Introducing the Acquisition Report

Overview

We’re excited to announce the rollout of the new Acquisition Report. For current customers, this report will become available in your dashboard in the next day or so, if it’s not already there.

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The Acquisition Report provides simple, accurate CAC numbers and performance benchmarks by channel, updated on an hourly basis.

With the Acquisition Report, you can:

• View both Blended Paid CAC and Fully Loaded CAC by day, month, quarter and year
• View acquisition performance across channels in a side-by-side view to understand how each channel is performing and what your spend mix looks like.
• Understand how your performance compares to peers with benchmarks for CPM, CTR and CPC by channel, so you finally know whether it’s you or the channel.

🚀 Want to see it for yourself? Book a demo today.

Key Features

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Acquisition Snapshot

See Paid Ad Spend, Customers Acquired, Blended Paid CAC and Fully Loaded CAC in one simple card. Drill up and down to view data by day, month, quarter or year.

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Channel Overview

Understand your spend mix across channels at a glance. Compare the performance of channels side by side on key metrics including Spend, Impressions, CPM, CTR, Clicks, and CPC.

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Channel Details w/ Benchmarks

See how your performance compares to others with benchmarks by channel for CPM, CTR, and CPC. Get clarity on whether performance blips are specific to your brand or the channel as a whole.

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🚀 Ready to see it in action? Book a demo today.

Why We Built It

The Acquisition Report has been one of the most requested features by our customers. Since iOS 14, it’s become harder than ever to understand what’s going on with your ad spend. The only thing that is clear is that the relying on the channels alone to provide reliable efficiency data is no longer an option.

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We’ve always been proponents of keeping things simple when it comes measuring your acquisition costs. At Bainbridge, we focus on two key metrics:

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1. ‍Blended Paid CAC: How much you spent on paid channels, divided by the number of new customers acquired.
2. ‍Fully Loaded CAC: How much you spent on marketing in total, divided by the number of new customers I acquired.

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Seems simple right? It is! That’s the idea.

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But getting this view together is more challenging than meets the eye:

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• First, it requires gathering and normalizing paid ad spend across multiple channels. You have to get the data out of the channel platform (e.g. Facebook Ads Reporting), clean it up so that time periods are easy to work with, and then align metric names so you can get a simple table with columns for date, spend, and channel.
• Second, it requires a way to capture your total marketing spend for the period. This is typically  captured best by your financial statements, but getting that data into a dashboard in an automated fashion is time-consuming or just plain impossible depending on your systems.
• Last, it requires aggregating new customer data from Shopify. This is a bit more straightforward, but still can trip you up if you’re not careful about how you define new customers.

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For Bainbridge customers, the Acquisition Report makes this process completely automatic:

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• Data is pulled from your connected ad spend data sources on an hourly basis and automatically cleaned and aggregated.
• Total marketing spend is automatically ingested into your Bainbridge Data Warehouse via your Bainbridge Model as soon as books are closed for the month.
• New customer additions are synced with Shopify hourly, and your report is automatically refreshed with the latest data.

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😍 The result is a clean, consistent view of your customer acquisition efforts that doesn’t depend on manual processes or anyone else’s fuzzy attribution math. Isn’t that beautiful?

Benchmarks Included

The other feature we’re rolling out as part of the Acquisition Report are benchmarks. We’re big believers in knowing how you stack up to the rest of the market. As any smart marketer or analysts will tell you, “beating” the benchmark isn’t necessarily the goal here - every brand should have a strong POV on its own targets and KPIs.

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But benchmarks are incredibly valuable because they provide context that can help inform decision making and prepare you for strategic conversations with investors and acquires who will absolutely want to compare your numbers to others.

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In the channel detail cards, you’ll find charts that show your performance on efficiency metrics like CPM, CTR and CPC alongside a benchmark value that represents the median value from all Bainbridge customers on a daily basis.

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Want to know how your CPM on Black Friday compared to the market? Now you can. Want to understand if Google CPC’s are up for everyone this month, or just you? Yep, you can do that, too.

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In the coming releases, you’ll see us continue to add more and more benchmarks for metrics across acquisition, retention, growth, margins and more. We hope you find them useful and look forward to your feedback as you get to know them.

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What’s Next?

Great question! Here's what we're working on: 

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More ad spend data sources.

We’re launching the report with support for Facebook and Google but are adding more channels as fast as we can. TikTok, Pinterest, Snap and more are on the way. Want to suggest something else? Let us know!

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Payback period and CAC:LTV

CAC is only part of the equation. We’re working on additional reports that provide a more detailed view of CAC:LTV ratios at different points in time and a dead simple view of the all-important payback period metric. Stay tuned.

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