How I Turned Marketing Efficiency Into a Measure Any CEO Could Understand.
TLDR
In 2018, before “MER” became the buzzword it is today, I was trying to answer one simple question:
How many units did marketing actually help sell?
That question became the foundation for what I now call Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER).
This post walks through:
How I first built my own version of MER without knowing it.
Why my early reporting failed to resonate with the executive table.
How shifting from units sold to dollars earned changed everything.
Why MER became the backbone of my $1 in Marketing Framework.
Before MER had a name, I was chasing clarity
Back in 2018, I was deep in the numbers—SEO performance, campaign leads, social engagement, content strategy, paid conversions.
Everything I tracked was connected to one simple goal: How many units were we selling because of marketing?
That was the number I cared about. I didn’t want vanity metrics—I wanted a real measure of impact.
So I built my own system.
I tied every dollar spent back to unit sales, trying to calculate how many physical products marketing had helped move.
It wasn’t about revenue yet. It was about proof of motion.
The early version: the “Spend-to-Unit” ratio.
Every quarter, I’d walk into the boardroom with the same chart—spend vs. units sold.
I could tell you, down to the decimal, how many units moved for every marketing dollar.
At the time, that number was 0.00021% units per marketing dollar. Small, but it was progress in defining what retrun marketing was getting on their efforts. And I thought - “It’s just simple math from there - want to sell more units, do the math and that’s the budget”. We were proving that marketing created measurable demand.
But it didn’t land.
The boardroom would nod politely and shift the conversation back to leads, opportunities, and close rates.
They didn’t feel what I was showing them—because I was talking in our language, not theirs.
When the table didn’t get it.
For a few years, I kept refining it—tracking more precisely, adding layers, correlating campaigns to spikes in unit velocity.
My marketing team understood it. They saw how spend translated to physical sales. But every time I presented the data to the executive table, it fell flat.
They didn’t care about “0.00021% unit’s sold per marketing dollar spent.” They cared about money.
The problem wasn’t the insight. It was the currency of communication.
The turning point: translating units into dollars.
One day, it clicked.
I realized I was already doing what would later be called MER—I just hadn’t translated it into the right metric.
I wasn’t wrong to track units. That’s what marketing truly influences. But the bridge between units sold and revenue earned was missing.
So I reframed it:
“For every $1 we spent in marketing, how much money did we make in return?”
Simple, right?
But when you’ve lived inside spreadsheets and dashboards long enough, simplicity hides in plain sight.
That’s when the math started telling the story everyone could understand.
The evolution into MER.
Once I turned that ratio into a dollar value, everything changed.
It was no longer “unit efficiency.” It was Marketing Efficiency—plain, measurable, and universal.
The team still tracked the details—lead volume, SQL%, pipeline velocity—but I finally had a number that spoke the CEO’s language.
And that number became our north star.
The moment it resonated.
I’ll never forget the first time it landed. I stood in front of the board and said:
“Our $1 in marketing generated $16.07 in sales this quarter.”
There was no confusion. No translation needed.
Just belief.
That’s when I realized MER wasn’t just a metric—it was a bridge. It connected marketing logic to financial logic. And that’s where real influence starts.
To see the exact slide I use to present it today, read: Here’s What $1 in Marketing Did This Quarter.
What I learned from that evolution.
You can’t sell a number people don’t understand.
It’s not about being right—it’s about being clear.Marketing impact must translate to business value.
“Units” make sense internally. “Dollars” build belief externally.Simplicity wins boardrooms.
The cleaner the metric, the stronger the narrative.
Today, MER drives how we see performance.
Every campaign, every quarter, every strategy now ladders up to one truth:
How efficiently did marketing turn investment into growth?
It’s not just about what we spent—it’s about what that spend moved. MER gives me that clarity.
And the $1 Framework gives me the story to tell it.
