How to measure marketing performance: the time-to-value system

<p>You have a dashboard. It’s glowing with numbers: traffic, impressions, MQLs. It looks like you are winning. Then you check the bank account. The numbers do not match. The disconnect feels like a betrayal. You are working hard, but the system is opaque. You are measuring noise, not signal.</p> <p>Conventional marketing measurement tells you to track everything. It hands you a firehose of vanity metrics and calls it "data-driven." This advice is fine for publicly traded companies with dedicated analytics teams. It is lethal for you. For the early-stage founder, measuring everything means understanding nothing. Complexity is the tax you pay for being unfocused.</p> <p>Stop measuring activity. Start measuring gravity. We need a system that focuses on the two things that actually matter in a startup: 1) Cash in hand, and 2) Learning speed. We will use a reframed model: The Time-to-Value Score.</p> <p>You are pre-revenue, or barely post-revenue. Your measurement system must be built for rapid de-risking, not scaling. This system will show you exactly which marketing bets are worth your time, and which are just digital theatre.</p> <p><em>If you are short on time, scroll to The Time-to-Value Builder section for a rapid action plan.</em></p> <h2>How to measure marketing performance: use the time-to-value score for deterministic results</h2> <p>The core insight: Marketing performance is not about volume (more traffic), but about acceleration (faster time-to-value). You are looking for proof that your actions create economic momentum, quickly. Any metric that does not contribute to proving this momentum is a distraction. Ignore it.</p> <p>Here is a small win you can achieve today: Decide right now to delete three vanity metrics from your main dashboard. Traffic volume, social media likes, and email open rate are gone. They are comforting lies.</p> <p>The Time-to-Value (TTV) Score measures the average time elapsed between a customer’s first engagement with your marketing and their first value realization (a paid subscription, a key integration milestone, or a high-LTV action). Lower is better. This forces you to optimize for speed and commitment, not superficial interest.</p> <p><h3>The core components of a TTV measurement system</h3></p> <p>The TTV Score requires you to define two milestones clearly: 1) Initial Signal (First Marketing Contact) and 2) Value Exchange (First Dollar or Key Activation). Your marketing is successful if it shortens the time between those two points.</p> <p>For example, if you run paid ads, you are not measuring click-through rate. You are measuring the time it takes for a click-through lead to complete their trial setup and invite a team member. You are measuring the elapsed hours, not the conversion percentage.</p> <p>A specific action you can take in the next hour: Define your 'Value Exchange' event. Is it the first paid month, or a specific API call? If you cannot define it, you cannot measure anything useful.</p> <h2>Stop measuring the funnel, measure the constraint</h2> <p>The marketing funnel model is a comfortable lie inherited from larger organizations. It implies a steady, predictable flow. For a startup, there is no flow. There is friction, and then there is nothing. Measuring the funnel means measuring a chain where every link is equally important. This is wrong. One link is always the weakest.</p> <p>Marketing performance is best measured by finding and resolving your single biggest constraint. When you fix the constraint, all metrics improve simultaneously. When you optimize a non-constraint, nothing moves. This is why fixing a landing page with a 40% conversion rate is often pointless if your core problem is <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-define-your-target-audience">defining your target audience</a>.</p> <p><h3>The three critical friction points in early marketing</h3></p> <p>1. **Attention Friction:** People don’t see you or don’t understand you. (Measure: Unique visitors vs. the size of your niche.)</p> <p>2. **Commitment Friction:** People see you but won’t commit to the next step. (Measure: Conversion Rate on the highest-friction step, like starting a trial.)</p> <p>3. **Value Friction:** People commit but don't see the value quickly. (Measure: The Time-to-Value Score.)</p> <p>You can ignore conventional advice about having a balanced budget. If your Attention Friction is high, throw all resources into <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/content-marketing-strategy">content marketing</a> or paid channels that get you in front of the right people. If Value Friction is high, stop all acquisition and fix the onboarding experience.</p> <h2>Your only two marketing metrics: Velocity and cost-per-commitment</h2> <p>For a builder, every decision must be binary: accelerate or stop. This clarity requires ruthless metric reduction. You only need two key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive growth in the early stages.</p> <p><h3>Velocity: The TTV Score in Days/Hours</h3></p> <p>Velocity is the inverse of the Time-to-Value score. If it takes 45 days for a new user to convert to a paid customer, your velocity is 45 days. You want this number to shrink, relentlessly. Focus your entire team on reducing this number by 10% this quarter. This simple goal reframes everyone's work from "make more stuff" to "remove friction."</p> <p><h3>Cost-Per-Commitment (CPC): The Price of Proof</h3></p> <p>Forget Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). That is for later. You need Cost Per Commitment (CPC). This is the total spend (time and money) divided by the number of users who hit the Value Exchange milestone. This metric is brutal and honest. If your CPC from Twitter is $150 and from SEO is $20, you know exactly where to allocate your limited effort. Marketing is a series of small, expensive experiments. Your job is to make them less expensive faster. This is how you <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/marketing-strategy-for-startups">build a marketing strategy</a> that scales.</p> <p>A specific action you can take in the next hour: Pull the data for your last 10 users who hit Value Exchange. Trace their path back to the first touchpoint. Calculate the average time in hours. That is your current TTV Score.</p> <h2>The learning loop: Measure once, iterate twice</h2> <p>Many founders treat measurement as reporting. You spend Friday compiling numbers for the board or your co-founder. You present them. Then nothing changes. This is performance art, not performance measurement. Measurement must be a loop, not a report.</p> <p>The learning loop looks like this:</p> <p>1. **Identify the Constraint:** Where is your TTV score lagging?</p> <p>2. **Hypothesize the Fix:** What is the single biggest change that could reduce the TTV by 5%?</p> <p>3. **Execute the Smallest Test:** Deploy the minimal viable effort to test the fix (e.g., changing one headline, simplifying a single step in your <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/landing-page-optimization-strategy">landing page</a>, or running a 1-day ad campaign).</p> <p>4. **Measure the TTV Delta:** Did the time-to-value shrink? If yes, keep it. If no, discard it. Move on.</p> <p>This is how you turn marketing from a mysterious art into a deterministic system. You are acting like an engineer isolating a bug in the conversion code. The beauty of this process is that every test yields a small win, a moment of genuine clarity that makes you feel competent and capable again.</p> <h2>The Time-to-Value Builder</h2> <p>Measuring marketing performance should be a prompt you run on your business, not a spreadsheet you wrestle with. Use this prompt to analyze a specific marketing channel (like email, social, or paid search) based on the TTV framework.</p> <h3>Channel Velocity Audit Builder</h3> <p>Copy and paste the following, replacing the bracketed placeholders:</p> <p><code>You are an early-stage founder focused on de-risking marketing channels quickly. The core product value exchange is [DEFINE VALUE EXCHANGE, e.g., a paid subscription after trial, or completing a 3-step setup]. The TTV (Time-to-Value) metric for this channel is currently [X] days/hours. The total effort/cost spent on this channel last month was [Y, e.g., 20 hours/ $500]. The goal is to reduce TTV and increase efficiency. Analyze the [MARKETING CHANNEL, e.g., email newsletter, Twitter presence, Google Ads]. Identify the single biggest constraint blocking TTV reduction and provide three specific, actionable deliverables to test the constraint. Deliverables must require less than 5 hours of work total.</code></p> <p>Example Output:</p> <p>Constraint: The welcome email sequence (Initial Signal) is too long and delays the first key activation (Value Exchange).</p> <p>Deliverables:</p> <p>1. Cut the 5-email sequence to 2 emails. Put the activation call-to-action in the first paragraph of email one.</p> <p>2. Draft a new subject line for the first email, emphasizing urgency ("Your 3-minute setup clock starts now").</p> <p>3. Create a simple A/B test in the <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/email-marketing-strategy">email marketing</a> platform to measure the TTV difference between the 5-email and 2-email sequences.</p> <p>This generator is one of countless interconnected prompts in the LiftKit system designed to make strategy actionable in under an hour.</p> <h2>FAQ</h2> <h3>Q: What if I have multiple channels? How do I measure their performance together?</h3> <p>A: Measure each channel's Time-to-Value Score and Cost-Per-Commitment individually. This gives you an apples-to-apples comparison of which channel delivers economic momentum most efficiently. You need to know which channels accelerate conversion and which ones are just for awareness. Prioritize the accelerators. For a holistic view, you need a clear <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/marketing-funnels-explained">marketing funnel strategy</a>, but focus the funnel on these two core metrics.</p> <h3>Q: We are pre-revenue. What counts as 'Value Exchange'?</h3> <p>A: Your 'Value Exchange' must be the user's highest commitment action before money changes hands. This could be completing a complex onboarding wizard, integrating with a third-party service they rely on, or creating the first piece of work inside your tool. It is the moment they cannot easily leave. If you are struggling with this definition, you might need to revisit <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-build-a-marketing-strategy">how to build a marketing strategy</a> that targets high-intent users.</p> <h3>Q: My CPA is low, but my TTV is high. What should I focus on?</h3> <p>A: Focus on TTV. A low CPA means you are good at generating cheap curiosity. A high TTV means you are terrible at converting that curiosity into commitment. You are acquiring users who are never going to pay. Stop running cheap campaigns and start fixing the commitment friction. Go back to your product's core value proposition and ensure your <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/content-marketing-strategy">content marketing</a> aligns perfectly with what people expect when they sign up.</p> <hr> <h2>Start running operator-grade marketing in under an hour.</h2> <p>LiftKit is the only strategy-first AI marketing system built for founders. It distills the same Fortune-500 frameworks used at Apple, Stripe, and McKinsey into a simple, actionable playbook you can run in under an hour.</p> <p>Stop tinkering with tactics. Start operating with strategy.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://getliftkit.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Get LiftKit</a></strong></p> <h2>Keep learning</h2> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Frameworks</strong></a>: Learn proven mental models to diagnose, prioritise, and scale marketing outcomes.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/channels" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Channels</strong></a>: Understand which acquisition paths actually work and how to deploy them strategically.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/messaging" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Messaging</strong></a>: Build positioning, angle, and copy that converts without guesswork.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Strategy</strong></a>: Make smarter decisions using operator-grade prompts and structured thinking.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Tools</strong></a>: Use AI, automation, and practical templates to move faster.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/research" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Research</strong></a>: Tap into market insights, psychology, and patterns that drive effective marketing.</p> <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "How to measure marketing performance: the time-to-value system", "description": "How to measure marketing performance: use the time-to-value score for deterministic results", "articleSection": "learn", "keywords": "how to measure marketing performance, metrics, KPIs, data, performance", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "url": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-measure-marketing-performance", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-measure-marketing-performance" } </script>