Marketing metric definitions: the argument before the dashboard
The short answer
Most reporting disputes are definition disputes nobody has articulated. Before building any dashboard, write one sentence defining each metric — what counts as a lead, when revenue is recognised, whether returns are netted — and get the people who use them to agree.
Key takeaways
- Write the definitions before building anything. It is the least exciting and most valuable step.
- Model once in a warehouse; repeating transformations per chart guarantees divergence.
- Every number needs a comparison — last period, target, or both.
- Daily refresh matches the decisions anyone actually makes weekly.
Every business past a certain size has the same meeting: marketing's number, sales' number and finance's number, none of which agree, and an hour spent reconciling instead of deciding.
The definitions worth agreeing first
- Lead
- Someone who submitted an identifiable contact detail. Say explicitly whether duplicates, test submissions and spam are excluded — most disputes about lead volume are actually about this.
- Qualified lead
- A lead a human has assessed and accepted against written criteria. Whether it is qualified by marketing or by sales must be stated, because the two produce very different numbers.
- CAC
- Total acquisition spend divided by new customers acquired in the same period. State whether it includes agency fees, creative production and salaries — 'media only' CAC and 'fully loaded' CAC can differ by a factor.
- ROAS
- Revenue attributed to advertising divided by advertising spend. Specify the attribution window and whether platform-reported or CRM-reconciled revenue is used; they rarely match.
- Contribution margin
- Revenue minus variable costs including COGS, shipping, payment fees and returns. The number that decides whether growth is worth having, and the one most dashboards omit.
- Recognised revenue
- When the money counts — at order, at dispatch, at delivery, or after the return window. For Indian e-commerce with cash on delivery, this choice changes the reported number substantially.
What belongs on a weekly dashboard
Top of the page
- Spend, against plan and against last period.
- Qualified leads or orders, on the agreed definition.
- Cost per qualified result — the number budget decisions are made on.
- Revenue, reconciled to the system finance trusts.
- Then the same four by channel, and only then by campaign.
- Diagnostics — CTR, CPM, frequency, conversion rate — below the outcomes, because they explain rather than replace them.
Do you need a warehouse?
Direct connections are fine
- One or two data sources
- Simple transformations
- A single team consuming the reports
- Budget and time are tight
Build a warehouse
- Four or more sources to join
- Transformations complex enough that each chart would reimplement them
- Several teams with conflicting definitions
- History matters and a source system truncates it
A dashboard cannot fix a conversion event that counts page views, which is why measurement comes first — see Conversion & Analytics — and the dashboard afterwards, on Data & BI Dashboards.