Here's a conversation that happens at some point—or too often—inside almost every brand between $30M and $80M.
Marketing is in Meta and Google all day. The dashboards look fine. CAC is stable. Efficiency is trending well. There's always a reasonable explanation for every off day—attribution changes, creative fatigue, platform bugs, seasonality.
Meanwhile, finance is living in the P&L so eventually someone asks the question: "If marketing is doing so well... why don't we see it in the numbers?"
A fair question. However, marketing hears: "Finance doesn't understand performance marketing. " Finance hears: "Marketing is grading their own homework."
Funny enough, both are partially right. And that's the problem.
Why This Keeps Happening
Most brands think they need better dashboards. They don't. They need a shared reality.
Right now, marketing and finance are operating on different physics. Platforms optimize for platform metrics—they'll happily report success based on signals they can see, within the slice of the journey they control. Finance optimizes for cash and profit: what cleared, what returned, what margin remains after fulfillment and overhead.
The bridge between these two worlds is customer behavior: cohorts, repeat rates, product pathways, discount dependency, payback windows. Without that bridge, every performance review becomes a debate about whose numbers are real.
And if you're constantly debating numbers, you're not improving the business.
Shifts Worth Making
Here's the advice I give brands facing this issue:
Stop asking channel questions about business problems - A question like "What's ROAS this week?" is a channel question. The business questions are: What's CAC after reconciliation? What's payback in contribution margin, not revenue? Are new cohorts getting better or worse? Which products create loyal customers versus one-and-done discount hunters?
Let the ledger be the referee - Your store and ERP are where real purchases, refunds, cancellations, and true revenue live. If your source of truth starts with a browser pixel, you're almost certainly making decisions on partial evidence. Platform data is an input, not the answer.
Averages are comforting—and dangerous - "Average LTV" hides the distribution. In most brands, a minority of customers drive the majority of profit. If you steer the business on averages, you'll over-invest in customers who never pay back and underinvest in the ones who fund your growth.
Attribution isn’t about credit. It’s about allocation - If you can't confidently answer "Where does the next $100k go?"—your attribution system is entertainment, not intelligence. The goal isn't finding the philosophically "right model." It's making repeatable budget decisions tied to LTV and payback.
Start Changing The Conversation
Build a weekly "Reconciled Scoreboard." One pager style. If leadership can't read it in 60 seconds, it's not a scoreboard. Include: net revenue from the store, contribution margin, spend, true CAC, payback period, new vs. returning revenue share, and cohort health versus the same period last year.
Define one customer quality metric that marketing can't game. Something like 90-day contribution margin per new customer, or percent of new customers who place a second order within 60 days. If marketing wins on this metric, finance will feel it.
Run a monthly reallocation review tied to cohort quality. Not "what did ROAS do"—but "which spend created the highest quality new customers?" Then reallocate by channel, campaign type, and entry product.
Create one shared language for “incrementality.” Instead of channel teams fighting over attribution windows, agree on decision rules: which channels are discovery vs. capture, how you evaluate assists, what "incremental" actually means for your business. When the language is shared, meetings become about allocation, not arguments.
For those of you who have marketing green and a skeptical finance team, your brand isn't confusing. It's simply unreconciled. And unreconciled businesses don't scale cleanly—they do spend harder, discount more, and wonder why the P&L never catches up.
- Alex
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Readers Note: If you want a sanity check on your own marketing vs. P&L reality gap—reply "PANDL" and I'll tell you what I'd look at in your data first.
