Most Series A startups send investors a monthly update. Most of those updates include a set of marketing metrics that were chosen because they were easy to pull from whatever dashboards the team uses, not because they tell the clearest story about the health of the business.
Investors notice this. The metrics you choose to report say as much about your understanding of your business as the numbers themselves.
What investors are actually trying to understand
When a Series A investor looks at your marketing metrics, they are trying to answer three questions. First, is the acquisition engine working and is it efficient? Second, are the customers you acquire actually valuable, meaning do they stay and generate meaningful revenue? Third, is the model improving over time, or is it staying flat or getting worse?
The metrics you report should make it easy to answer those three questions. If your update requires an investor to read several paragraphs before they can form a view on acquisition efficiency or retention, the reporting needs rethinking.
The metrics that actually matter
Customer acquisition cost, broken down by channel where possible, is the foundation. A blended CAC tells investors something. A CAC by channel tells them significantly more, because it shows you understand where your best customers come from and where you are wasting money.
LTV, or a proxy for it at early stages such as revenue per customer at six months or twelve months, sits alongside CAC. The ratio between the two is what investors use to assess whether the model is economically sound. A 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio is a widely used benchmark for Series A. Below that, there are questions to answer.
Retention by cohort is one of the most revealing metrics you can report and one of the most commonly omitted. A retention curve that shows customers acquired in month one, month three, and month six, and how many of them are still active at various points, tells a story about product stickiness that no other metric captures. If your cohort retention is improving over time, that is a strong signal. If it is declining, that is something an investor will want to discuss.
Payback period, meaning how long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer through their revenue, matters more to investors who are thinking about capital efficiency. At Series A, this is often a more pressing concern than pure growth rate.
What to leave out of the update
Impressions, reach, follower counts, and branded search volume are not metrics that belong in an investor update unless there is a specific reason they are the most relevant indicator for your business at this stage. They tend to go in because they are easy to produce and often look healthy even when the underlying business metrics are not. Investors who have seen many of these updates have learned to discount them.
Open rates and click-through rates on email are internal optimisation metrics, not business health metrics. They can inform decisions but they do not belong in a board update.
How to frame the numbers you do report
Numbers without context invite the wrong questions. If your CAC went up by 15% last month, the update should say why. If it went up because you expanded into a new channel that is still in the testing phase, that is a different story from CAC rising in your core channel. Investors read updates quickly. Make it easy for them to understand what the number means, not just what it is.
The best investor updates on marketing tell a clear story: here is what we spent, here is what we got, here is how that compares to last month, and here is what we are doing about the parts that are not working. That level of clarity builds confidence faster than any amount of impressive-looking numbers.
Report the metrics that answer whether acquisition is working, whether customers are valuable, and whether the model is improving. Everything else is noise.