Dashboard visualizations for two-sided SaaS and e-commerce marketplaces: Is this business working?

How to Track Key Metrics for Marketplace Startups

For founders of a two-sided marketplace, critical data often lives in disconnected silos. Your payment information is in a system like Stripe, user activity is tracked in production databases, and marketing spend is buried in spreadsheets managed with tools like QuickBooks or Xero. This fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to answer the most fundamental question: Is this business working? Without a single, coherent view, you cannot reliably calculate core marketplace metrics like take rate, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Lifetime Value (LTV).

The challenge is not a lack of data, but the absence of a unified dashboard that provides clarity. Without it, strategic decisions are based on guesswork, and investor conversations lack the concrete evidence needed to build confidence. Are you spending money efficiently to grow? This guide provides a practical framework for moving from data chaos to a clear, visual dashboard that tracks the true health of your SaaS or e-commerce marketplace.

Foundational Metrics: Getting a Clean Read on Revenue

Before you can analyze profitability, you need a precise understanding of your revenue. For a two-sided marketplace, the most common top-line figure is Gross Marketplace Value (GMV). GMV represents the total value of all transactions that pass through your platform. However, it is essential to remember that GMV is not your revenue. Your actual revenue is the portion you keep, which is known as your take rate.

Calculating your take rate is the first and most critical step in measuring marketplace performance. It provides essential insight into your business model's efficiency.

Take Rate Formula: (Total Marketplace Revenue / GMV) * 100

This figure distinguishes your actual earnings from the total flow of money. It is also crucial to differentiate the take rate from your profit margin. Your take rate is your gross revenue as a percentage of transactions, while the profit margin accounts for all operating costs. Getting this calculation right is the basis for all other unit economic analysis. Without a clean take rate, every subsequent metric will be flawed.

Untangling Your Acquisition Costs (CAC)

The next challenge is understanding how much it costs to acquire users. A scenario we repeatedly see is founders relying on a single, blended CAC, which averages the cost of acquiring both buyers and sellers. This approach is dangerously misleading because it masks the distinct economics of each side of the marketplace. The cost to acquire a buyer is rarely the same as the cost to acquire a seller, and their value to the platform can differ significantly.

To make sound scaling decisions, you must separate these costs. This involves allocating every marketing and sales expense to either the buyer or seller side. Some costs are direct, like a Google Ads campaign targeting buyers. Others are shared, such as the salary of a marketing manager who works on both sides. For shared costs, you need a logical allocation rule, such as a 50/50 split or one based on time spent. The reality for most pre-seed to Series A startups is more pragmatic: start with a reasonable assumption, document it, and apply it consistently.

Here is a simple way to structure this allocation:

• Direct Buyer Costs: These are expenses aimed exclusively at acquiring buyers. For example, if you spend $5,000 on a Google Ads campaign targeting buyers, that entire amount goes into the Buyer CAC bucket.
• Direct Seller Costs: These expenses are aimed exclusively at acquiring sellers. A $3,000 LinkedIn Ads campaign targeting sellers is allocated entirely to the Seller CAC bucket.
• Shared Costs: These are expenses that benefit both sides of the marketplace. If a content marketer with an $8,000 salary works on campaigns for both buyers and sellers, you might apply a 50/50 split. This allocates $4,000 to the Buyer CAC bucket and $4,000 to the Seller CAC bucket.

In this scenario, your total allocated spend of $16,000 is correctly split into $9,000 for acquiring buyers and $7,000 for acquiring sellers. By separating these costs and dividing them by the number of new buyers and sellers acquired in that period, you get a side-specific CAC. This granular view reveals which side of your marketplace is more capital-efficient to grow, directly informing your budget and strategy.

Calculating the Payoff: Lifetime Value (LTV)

Once you know what it costs to acquire a user, you need to determine their long-term worth. This is where Lifetime Value (LTV) comes in. For most marketplaces, calculating the LTV of the buyer is the most actionable starting point, as they are typically the side that generates repeatable transactions. LTV helps you answer a critical question: are the users we are acquiring worth the cost over their lifetime?

While a gold-standard LTV calculation involves complex cohort analysis, early-stage founders can get a powerful directional signal with a simpler formula. This provides a crucial forward-looking perspective, helping you justify marketing spend and model future profitability.

Simple LTV Formula: AOV * F * Customer Lifetime * Take Rate

Let’s break down its components:

• Average Order Value (AOV): This is the average value of each transaction on your platform. You can calculate it with the formula: Average Order Value (AOV) Formula: GMV / Number of Orders.
• Purchase Frequency (F): This metric shows how often a unique customer makes a purchase in a given period, such as a year. The formula is: Purchase Frequency (F) Formula: Number of Orders / Number of Unique Buyers.
• Customer Lifetime: This is an estimate of how long a customer will remain active on your platform. Early on, this might be an educated guess, perhaps two to three years, which you can refine over time as you gather more data.
• Take Rate: This is the percentage of GMV you capture as revenue, the same figure you calculated in the first step.

The Ultimate Health Metric: The LTV:CAC Ratio

Individually, LTV and CAC are vital metrics. Together, they form the LTV:CAC ratio, the ultimate indicator of your business model's long-term sustainability. This ratio answers the most important question for founders and investors alike: for every dollar we spend acquiring a customer, how many dollars do we get back in revenue over their lifetime?

A high ratio indicates an efficient, profitable growth engine, while a ratio below 1:1 means you are losing money on every new customer. The industry often points to a specific target as a rule of thumb. Generally, a healthy LTV:CAC ratio is often cited as a 3:1 benchmark. This suggests that for every $1 spent on acquisition, you generate $3 in lifetime revenue.

However, the context of a two-sided marketplace adds an important nuance. Because of the power of network effects, where each new user adds value to other users, early-stage marketplaces can often justify a lower initial ratio. For instance, Marketplaces with strong network effects might justify an LTV:CAC ratio of 1.5:1 or 2:1 early on. The expectation is that as the network strengthens, user retention and value will increase, naturally improving the ratio over time.

From Spreadsheet Chaos to a Clear Dashboard

For most founders, the process of calculating these metrics begins in spreadsheets. You export data from Stripe, pull user counts from your production database, and manually merge it with marketing spend from your accounting software. This is a necessary first step, but it is time-consuming, prone to error, and fails to show trends clearly. This manual work is a primary pain point that hinders strategic decision making and creates a scramble before every board meeting.

The goal is to move from manual chaos to an automated, visual dashboard. Using an entry-level BI tool like Looker Studio, Metabase, or Tableau, you can create a single source of truth that updates automatically. By connecting these marketplace analytics tools directly to your data sources, you can build investor-ready visualizations without a dedicated analytics team.

To start building your marketplace dashboard, focus on these three essential charts:

1. GMV and Take Rate Trend (Dual-Axis Line Chart): This chart plots your GMV growth month-over-month on one axis and your take rate on the other. It immediately shows if your growth in transaction volume is translating into stable revenue. Investors look for consistent or growing take rates alongside rising GMV, as a falling take rate could indicate you are relying on discounts to fuel growth.
2. CAC by Side (Stacked Bar Chart): Each bar in this chart represents a month's total acquisition spend, segmented by color to show buyer CAC and seller acquisition cost. This visual makes it incredibly easy to see where your acquisition budget is going and how the balance shifts over time as you scale one side of the marketplace or the other.
3. LTV:CAC Trend (Line Chart): This chart tracks your LTV:CAC ratio over time. An upward-trending line is one of the most powerful signals you can show an investor, as it demonstrates that your unit economics are improving as you grow. It proves your business is becoming more efficient, not just bigger.

If you need a professional setup for visualizing platform KPIs, see our Tableau quick start guide for more detailed instructions.

Practical Takeaways for Marketplace Founders

For early-stage founders in the UK and USA, navigating marketplace metrics does not require a large analytics team or expensive software. It requires a disciplined, step-by-step approach to building clarity from the data you already have, whether your costs are logged in QuickBooks or Xero.

First, achieve precision in your revenue calculation. Your initial dashboard component must be a clean calculation of GMV and your take rate. This is your foundation. Everything else is built upon it.

Second, bring rigor to your cost allocation. Immediately stop using a blended CAC. By separating buyer and seller acquisition costs, you will gain a fundamentally different and more accurate understanding of your growth levers. Document your allocation assumptions and apply them consistently.

Third, quantify the long-term payoff. Use the simple LTV formula to get a directional understanding of what a customer is worth. This context is essential for making intelligent decisions about how much you are willing to spend to acquire them.

Finally, visualize your progress. The transition from spreadsheets to a simple BI dashboard with the three core charts is transformative. It turns abstract data points into a clear narrative about your business's health and trajectory. This is not just for fundraising; it is for running a smarter, more sustainable two-sided marketplace. For more on this topic, see our hub on choosing and visualising key metrics. UK founders should also review GOV.UK guidance on marketplace VAT to ensure compliance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is a good take rate for a two-sided marketplace?

A: A good take rate varies significantly by industry. Marketplaces for physical goods, like e-commerce platforms, often have lower take rates in the 5-15% range. In contrast, marketplaces for digital services, skills, or accommodations can command higher take rates, often between 15% and 30%, due to higher value-add and network effects.

Q: How can I calculate LTV if my startup is less than a year old?

A: For very new startups, calculating a precise LTV is challenging. Start by making educated assumptions for customer lifetime based on early user behavior and industry benchmarks. For example, you might assume a two-year lifetime. Document this assumption and plan to refine it with cohort analysis as you accumulate more historical data.

Q: Should I focus on growing the buyer or seller side first?

A: This depends on the classic "chicken and egg" problem specific to your marketplace. Analyze which side is the constrained resource. If you have plenty of sellers but not enough buyers, focus on buyer acquisition. Your separated CAC calculations will show which side is more capital-efficient to grow, helping guide your strategic focus.