The marketing efficiency ratio helps organizations measure how effectively marketing spend translates into revenue or desired outcomes, ensuring resources are used wisely. By tracking this ratio, marketers can optimize campaigns, justify budgets, and improve ROI through data-driven decisions.

HubSpot has published a new guide, ‘Marketing efficiency ratio: How to calculate and improve yours’.

Erin Pennings says, “The marketing efficiency ratio (MER) is the total revenue generated divided by the total marketing spend for a specific period, giving a blended view of how efficiently marketing contributes to overall revenue.

What is MER?

MER measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels and reflects the combined impact of paid, organic, referral, partner, and brand-led activity. Because it compares all revenue to all marketing spend, it reflects how the entire marketing ecosystem is performing — campaigns, organic traffic, referral channels, brand building, partnerships, and everything in between. This makes the marketing efficiency ratio one of the simplest ways to evaluate full-funnel performance.

MER should include all revenue generated during the reporting period — paid, organic, referral, partner, and direct — as long as the revenue definition stays consistent across reporting windows. This ensures MER accurately reflects the full commercial impact of marketing activity.”

Marketing efficiency ratio: How to calculate and improve yours

HubSpot