Strategy and goals
Unit economics
The revenue and costs of a single customer or order, used to judge whether growth makes money.
What it is
Unit economics breaks the business down to one unit: what it costs to win a customer, what that customer pays, and what it costs to serve them.
Why it matters
For lead generation and e-commerceAdvertising multiplies the unit. If one customer loses money, more customers lose more money, however good the ads look.
In practice
The usual pieces are acquisition cost, gross margin per customer or order, lifetime value and payback period.
A common mistake
Reading ad metrics without the margin behind them. A campaign can look efficient on platform numbers and still lose money on every sale.