Running a footwear brand, I tracked everything obsessively early on: daily revenue, ROAS, every conversion rate imaginable. It was exhausting and, frankly, counterproductive.
Today, my approach is different. I still look at most metrics almost every day, but I’ve learned to worry about them on different timescales.
Daily: The Pulse Check
Customer Acquisition Cost. CAC is my daily obsession. It tells me if something’s off before it becomes expensive. I check it every day, but I don’t panic over daily fluctuations. The goal is pattern recognition: catching trends early, not reacting to noise.
New customers. Simple but essential. How many new people bought today? This is the heartbeat of the business.
Gross revenue. The top-line number. I don’t make decisions based on it alone, but it sets the context for everything else.
What I don’t obsess over daily? ROAS. It’s tempting to watch it constantly, but daily ROAS is mostly noise, especially if you have a huge mix of purchases by new and existing customers.
Weekly: Cohort Analysis
Every week, I dig into cohorts.
This is where you see the real story: how customers from different acquisition periods are behaving, whether newer cohorts are retaining better or worse, whether something we changed actually worked. Even down to specific coupon codes.
Cohort analysis is one of those metrics that seems complex but becomes second nature. And it catches problems that surface-level metrics hide completely.
Monthly: The Operating Reality
Monthly is where I get serious about the business fundamentals:
Contribution margin (variable result). This is my north star for profitability. Everything that varies with each order (product cost, fulfillment, payment processing) lives in this number. But we need to be mindful that it doesn’t consider LTV, so not necessarily reflecting long-term profitability.
Average order net. After all costs, what does a typical order actually contribute? If this number is flat or shrinking while revenue goes up, something’s wrong.
Conversions and new leads. The top of funnel health check. Are we bringing in enough new customers? Is the site converting?
ROAS. Here’s where ROAS actually matters to me: as an operating cash flow indicator. Monthly ROAS tells me if our ad spend is sustainable from a cash perspective. Can we keep the lights on? That’s what I’m checking; profitability is a longer game.
Yearly: The Long Game
Annually, I zoom out completely:
Lifetime Value (LTV). What’s a customer actually worth over time? This number takes patience to calculate properly, but it’s essential.
Long-term profit estimation. I map LTV against acquisition costs and contribution margins to estimate what today’s customers will mean for the business in 2-3 years. This is where strategy happens.
What I Don’t Worry Much About
Product Return rate. We track it occasionally, but it’s consistently small. When a metric is stable and low, checking it weekly is just anxiety management IMO.
COGS in isolation. Our supply chain is dialed in. In most cases, COGS moves only when we want it to move (new products, material changes), so in our case it lives inside contribution margin now.
The Evolution
Early on, I looked at completely different metrics. I was reactive, checking everything multiple times a day, responding to every fluctuation.
What changed? I stopped treating every metric the same way. Some numbers need daily attention because they move fast and signal problems early. Others only make sense when you step back and look at a wider window.
