Cost Per Deal
Total marketing spend divided by closed deals — the bottom-line metric that tells you whether a channel is actually profitable.
Cost per deal is the truest measure of a marketing channel: everything you spent divided by the number of deals it closed. A channel can post a great response rate and a low cost per lead and still lose money if those leads rarely close — cost per deal is where that reality surfaces.
Because a single wholesale fee can dwarf a month of marketing spend, investors tolerate a high cost per deal as long as it stays well under the average profit per deal. Tracking it by channel is how you learn where to scale and what to cut, rather than guessing from gut feel.
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