There’s a million marketing metrics floating around on the web. But the CEO of your company isn’t going to care all that much about Likes and Follows.

If you’re a marketing manager who wants to impress your boss, there’s six core marketing metrics you should be able to recite by heart:

1. Customer acquisition cost

The customer acquisition cost (or CAC) is the metric that’s used to measure the average cost your company spends when it’s trying to acquire a new customer.

It’s important to be conscious of your CAC, because you want it to be as low as possible. If your CAC is rising, it could mean there’s a problem with the efficiency of your marketing or sales.

2. Marketing % of Customer Acquisitions Cost

This is how much of your previous CAC is spent on marketing. It can show you if your marketing team is performing well (relative to your sales team, which will be the remaining portion of CAC spend).

3. The ratio of customer lifetime value to CAC

It’s getting a little complicated now. But stay with us. Customer lifetime value (LTV) relative to CAC helps you show how much value a customer is contributing to your business, versus how much you spend on acquiring them.

So – in really simple terms – if John Smith costs $1,000 to acquire, and spends $4,000 on your business – it’s an LTV:CAC ratio of 4:1. The higher the ratio is, the better.

4. The time to payback

This shows you how long it takes your company to make back the money it spends acquiring the customer (CAC).

If you’re in a business where customers pay an annual fee, you want your payback time to be less than 12 months.

5. Marketing originated customer percentage

This shows the percentage of customers that were created by marketing. It illustrates the impact your marketing team is making on lead generation and creating new customers.

What makes a ‘good percentage’ varies depending upon the nature of the team and the business’ goals – anywhere from 20 per cent to 80 per cent could be considered a healthy number.

6. Marketing influenced customer percentage

This is different from the above metric because it looks at customers that marketing touched at some point in the marketing process. It can give a CEO a big-picture look at the impact of marketing on the sales process.

These are all well and good – but how exactly do you work out how to calculate them?

These metrics are complicated, and there’s more to them than what can be shared in a quick blog post.