Marketing efficiency

Move from 55% to 40% marketing-percent. The optimization goal that organises every other use case on this page.

The question, verbatim: "We are currently at 55% of marketing percentage. I want to move to 30% of marketing percentage because top brands operate at 25 or 20% — Dabur and all of those. Startups stay in between. We are on the higher side of inefficiency. This time aok we have taken 46%. We have to become more efficient by 10."

This is the goal every other perf-marketing use case rolls up to. Move marketing % from 55% → 40% (and ultimately 30%) while continuing to grow 40% YoY. The lever isn't a single action — it's compounding small efficiency gains across the perf stack.

Who asks

Perf-marketing leader — owns the number
Founder — tracks it as a strategic metric
Finance — verifies in the Friday RCA

Frequency

Tracked weekly. Reviewed monthly. Re-baselined quarterly.

What "marketing %" means

Marketing % = Marketing spend ÷ Net revenue.

It compounds three things:

Acquisition efficiency — CAC trend
Repeat efficiency — repeat-customer revenue per ₹ of repeat-marketing spend
Mix effect — share of revenue from organic / earned channels

A 1% improvement in any of these moves the headline number.

Data you need

Monthly P&L view (or a derived marketing_pct daily view from BigQuery)
Spend by channel (Meta, Google, Amazon DSP, influencer, content, brand)
Revenue by acquisition source (new vs repeat)
CAC and LTV per cohort

How to ask it

Headline check:

"What's our current marketing % this month? Compare to last month, last quarter, and our 40% target."

Decomposition:

"Decompose this month's marketing % into acquisition CAC trend, repeat efficiency, and organic share."

Roadmap:

"To move from 46% to 40% marketing % over the next 2 quarters, what are the highest-leverage levers? Rank by expected delta."

Drill-in:

"For the levers that close the gap from 46% to 40%, who owns each? What's the timeline?"

What you'll get back

A goal-tracking view:

Current: 46% · Target: 40% · Gap: 6 percentage points · Confidence to hit by end of next quarter: medium

Top levers, ranked:

Reduce Meta NRoAS-below-threshold spend (est. 1.8pp impact) — kill or pause ads with NRoAS < 1.0; freed budget reallocated to scaling ads. Owner: perf team. Timeline: 2-3 weeks.
Lift repeat-purchase share (est. 1.5pp) — current 38%, peer benchmark 48%. Lifecycle CRM + WhatsApp + SMS. Owner: lifecycle. Timeline: 2 quarters.
Increase Mega-creator share (est. 0.9pp) — validated NRoAS gap (see Creator size mix). Owner: category. Timeline: 1 quarter.
Tighten audience overlap (est. 0.6pp) — see Audience overlap diagnosis. Owner: perf team.
Reduce influencer agency fees (est. 0.4pp) — re-negotiation. Owner: leadership.

Sum: 5.2pp out of 6pp gap — the remaining 0.8pp comes from compounding small gains across many ads.

How this organises the rest of the perf use cases

Every other use case on this page either:

Detects that the goal is at risk (target-vs-landing, NRoAS RCA, product lag)
Closes a lever (ad actions, creator pattern, creator size, channel scenarios, overlap diagnosis)
Communicates progress (MBR/QBR assembly)

The goal page itself shows all the linked trackers and decisions in one view (see Goals and the link-role types).

How to make it recurring

Save the goal itself in the platform's Goals page. Link these trackers:

Primary: Monthly marketing % (lagging — read at month close)
Leading: Weekly NRoAS by product (early signal for acquisition efficiency)
Leading: Weekly repeat-customer share (early signal for repeat efficiency)
Guardrail: Revenue growth YoY (must stay above 30% — efficiency can't come at growth's expense)
Guardrail: New-customer count weekly (must stay above target — efficiency can't come from starvation)

Pitfalls

Chasing efficiency at the cost of growth. A 30% marketing % at 15% growth is worse than 46% at 40% growth. The guardrails matter.
Confusing lever sums with reality. Lever estimates compound imperfectly. A 6pp gap rarely closes from a 6pp sum of estimates. Track actuals weekly.
Front-loading easy levers and leaving structural ones. "Reduce agency fees" is easy and one-time. "Lift repeat share" is hard and ongoing. Don't burn easy levers first and stall later.
Treating the goal as quarterly only. The goal page should be read weekly — by the time the quarterly review happens, it's too late to correct.

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