is the difference between a company that invests in marketing — and sees meaningful results — and one that bets on marketing, keeps hoping to grow, but never sees real results.
Sources
[1] David Skok, “SaaS Metrics 2.0 — A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters” / Burkland Associates, “LTV:CAC — An Important (But Often Misunderstood) SaaS Metric” — burklandassociates.com.