Every term below shows up in a board deck sooner or later. Each one gets the same treatment: what it actually means, the formula, a worked example with real numbers, why the board cares, and the mistakes that quietly make the number lie. Written for operators who have to defend a marketing budget in front of people who read financial statements for a living.
The fully loaded cost of winning one new customer, including media, salaries, agency fees and tools.
The total gross profit a customer generates across the whole relationship, not the revenue they generate.
How many dollars of lifetime gross profit each dollar of acquisition spend buys back.
How many months of gross profit it takes to earn back what was spent acquiring a customer.
What is left from a sale after every variable cost, including the marketing spend that produced it.
Average revenue generated per customer or account in a period, usually measured monthly.
The annualized value of a customer contract, normalized so deals of different lengths can be compared.
The predictable subscription revenue a business earns each month or year, excluding one-time fees.
Revenue attributed to advertising divided by the advertising spend that produced it.
Total company revenue divided by total marketing spend, with no attribution modeling involved.
The return from revenue that would not have happened without the ad, measured against a holdout group.
What a single conversion costs, where the conversion is a defined action rather than a paying customer.
The average media cost to generate one lead, before any qualification has happened.
The cost to serve one thousand ad impressions, the base unit of media pricing.
The average amount paid for one click on an ad.
The difference between what all customers cost on average and what paid-acquired customers actually cost.
A lead that has met the marketing team's bar for handoff to sales, usually by fit plus engagement.
A lead sales has vetted and judged worth pursuing as a real opportunity.
A lead sales has formally accepted for follow-up, sitting between marketing qualification and real opportunity.
A user who has hit a meaningful usage milestone in a free product and earned a sales conversation.
How many dollars of open pipeline exist for every dollar of the revenue target in a period.
The share of qualified opportunities that close as won.
The average elapsed time from qualified opportunity to closed won.
The difference between pipeline marketing created outright and pipeline marketing merely touched.
The rate at which customers or revenue leave the business in a given period.
Revenue retained from existing customers including expansion, expressed against the starting base.
Grouping customers by when they were acquired and tracking each group's behavior over time.
A single-question loyalty score from minus 100 to plus 100, based on likelihood to recommend.
The set of rules that decides which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion.
A controlled experiment that measures what marketing actually caused, rather than what it can claim.
A statistical model that estimates each channel's contribution to revenue using aggregate historical data.
A brand's share of total category visibility, whether in advertising, search results or AI answers.
The three nested market sizes: everything possible, everything reachable, and everything realistically winnable.
Defining a metric is the easy half. If you need the reporting layer that makes these numbers trustworthy, start with analytics and reporting, or see all consulting services.
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