Marketing Analytics: ROAS, CAC, and Attribution Without a Data Team

Every channel claims credit for the same conversion. Here's how to measure ROAS, CAC, and real attribution without a marketing data team.

The attribution problem

Facebook, Google, and your email tool will each claim the same conversion. Add up the platform-reported numbers and you've 'acquired' more customers than you actually have. You need one source of truth, not three dashboards.

The metrics that matter

• Blended CAC: total marketing spend ÷ total new customers. The honest number.
• Paid CAC: paid spend ÷ paid-attributed customers, by channel.
• ROAS: revenue ÷ ad spend, per channel and campaign.
• CAC payback period: months to recover CAC from gross margin. Under 12 is healthy for most SaaS.
• Marketing-driven LTV:CAC: lifetime value vs acquisition cost, by channel.

Blended vs paid

Blended CAC keeps you honest about total efficiency; paid CAC by channel tells you where to put the next dollar. Track both. A channel with great reported ROAS but rising blended CAC may just be claiming organic conversions.

How Talon does it

Export spend and conversions from each ad platform (plus your revenue data) and ask the Marketing Analyst: "Compute blended CAC, per-channel ROAS, and CAC payback period, then rank channels by efficiency."

Talon runs the deterministic Metric Pack across your channels, charts spend vs return, and flags channels where CAC is rising faster than revenue.

Bottom line

Trust blended CAC for the headline and per-channel ROAS for allocation. Talon unifies your ad exports into one efficiency view in about a minute.