What is an acquisition report?
An acquisition report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, Google Analytics, Salesforce) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, lead sources), enabling teams to monitor acquisition strategies and performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Acquisition reports are typically created using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in an acquisition report?
An actionable acquisition report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive acquisition reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and stakeholders show acquisition's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Acquisition ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution models for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from acquired customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Acquisition manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall acquisition, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for channel and tactic mapping
- Lead source and conversion analysis
Operational Acquisition Reports
Operational reports for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Lead generation: source performance, conversion rates, cost per lead
- CRM metrics: lead status, pipeline stages, conversion timelines
- Web analytics: traffic sources, landing page performance, bounce rates
Operational acquisition reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build an acquisition report?
To build an acquisition report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are CRM systems for lead data, Google Analytics for web analytics, and Salesforce for sales data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of acquisition report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like lead tracking, conversion analysis, and customer journey mapping.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "leads" and "acquisitions".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your acquisition reporting use cases, such as lead tracking, conversion analysis, and customer journey mapping.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Leads, conversion rate, CAC, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, lead source, campaign name, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your acquisition reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your acquisition reports:
Share
Share your acquisition reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an acquisition report?
Acquisition reports should include a mix of funnel—lead generation, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of acquisition strategies towards business goals. They include:
Acquisition funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the acquisition perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Lead generation metrics: new leads, lead sources, lead quality
- Conversion metrics: conversion rates, customer acquisition, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your acquisition outputs to the cost, including:
- Lead generation: CPL (Cost per Lead)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Lead generation: Lead conversion rate
- Conversion: Customer conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your acquisition performance:
- Sales: new customers, revenue
- Cost: acquisition spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these acquisition KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, paid, referral
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
