The 4 Paid-Media Numbers I Put in a Board Deck (and 3 I Cut)

Quick Take

Your board doesn’t want eleven paid-media KPIs in the Q3 update. They want the four that map to a decision they have the authority to make. I write this memo for CMOs at $10-25M home brands prepping the next board meeting. The four to put in: contribution-margin ROAS (not blended), new-customer CAC (not blended CAC), incrementality lift (from one geo holdout), and media-spend payback weeks (not “ROAS”). The three to cut: reported platform ROAS, last-click attribution by channel, and any metric beginning with “engagement.” Replace those with sentences the board can quote in the hallway after. Numbers a non-marketer can understand and act on.

The frame

Your board sees the same paid-media slide every quarter and asks the same two questions: “Is it working?” and “Should we spend more?” The deck most agencies prepare answers neither question. It shows reported ROAS by channel, blended ROAS year-over-year, total spend, and a “we are testing the following” list. The board nods, the meeting moves on, and the agency renews because nobody could prove the budget was wrong.

You’re the internal champion. You read this site because the agency report isn’t the report you would write yourself. Here is what I would put in the deck instead.

The four numbers that earn the slot

1. Contribution-margin ROAS (not reported ROAS)

Reported ROAS is platform-level revenue divided by platform-level spend. It’s the number agencies put on the slide because it looks the most generous. It overcounts because of the four things I’ve written about elsewhere (attribution drift, shipping and discounts baked in, customer-lifecycle inflation, Meta CAPI deduplication misses).

The number the board needs is contribution-margin ROAS: gross revenue minus discounts, shipping, COGS, payment processing, and returns, divided by media spend. Same formula, real numerator. On the home brands I audit, contribution-margin ROAS comes in well below reported ROAS. The board needs to see that gap and know which number the cash decision rests on.

Slide text: “Reported ROAS 4.1x. Contribution-margin ROAS 2.4x. The gap is shipping, returns, COGS, and attribution overcounting. We make budget decisions off the second number.”

2. New-customer CAC (not blended CAC)

Blended CAC mixes new and returning. It looks healthy because the returning-customer cohort is cheap to reactivate and pulls the blended number down. The board can’t act on it because they can’t tell whether the brand is acquiring profitably or just harvesting an existing list at a discount.

New-customer CAC is the only number that tells you whether the growth engine is real. Calculate it as paid-media spend divided by net new customers acquired (Shopify’s “first-time orders” report, not “all orders”). Compare against gross margin per new customer minus the first-order cost. If new-customer CAC is higher than 30-day contribution margin, the growth engine is losing money and the budget conversation should be about retention spending, not paid.

Slide text: “Blended CAC $44. New-customer CAC $127. First-order contribution margin $95. We are losing $32 per new customer on the front end and making it back in months 2-6. Payback weeks below.”

I walk through the full methodology in The CAC payback curve post. How to pull clean inputs, what changes the curve, the three patterns I see across home brands.

3. Incrementality lift (from one quarterly geo holdout)

Attribution reports don’t measure incrementality. They measure correlation. The board has been trained to assume that “ROAS 4x” means “every dollar of spend produced four dollars of revenue we would not have had otherwise.” That assumption overstates what the spend caused, and the one holdout I’ve published shows by how much.

Run one geo holdout per quarter. Pick a small market with stable trend, pull all paid media for 14-28 days, measure organic revenue against the same market in the previous comparable period. The delta is the incremental lift the paid spend was producing. The result will surprise the board. In the one 21-day geo holdout I’ve published, pausing paid media in one state cut revenue there by 38%, while attribution had called 92% of revenue paid-influenced (N = 1). Branded search and remarketing are where I expect the biggest gap.

Slide text: “Q2 geo holdout in [market]. Paused all paid media for 21 days. Organic revenue dropped 38% vs the same market in Q1. Incremental lift was 38%, not the 92% the attribution report claimed. We are recalibrating Q3 spend against the true number.”

The full protocol for running the holdout (which market to pick, the 5-week timeline, how to read the result, what changes about the budget conversation) walks through in The 21-day geo holdout post.

4. Media-spend payback in weeks (not generic ROAS)

ROAS is a snapshot. Payback weeks is a velocity metric the board can stress-test against the cash position. Calculate it as: cumulative gross margin from a customer cohort divided by the paid-media spend that acquired them, projected out until margin equals spend. The point at which they cross is the payback week. For home brands, that number should be under 12 weeks at a 30% contribution-margin target. Anything beyond 20 weeks is a cash-management risk regardless of how the ROAS looks.

Slide text: “Customers acquired in Q2 are paying back media spend in 11 weeks at current contribution margin. Q1 cohort paid back in 9 weeks. Trending the wrong direction and we know why (CAC up because of [reason]). The fix lands in Q3 and we will see it in the Q4 payback number.”

The three numbers to cut

Reported platform ROAS

Already covered. It’s the number that makes you look smart and the board feel comfortable. Replace it with contribution-margin ROAS so the board is making decisions on cash math, not on the platform’s most-generous attribution model.

Last-click attribution by channel

The slide that says “Meta drove 38% of revenue, Google 41%, Email 21%” is meaningless if each channel’s incremental lift sits well below what it reports. The channels are double-counting the same buyer at different touchpoints. The board sees the percentages, asks “should we shift budget from Meta to Email,” and the answer the slide implies is wrong.

If you want to show channel mix, show it as “spend allocation” against your stated mix target. That’s a decision the board can make. “Last-click revenue share” is a number that looks like a budget input and isn’t one. The board can’t allocate against double-counted revenue.

Anything labeled “engagement”

Likes, shares, post saves, video views, “audience growth.” None of these map to a decision the board can act on. The board doesn’t allocate budget against post saves. Cut the slide. If you need to show that the brand is alive on social, send the CMO update separately. The board meeting is for capital allocation, not for proving the social manager is working.

The shape of the slide deck

Three slides on paid media in a quarterly board deck. That’s the right ratio.

• Slide 1: The four numbers above, last quarter vs this quarter, with one sentence each on what changed and why.
• Slide 2: The one strategic decision the board needs to make this quarter (budget shift, channel exit, retention vs acquisition rebalance, an audit fix that requires capex, a campaign-architecture rebuild). One slide, one decision, one recommendation.
• Slide 3: The forward-look. What the CMO is testing next quarter, what the team expects to learn, what gets reported at the next meeting.

Anything else belongs in the appendix or the CMO’s monthly update, not in the board pack.

The pre-meeting read

If you’re the CMO and the agency hasn’t given you the four numbers above for the next board meeting, send me read-only access for the free ads audit the week before. I’ll tell you which of the four numbers your ad account reports inflated, and by roughly how much, in a 5 to 7 page write-up.

I write it myself. No account manager in the middle. It’s back within 24 hours of access, so the week before the meeting leaves you time to rework the slides yourself. No call.

Keep going

If this hit, the next two pieces in the same universe:

• I paused all paid media in one state for 21 days. The geo holdout protocol that produces Number 3 on the slide. The cheapest way to find out what fraction of your reported ROAS is actually incremental.
• What conversion value to send to Google and Meta. The value definition that keeps shipping and discounts out of the ROAS on the slide.

Free PDF: The 25-page Google Ads Setup Checklist. The audit walkthrough the four numbers above are derived from.