Key Marketing Performance Metrics to Track for Online Schools

Why Your Metrics Aren’t Helping You — And What to Do About It

If you’re leading an online school or e-learning company, you’re probably already deep in dashboards, spreadsheets, and ad reports. You’ve got teams checking CTRs, click volumes, video watch rates, email open rates… and yet, no one can confidently answer the one question that actually matters:

Are our ads driving profitable student enrollments — or just draining our budget?

At nn.partners, we work with online education providers spending millions on platforms like Google and Meta. And no matter the ad budget, the pattern is the same: too much attention on secondary metrics, and not nearly enough clarity around what’s actually driving revenue.

Here’s the problem: when you’re measuring everything, you’re prioritizing nothing. The wrong metrics create a false sense of control. You feel informed, but you’re still making decisions based on noise — not outcomes.

That’s how ad budgets get wasted. How growth stalls. How smart teams stay stuck.

But the most profitable online schools operate differently. They’ve learned to ignore the fluff and focus on just four core advertising performance metrics that drive everything else:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – how much it costs to acquire a paying student
2. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – how efficiently your ads are turning into revenue
3. Gross Profit – what’s left after you deliver the course
4. Purchases – the number of actual enrollments you’re generating

In this article, we’ll show you how tracking just these four numbers can give you the clarity to scale, the confidence to budget, and the insight to make every marketing dollar count.

Let’s cut through the noise and focus on what really matters.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The Most Important Number You’re Not Watching

CAC isn’t just another metric. It’s the clearest indicator of your marketing efficiency. It tells you whether your paid campaigns are profitable, scalable, or quietly draining your budget.

We’ve seen it again and again: schools tracking dozens of numbers, yet missing the one that actually matters. Until you understand your CAC, you’re guessing.

This number ties your ad budget directly to business outcomes. It tells you, in concrete terms, how much it costs to acquire one paying student. Everything else—clicks, impressions, engagement—is secondary if you don’t know this.

Why CAC Matters More Than Most Schools Realize

If you don’t know your CAC, your growth strategy has no foundation. Here’s why it’s essential:

• Budgeting and Forecasting: CAC lets you connect ad spend to enrollment targets. If it costs $200 to enroll one student, you know exactly what it takes to hit your revenue goals.
• Campaign Evaluation: A campaign with lots of engagement but a high CAC is a poor investment. This metric keeps your analysis grounded in outcomes.
• Profit Margins: If CAC is higher than your profit per student, you’re losing money. This figure forces clarity on your pricing and cost structure.

It’s not about tracking more data. It’s about tracking the right data.

The CAC Formula (Simple but Powerful)

CAC = Total Ad Spend ÷ Number of New Paying Students

For example, if you spent $10,000 on Google Ads and enrolled 50 students, your CAC is $200. That means each new student cost you $200 to acquire. This is the number you use to assess whether your campaigns are sustainable and worth scaling.

The lower your CAC, the more profit you keep. That’s why high-performing online schools track this number obsessively and use it to guide key decisions.

If you are already tracking CAC you want to reduce it, check out our guide: Lower Customer Acquisition Cost for Your Online School.

CAC won’t answer every question, but it’s the starting point for real control over your advertising performance. Instead of chasing every metric, focus here first.

Return On Ad Spend: Your Immediate Profitability Check

While Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) gives you a long-term view of efficiency, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is your campaign’s real-time profitability meter. Think of it as an instant financial check-up. It answers one simple, urgent question: “For every dollar we’re spending on this ad campaign, how many dollars are we getting back right now?”

This metric is especially important for online schools that sell a mix of courses at different price points. A good CAC for a $1,997 certification program would be a disaster for a $47 mini-course. ROAS cuts through that noise, giving you a single, clear measure of profitability that works for every product you offer.

Why Every E-Learning Leader Needs to Watch ROAS

Tracking ROAS next to CAC gives you the full financial story. Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if your ROAS is less than 1.0, you are actively losing money on that campaign. For every dollar you put in, you’re getting less than a dollar back—a major red flag that demands immediate action. On the other hand, a ROAS of 3.0 means you’re generating $3 in revenue for every $1 spent on ads.

Calculating ROAS couldn’t be simpler:

Formula: Total Revenue from Ads ÷ Total Ad Spend = ROAS

Let’s say you spend $5,000 on ads for a course and those ads bring in $15,000 in new student enrollments. Your ROAS is 3.0.

$15,000 Revenue / $5,000 Ad Spend = 3.0 ROAS

This straightforward metric helps you make quick decisions, like shifting your budget away from campaigns that aren’t working and putting more money into the ones that are.

Why ROAS Matters in a Competitive Market

Keeping a close eye on ROAS is more critical than ever as the advertising space becomes more crowded. Recent search advertising data shows that costs have been steadily climbing over the past five years due to increased competition. While cost per click (CPC) continues to rise, the cost per lead (CPL) has started to level out in 2025, which suggests marketers are getting smarter about converting the clicks they pay for.

A strong ROAS is your proof that campaigns are efficient enough to succeed even as costs go up. If you notice your returns are starting to dip, it might be a sign that you need to investigate if your ad ROI dropped and how to fix it. You can also explore the latest findings from WordStream for more details on these advertising benchmarks.

Gross Profit from Ads: The Most Overlooked Metric That Drives Real Growth

Once you’ve nailed down your CAC and ROAS, the next piece of the puzzle is gross profit from advertising—how much actual money your ad campaigns are putting back into the business after covering acquisition costs.

This number shows what you really have left to reinvest, save, or grow. It’s not a vanity metric, and it’s not theoretical. It’s the hard cash margin between your ad spend and the revenue it generates.

Formula:

Revenue from Ads – Total Ad Spend = Gross Profit from Ads

If you spend $20,000 on Google Ads and those campaigns drive $50,000 in course sales, your gross profit from ads is $30,000. That’s your real return, not just in percentage terms, but in dollars you can actually use.

This metric helps you answer questions like:

• Are my campaigns not just working, but worth it?
• How much profit do I get back for every dollar spent?
• Can I afford to scale or should I optimize first?

Going a Step Further: True Business Profitability

If you want to get a fuller picture of your margins, subtract the cost of goods delivered (COGD) from that number. This includes direct expenses tied to serving each student—things like instructor payments, LMS fees, support staff, and content delivery tools.

Formula:

(Revenue from Ads – Total Ad Spend) – COGD = Business Gross Profit

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You don’t need to get perfect with this right away.

Even just tracking the gap between ad spend and ad-driven revenue gives you a strong sense of your campaign’s financial impact. But layering in delivery costs helps you understand what kind of profit you’re really working with—and how far you can push your acquisition strategy without breaking your business model.

Most schools skip this step and over-invest in campaigns that “look good” but don’t deliver strong margins. Don’t make that mistake.

Your gross profit from ads is where marketing performance becomes business performance. Track it. Optimize for it. Grow from it.

Student Enrollments: The Only Metric That Pays The Bills

While metrics like CAC, ROAS, and Gross Profit give you a vital health check on your marketing, they all point to one ultimate goal: generating student enrollments. This is the finish line, the moment where all your advertising efforts convert into real revenue. It’s when a prospect trusts you enough to pull out their credit card and officially become a paying customer.

Simply put, enrollments are the only metric that puts money directly into your bank account.

It’s easy for marketing teams to get excited about intermediate wins—webinar sign-ups, lead magnet downloads, or high email open rates. These aren’t failures, but they are steps on the journey, not the destination. A lead is a possibility; an enrollment is a result. Mistaking one for the other is a costly error for any business leader. Anchoring your strategy to enrollments ensures everyone is focused on what truly matters: sustainable business growth.

Core vs. Supporting Metrics

To grow effectively, you must understand the difference between metrics that drive the business and those that diagnose performance. Your four core metrics are the pillars of your financial decision-making. Supporting metrics are the diagnostic tools that help you understand why the core numbers look the way they do. This distinction keeps your team focused and your meetings productive.

For example, if enrollments suddenly drop, a low click-through rate on your latest email campaign might be the reason. The click-through rate is a useful piece of information, but the business problem is the lack of enrollments. Maintaining this clarity is a key feature of high-performing advertising performance metrics frameworks.

To make this distinction clear, it helps to categorize your metrics. Here’s a simple breakdown of how to think about them for your online school.

Core vs. Supporting Metrics for Online Schools

Clear comparison showing which metrics drive decisions vs. which ones provide supporting context

This table shows that while you might check supporting metrics frequently to fix small problems, your big-picture decisions should always be guided by your core metrics.

From Clicks to Customers

The final piece of the puzzle is creating a clear, traceable line from a specific ad click to a student enrollment. This requires setting up proper attribution and tracking systems. When you can confidently say, “Our Google Ads campaign generated 25 new students last month,” you have moved from guessing to knowing. You can discover more on this topic with our guide to proven Google Ads strategies for eLearning providers.

This intense focus on enrollments empowers you to make confident budget decisions, forecast revenue accurately, and build a marketing engine that consistently delivers paying students. After all, that’s the only outcome that truly fuels your school’s mission and its future growth.

Why Simple Measurement Drives Better Results

The most successful online schools all share one powerful, disciplined habit: they focus on simple, clear measurements that lead directly to action. It’s easy to get lost tracking every possible data point, but concentrating on just four core advertising performance metrics—CAC, ROAS, Gross Profit, and Enrollments—is what separates high-growth businesses from those drowning in data. This isn’t about ignoring the details; it’s about knowing which numbers truly matter.

From Analysis Paralysis to Decisive Action

Ultimately, simplicity in measurement doesn’t mean being uninformed. It means having the discipline to prioritize the metrics that directly impact your bottom line. All other data should serve as a diagnostic tool, not a distraction.

If you’re tired of chaotic data and want a clear path to scalable results, we can help. At nn.partners, we specialize in building marketing systems that bring clarity and drive real growth.

Learn how we can help you build a smarter marketing engine.