Marketing

Marketing calculators translate campaign activity into the metrics that drive decisions — how much each impression costs, how many customers you can afford to acquire, whether a campaign is profitable, and where to reallocate budget for the highest return. This category covers the full stack of marketing measurement: paid media efficiency, customer economics, social and content performance, and campaign ROI.

Paid media metrics: the cost of attention

Every paid advertising campaign ultimately reduces to a handful of efficiency metrics. CPM (Cost Per Mille) tells you how much you are paying for every 1,000 impressions — the base unit of media buying. CPC (Cost Per Click) tells you what each visit to your destination costs. CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) tells you what each conversion costs. And ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) tells you how much revenue each dollar of ad spend generates.

These metrics form a funnel. A campaign can have a low CPM but a high CPA if the ad creative fails to drive clicks, or a strong ROAS on a small budget but collapse when scaled because the audience pool is exhausted. Tracking all four metrics simultaneously — and understanding how each one affects the others — is what separates systematic media buying from guesswork.

Breakeven ROAS deserves particular attention: it is the minimum ROAS your campaign must achieve to avoid losing money, calculated from your gross margin. Running at a ROAS below breakeven burns cash even when revenue looks healthy on a dashboard.

Customer economics: the long game

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) are the two numbers that determine whether a business model is sustainable. CLV is the total net revenue you expect from a single customer over their lifetime with your brand. CAC is what you spent, on average, to acquire each new customer.

The relationship between them is everything. A CLV:CAC ratio below 1 means you are losing money on every customer you acquire. A ratio of 3:1 is a commonly cited healthy benchmark — you earn three dollars for every dollar spent acquiring customers. A ratio above 5:1 often suggests you are under-investing in growth and leaving market share on the table.

Churn rate, retention rate, and payback period complete the picture. A business with high CLV but also high churn may have a misleadingly optimistic CLV projection if customers are leaving faster than the model assumes. Payback period — how many months it takes to recover your CAC — tells you how much capital your growth model consumes before it becomes self-funding.

Social and content performance

Engagement rate is the primary health metric for organic social media — it tells you whether your content is resonating with your audience or just appearing in feeds. The formula is simple (engagements divided by followers or impressions, multiplied by 100), but the interpretation requires context: what counts as a good engagement rate differs significantly between Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.

Conversion rate and sales funnel metrics bridge the gap between content performance and business outcomes. A post with high engagement but zero click-through is an awareness asset, not a demand-generation asset. Mapping each stage of your funnel — impressions to clicks, clicks to leads, leads to customers — and knowing the conversion rate at each stage lets you identify exactly where prospects are dropping off and where optimisation effort will have the greatest impact.

Campaign ROI and budget planning

Marketing ROI brings all the other metrics together into a single profitability measure: (Revenue generated − Campaign cost) ÷ Campaign cost. The challenge is attribution — accurately crediting revenue to specific campaigns and channels across a multi-touch customer journey. The calculators in this category help you model ROI before a campaign launches (to set realistic expectations and justify budget) and measure it after (to evaluate performance and inform the next allocation).

Effective budget planning starts with your target CPA or ROAS and works backwards: how many conversions do you need, what conversion rate can you expect, and therefore how many clicks or impressions do you need to buy? These calculators let you run those scenarios in seconds rather than rebuilding a spreadsheet from scratch every planning cycle.