Your board has 90 seconds for the paid acquisition section of the deck. Half of that goes to last-quarter's number, the other half to next-quarter's plan. If your slides are full of impressions, CTR, and "campaign-level optimisation summaries", you've already lost them.
These are the five metrics SaaS boards actually want — and the anti-metrics that should never make the cut.
1. Blended CAC (not channel CAC)
Blended customer acquisition cost is total fully-loaded acquisition spend (paid media + paid tools + a share of the marketing team) over new paying customers acquired in the period. Not paid-only CAC, not channel-specific CAC — blended.
Why blended: your board is comparing your CAC against industry benchmarks and against your own LTV. Both of those are blended numbers. Reporting "Google Ads CAC = $180" sounds great until they compare it against blended $640 and realise the channel CAC is misleading because Google Ads only captures the last touch.
How to report it cleanly: trailing 90-day blended CAC, with one sentence on what moved. "$640 → $580, driven by Google Ads contributing 12% more customers at flat spend after the comparison-keyword campaigns went live." That's the entire CAC story.
2. CAC payback period
How many months of customer revenue does it take to recoup the CAC? Computed as CAC / (monthly ARPU × gross margin). The unit is months.
This is the single most powerful unit-economics metric for a SaaS board because it answers two questions at once: is the business capital-efficient, and how durable is growth if cash gets tight?
Benchmark: under 12 months is healthy for venture-backed, under 18 months for capital-efficient/bootstrapped. Over 24 months is a board-level conversation about either ACV or channel mix.
The trick: report this on the same chart as CAC. The chart that shows CAC down 30% while payback period is flat is the chart that tells you you're acquiring cheaper but lower-quality customers. Both of those metrics in isolation can lie; together they tell the truth.
3. LTV:CAC ratio
Customer lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. The canonical target is 3:1.
Below 2:1: the business is structurally unhealthy. You can survive this short-term on cash reserves, but every dollar of growth makes the problem worse, not better. Boards see this as an existential threat, not a paid acquisition issue.
Above 5:1: you're almost certainly underinvesting in growth. The market is willing to give you more customers at your current CAC and you're refusing them. Boards see this as a missed opportunity — prepare to defend why you're not spending more.
The 3-5× sweet spot is where paid acquisition decisions get interesting. Inside that band, the question is no longer "is paid working" but "should we lean in or out, and by how much".
4. Pipeline contribution from paid
What percentage of your pipeline (open deals × probability-weighted value) is sourced from paid? Not closed-won — pipeline.
Boards care about this because it tells them how dependent your growth is on continued paid spend. 70% pipeline from paid means every dollar of growth costs you a dollar of paid spend. 25% pipeline from paid in a $5M ARR business means you have organic and word-of-mouth engines that compound.
How to report: trailing-3-month average, with the prior 3-month comparison. "Paid pipeline contribution: 38% (up from 31% in Q1), driven by the new comparison-keyword campaigns picking up late-stage buyers." Concrete, attributable, board-friendly.
5. ARR added attributable to paid
The absolute dollar number — how much new ARR came from paid-sourced customers in the period. Not a percentage, not a rate. Dollars.
Boards think in dollars because they're underwriting dollar outcomes. "Paid acquisition added $312k of ARR last quarter" lands differently than "paid CAC is down 18%". Both can be true; only one answers what they're actually asking.
The accompanying chart is trailing-12-month ARR-added-from-paid, with the current month called out. This is the chart that gets screenshotted into the next investor update.
The anti-metrics
These don't belong in board reports. They're inputs to the five above, useful in operating reviews and useless to a board:
- Impressions. A board has no way to act on this number. It's vanity at best, misleading at worst (impressions inflate during cheap-traffic seasonality).
- Clicks / CTR. Inputs to CAC. Report the CAC movement, not the CTR.
- Total conversions. Vanity unless you've already told them your bid strategy is volume-maximising. For value-based bidding (see our MCV vs tCPA guide), total conversion count is actively misleading.
- Cost-per-click averages. CPC is a number you control with bidding, not a business outcome. If CPCs went up but CAC went down, that's a good thing — but only if you frame the CAC story, not the CPC story.
- Quality Score / impression share. Diagnostic metrics. Useful when you're explaining why CAC moved, never as the lead.
The board-slide format that works
One slide. Two columns. Left column: the five metrics, last quarter and this quarter, with the delta. Right column: one sentence per metric explaining the movement, plus one forward- looking note.
If you want a battle-tested template plus the underlying SQL / Looker queries to populate it from your conversion tracking, that's what our analytics service ships in the first two weeks. See the HR-tech SaaS case study for what a board-ready dashboard looks like once it's tuned to these five metrics rather than 47 vanity ones.