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What’s the first metric you look at now that you ignore CPC?
Posted by on February 12, 2026 at 4:37 pmI used to obsess over CPC because it felt like the cleanest signal. Low CPC meant “good ads,” high CPC meant something was broken. Over time that stopped being relevant… I’ve had campaigns with cheap clicks that lost money and others with ugly CPCs that scaled profitably because the backend worked.
These days I look at contribution margin and payback first. How much profit is left after ads, fulfillment, refunds, and ops. Then how fast that spend comes back. A campaign that pays back in 30 days with room to scale matters more than a pretty CPC imo.
I also got a bit of "performance marketing" outside help and realized they barely talked about CPC at all. They talkd funnels, retention, and where money actually leaked. Great, that's what I'll focus on from now on.
Still wanna know what others prioritize now. Is it LTV, payback window, MER, something else entirely?
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1 Reply
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I’m in learning phase for now, may you tell me what payback window is?
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I’m obsessed with blended ROAS across all channels now. Like you said, CPC is basically meaningless if you’re not tracking what happens after the click.
I spent way too long optimizing individual campaign ROAS before I realized I was missing the whole picture. Someone clicks my Facebook ad, doesn’t buy, then comes back through Google a week later and converts. If I’m only looking at Facebook performance, that campaign looks terrible even though it actually drove the sale.
Now I look at overall revenue divided by total ad spend across everything – Facebook, Google, TikTok, whatever. That tells me if my marketing is actually profitable or just moving money around between channels.
The other thing I track religiously is repeat purchase rate at 90 days. A campaign might look great on first purchase ROAS but if those customers never buy again, it’s garbage. I’d rather pay more upfront for customers who stick around. Way easier to scale when you know your LTV isn’t trash.
One metric that’s been super helpful is day-7 ROAS vs day-30. Helps me figure out payback windows without waiting forever to make decisions. If something looks decent at 7 days and I know my historical lift from 7 to 30, I can scale faster instead of sitting around waiting for perfect data.
Honestly contribution margin is probably the smartest thing to focus on. I still don’t track it as cleanly as I should but it’s way more honest than pretending a 3x ROAS means anything when your margins are thin.
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It reflects a shift in PPC strategy: moving away from surface‑level efficiency metrics (like CPC) toward **business outcome metrics**.
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I actually look at cost as my core benchmark when comparing date ranges, and then use the % change to evaluate everything else relatively. “We spent the same and got more X”
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>MER
“This is the way”
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Net surgical revenue at the KW level by procedure. I run a performance marketing agency for aesthetic practices.
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CPC is a diagnostic metric, not a decision metric cheap clicks don’t equal profitable campaigns.
I prioritize contribution margin and payback window first, then cohort LTV and blended MER.
It’s about capital efficiency and cash velocity, not pretty ad metrics. -
Low CPC does’t mean a good ad. Just looking at CPC was never relevant. Profitability should have always been looked at. Either clients are making money from ads or they are not.
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