What is the best metric for a planner/buyer to optimize towards if the goal is to maximize revenue?

When the goal is to maximize revenue, focusing on Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is particularly effective. This metric represents the cost associated with acquiring a customer who makes a purchase. By optimizing towards CPA, a planner or buyer can effectively manage their budget to ensure that the costs incurred to acquire customers directly correlate with the revenue generated from those customers.

Maximizing revenue essentially hinges on understanding how much is being spent to bring in sales. If the CPA is lower than the average revenue per customer, then the media spend is efficient, allowing for profitable scaling of advertising efforts. Therefore, targeting a lower CPA ensures that the revenue potential is maximized relative to the expenditure involved in acquiring customers.

In contrast, other metrics like Return on Investment (ROI) focus on profitability over a broader scope and encompass various costs, which may not provide a direct insight into optimizing the acquisition of new customers specifically. Cost Per Click (CPC) deals more with driving traffic rather than directly linking spending to revenue from acquired customers. Engagement Rate, while valuable for understanding audience interaction with content, does not directly indicate revenue.

Thus, prioritizing Cost Per Acquisition aligns revenue maximization directly with the effective control of costs associated with gaining new customers, making it the most pertinent metric in this