Marketing & margin glossary
The terms behind every MarginFix audit, in plain English — the ones that decide whether your reporting is telling you the truth about your margin.
Blended ROAS
Return on ad spend measured across every channel at once (total revenue ÷ total ad spend). It reads healthy while hiding channel-level waste, and it over-counts — because Meta, Google and GA4 each claim the same sale.
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
Total revenue ÷ total marketing spend — a blended, platform-independent efficiency measure. Harder to game than per-platform ROAS because no single channel can take credit twice.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The fully-loaded cost to win one customer (spend ÷ new customers). Understated whenever it leaves out creative, tools, onboarding and team time — which is most of the time.
Contribution margin
Revenue minus all variable costs — COGS, shipping, payment fees, returns — per order or unit. It is the real profit a marketing dollar defends, and the number blended ROAS quietly ignores.
Incrementality
The share of conversions that happened because of the spend, versus those that would have occurred anyway. High reported ROAS with low incrementality means you are paying for sales you already had.
Non-incremental spend
Ad budget that buys conversions you would have won without it — classically, branded search against customers already intending to purchase. The most common leak audits surface.
Attribution inflation
When several platforms each claim the same sale, so attributed revenue sums to more than 100% of actual. In audits it typically lands at 120–160%, over-funding whichever channel claims most aggressively.
Margin leak
A recurring, usually invisible loss of marketing margin — wasted paid spend, mispriced offers, or retention drop-off — that a healthy-looking blended metric conceals.
Dunning
The process of retrying failed recurring payments. Weak dunning turns solvable payment failures into involuntary churn, quietly erasing retention gains.
Take rate
The percentage a marketplace keeps from each transaction. A take rate set without passing landed cost through to pricing is a structural margin leak.
Payback period
The time for a customer's contribution margin to repay their acquisition cost. Almost always longer than the board believes, because CAC excludes onboarding and blended metrics flatter it.
LTV:CAC
Lifetime value to customer-acquisition-cost ratio — a headline health metric that misleads when LTV is built on revenue instead of contribution margin.
Wasted ad spend
Media budget producing no incremental margin. Quantifying it — not just naming it — is the core output of a marketing audit.
Marketing & margin audit
An independent, evidenced review of marketing spend and unit economics that finds where budget leaks, quantifies the recoverable margin, and hands over a prioritized fix list.