The answers tell you where your growth potential actually sits. Which channel. Which country. Which part of the funnel.
1. What's our LTV — blended, per channel, per country?
Blended tells you if the business works. The channel and country cut tells you where to push. If Facebook's LTV in Germany is higher than TikTok's — and both have the same CPA in the same market — that's the answer to where the next dollar goes.
One shortcut: cohort revenue minus media cost for that cohort, divided by users acquired. Profit per user, in one line. Make sure the cohort is old enough to be meaningful.
2. What's our click-to-lead rate and our lead-to-order rate?
A single blended conversion rate hides which half of the funnel is breaking. When it drops, you end up debugging the whole thing at once and finding nothing.
Click-to-lead drop: most likely creative, landing page, targeting. Lead-to-order drop: most likely offer, price, checkout.
3. Which attribution model are we using, and why that one?
Last click hands the credit to Google. First click hands it to whoever brought the customer in.
Same spend, same platforms, different pictures of what's working.
The model doesn't measure reality. It decides who gets credit — and whoever gets credit gets the next budget increase.
4. What are our quarter-over-quarter trends — in aggregate, per channel, per country?
The most expensive drops are the ones hiding inside a healthy average.
Aggregate first. Then per channel. Then per country.
One channel bleeding is a different problem than a system-wide drift. "CAC is up" isn't a diagnosis — it's a signal that says look somewhere.
5. When did we last test a new angle?
Not a new creative. A new angle. A new angle is a new ad and a new landing page selling the same product with a different story. Same funnel, different entry point.
Five questions. The answers tell you where the growth is — and where it isn't yet. If the CMO can answer all five cleanly, you have a system. If they can't, you have the map of what to fix first.
Originally published in The Growth System newsletter on LinkedIn.