Emilio Garcia argues that cost-per-click is misleading. What matters is customer lifetime value against total acquisition cost. A Starbucks customer's long-term spending justifies high ad spend, and podcast ads drive organic traffic that clicks alone don't capture.
The other one that I also like a lot is Starbucks. And actually I'm going to build up on that one because when someone says, well, this activity or this channel is very expensive, like the question that Elisa have here, it really depends on the value of what you want to get out of the acquisition. So for example, Coca-Cola and both Starbucks and apply to B2B companies, they make these big investments in a person. In particular, right? It's like across all the channels, there's a lot of money, but in a one person in particular, it's just a handful of dollars at most. But what will be the lifetime value of a Starbucks coffee consumer? Once you sip one of those cups, right? Not everybody, but most people will continue to drink them for years. And that's the return on that effort. And the advertising contributes to that. The challenge with advertising channels like the ones that Coca-Cola and Starbucks usually do is that attribution is very hard, but there's a trap on digital because attribution in digital is just as hard, right? There's this illusion that it's easier to measure because we have all these tracking things and the cookies and the CRM, but everybody has experience, for example, the one that I use all the time is a podcast. You do a podcast and in the attribution systems, you will not get a lot of clicks or sessions coming from those activities, but you will get a lot of forms coming from organic and from direct traffic that are a result of people listening to that, even when it's a digital channel. Again, at the end of the day, what makes more sense to compare is your cost of acquisition, which is your ad spend plus your spending on marketing and maybe on sometimes sales against the value of the client. And that relationship, the return on investment, is the one that will tell you if a channel is expensive or not, not the cost per click.
