Flying Fish Advisory
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Channel Performance Audit

How Healthy Is
Each Channel?

Enter what you spend and what it brings in. You'll get a clear read on every channel — what a customer costs you there, what they're worth, and whether that channel is earning its budget.

Up to 8 channels About 6 minutes Email to unlock
01

Your business

A few numbers about your business. Everything else is measured against these.

Sets what a healthy return looks like for you.
Total revenue from an average customer over the whole time they stay with you, before any costs. Best guess is fine.
Of every dollar above, roughly what is left after the cost of making and delivering the thing. This turns revenue into profit, which is what actually has to cover your marketing.
How much of that arrives in the first twelve months. Lets us show how long it takes to earn back what you spent. Leave blank to skip.
02

Pick your channels

Choose the ones you actually spend money or meaningful time on. Up to eight — for most companies that covers everything.

0 of 8 selected
That's eight. Click any selected channel to swap it out. If you run more than eight, pick the ones with the most budget behind them — that's usually where the answer is.
03

Spend and customers

Monthly numbers, from a typical month rather than your best one.

What counts as spend? For paid channels it is what the ad account bills you. For the rest it is easy to enter nothing, and that is where the picture goes wrong.
  • Email and SMS — close to free per message once the list exists, so platform fees and the hours someone spends writing and building are the real cost.
  • Referral — genuinely costs money. Count the discount, credit or reward you pay out, plus anything the software costs.
  • SEO, content, organic social — whatever you pay writers, agencies or tools, and a rough value on internal hours.
  • Events and sponsorship — the fee, the stand, the travel, and the people you sent.
A rough number beats a blank. A channel entered at zero looks free, and free channels are the ones that quietly get underfunded.
ChannelMonthly spendCustomers / mo
Pick your channels above to start.

Add your business model and at least one channel.

Your results open on this page as soon as you click — nothing to wait for in your inbox. The email is how I keep in touch about the tools, roughly monthly, and it is easy to leave.

The numbers

ChannelSpendCost per
customer		Cost vs typicalReturnPayback*Verdict

scale

Working and affordable. Add budget here.

optimize

Pays for itself but costs too much per customer. Fix before funding.

reallocate

Profitable, but the same money buys more customers elsewhere.

pause

Losing money on every customer. Stop this one first.

check tracking

Spend with no attributed customers. Usually measurement, not failure.

not costed

Bringing in customers with no cost recorded. Put a number on the time it takes.

Benchmarks are 2026 blended acquisition costs by business model and channel type, adjusted for how each channel typically performs. They're a directional guide, not gospel — your category and stage move them.

What the spend brings back

A year of new customers at this rate, and what they are worth against what you paid to get them.

This is not a P&L. It counts what customers spend and what it costs in marketing to win them — not salaries, overheads, or the cost of running the business. Revenue arrives across the customer’s whole life with you, not on day one, so treat it as what a year of new customers is ultimately worth rather than cash in the bank this year.

Financial impact

What the verdicts are worth in dollars over twelve months.

The reallocation figure assumes you move that money into your best channel and it keeps performing exactly as it does now. In practice it usually gets a little more expensive as you spend more there, so treat this as the best case rather than a forecast.

What I'd do first

In order. The first one is usually worth more than the rest combined.

Want to see a different mix?

This tells you how the channels you run today are performing. If you want to model what happens when you change the mix — move budget from one place to another, add a channel, or plan next year from scratch — that's a different tool.

The Acquisition Budget Planner works forward instead of backward. You set the spend across more than fifty channels and it returns what you'd expect to get back, so you can compare two or three versions of a plan side by side before you commit to any of them.

Open the Budget Planner

Want to talk it through?

This shows you what each channel costs and what it returns. What it can't tell you is why a channel is underperforming, or which fix to try first — that depends on your market, your offer, and what you've already tried. If you want help piecing it together, or you'd rather work through the whole portfolio rather than eight channels, that's a conversation.

Book a Discovery Call More in the Vault