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How to Calculate Burn Rate in Google Analytics

Cody Schneider•

Thinking about your burn rate in the context of Google Analytics means you’re asking the right questions about your marketing spend and its efficiency. While Google Analytics isn't a financial tool for calculating your company's total net burn, it is the perfect place to figure out if the cash you're "burning" on marketing campaigns is generating valuable traffic and conversions. This guide will show you how to connect your ad spend data with your website performance data to understand what's working and what's not.

What is Burn Rate (and Why GA Isn't the Whole Picture)

Before we go further, it's helpful to quickly define "burn rate." It's the speed at which a company is spending its venture capital to cover overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations.

  • Gross Burn Rate: This is the total amount of money your company spends in a month. It includes everything - salaries, rent, software subscriptions, inventory, and, of course, marketing and advertising costs.

  • Net Burn Rate: This is your gross burn minus your monthly revenue. If you spend $100,000 and bring in $60,000, your net burn is $40,000 for that month.

Google Analytics is designed to track website and app user behavior - where visitors come from, what pages they view, and what actions they take. It doesn't have access to your payroll, office lease, or other operational expenses. Therefore, you can't calculate your company’s full gross or net burn rate within Google Analytics. However, you can analyze a significant piece of it: your paid acquisition costs.

Focusing on What You Can Track: Ad Spend Efficiency

The real question most marketers and founders are trying to answer is, "Is the money I'm spending to acquire customers actually paying off?" You want to connect the money spent on platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or LinkedIn Ads to the traffic, engagement, and conversions you see in Google Analytics. When you combine cost data with behavior data, your marketing burn stops being a simple expense and becomes an investment with a measurable return.

There are a couple of ways to do this: a simple manual method using spreadsheets and a more advanced (but more powerful) method involving data imports directly into Google Analytics.

Method 1: The Manual Spreadsheet Approach

This is the most common and straightforward way to get a quick pulse on your marketing burn efficiency. It involves exporting data from two different places and combining them in Google Sheets or Excel. It requires some manual work each week or month, but it gets the job done.

Step 1: Export Your Cost Data from Ad Platforms

First, log into your advertising platforms and pull your spending data. You'll want to break this down by campaign so you can analyze performance granularly.

For example, in Facebook Ads Manager:

  1. Select your desired date range (e.g., Last 30 Days).

  2. Navigate to the "Campaigns" tab.

  3. Ensure your columns include "Campaign Name" and "Amount Spent."

  4. Click the "Reports" icon and select "Export Table Data."

  5. Choose the .csv format and export the file.

Repeat this process for Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or any other platforms where you're spending money.

Step 2: Export Your Acquisition & Conversion Data from Google Analytics

Next, you’ll pull the performance data from Google Analytics. To ensure you can match your ad data to your GA data, you must use consistent UTM tags for all your campaigns. Your utm_campaign parameter should match the campaign names in your ad platforms.

In Google Analytics 4:

  1. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

  2. Set your report's date range to match the one from your ad platforms.

  3. Change the primary dimension to "Session campaign." You can do this by clicking the drop-down menu above the first column of the table.

  4. Add the key metrics you care about, such as Sessions, Users, Engaged sessions, and, most importantly, your key Conversions (like purchase or generate_lead).

  5. Click the "Share this report" icon in the top right and select "Download File" to get a CSV.

Step 3: Combine and Analyze the Data in a Spreadsheet

Now for the fun part. Create a new Google Sheet or Excel workbook and combine your exported data.

  1. Create two tabs: One for your ad cost data, one for your GA data.

  2. Copy and paste the data from your CSVs into the respective tabs.

  3. Create a third "Analysis" tab. In the first column, list all your unique campaign names.

  4. Use VLOOKUP or SUMIF formulas to pull in the 'Amount Spent' from your first tab and the 'Sessions,' 'Users,' and 'Conversions' from your second tab, matching them by campaign name.

  5. Calculate your key metrics. With all the data in one place, you can create new columns to calculate cost efficiency:

  • Cost Per Session (CPS): = [Amount Spent] / [Sessions]

  • Cost Per Conversion (CPA): = [Amount Spent] / [Conversions]

This manual report immediately shows you which campaigns are efficiently driving traffic and conversions versus which ones are just burning cash with little to show for it.

Method 2: Importing Cost Data into Google Analytics

If you plan to analyze cost data regularly, the manual spreadsheet method gets old fast. A more sustainable solution is to import your cost data directly into Google Analytics. This keeps all your analysis in one place and allows you to view costs alongside hundreds of other GA dimensions and metrics.

You can automatically sync this with some ad platforms (like Google Ads), but for others (like Facebook Ads), you’ll need to do a manual upload via a formatted CSV file.

How Cost Data Import Works in GA4

You need to create a CSV file with your cost, clicks, and impressions data broken down by date and source, medium, and campaign. Google Analytics then uses these identifiers to match the cost data to the correct user sessions.

Step 1: Create Your CSV File for Upload

Your lookup key relies on having a few mandatory dimensions. Your spreadsheet must contain the following columns:

  • date (in YYYY-MM-DD format)

  • utm_source (e.g., facebook)

  • utm_medium (e.g., cpc)

  • utm_campaign (e.g., winter-sale-2024)

You then must include at least one of these cost metrics:

  • cost

  • clicks

  • impressions

Here’s a simple example of what two rows in your file might look like:

date,utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign,cost,clicks,impressions 2024-03-15,facebook,cpc,Q1-LeadGen-Campaign,150.75,220,15000 2024-03-15,linkedin,cpc,Q1-Hiring-Campaign,210.50,95,8500

Step 2: Upload the Data into GA4

  1. In GA4, go to Admin.

  2. Under the Property column, click on Data Import.

  3. Click the "Create data source" button.

  4. Give your data source a name (e.g., "Facebook Ads Cost Data").

  5. Under "Data type," select Cost Data.

  6. Follow the prompts to map your CSV columns to the corresponding GA fields.

  7. Upload your file and wait for GA to process it.

Step 3: Analyze Your Data in the Cost Analysis Report

After a successful import (which can take up to 24 hours), you can view your cost data blended with your website analytics directly in GA4.

  1. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Overview.

  2. Find the card titled "Sessions by Session Channel Grouping" and click "View traffic acquisition report."

  3. Now, in this report, you can add cost metrics to your analysis. Use the "Add comparison" tool or customize the report's metrics to include things like Cost and Cost per conversion.

This integrated view makes it easy to see which campaigns are driving the highest Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and which have an unacceptably high Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) without ever leaving the GA interface.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, Google Analytics can't give you your full company burn rate, but it is an essential tool for understanding the efficiency of your marketing spend - a major line item for most growing businesses. By combining cost data with GA's powerful behavioral analytics, either manually in a spreadsheet or directly via data import, you can make smarter decisions about where to invest your next dollar.

Of course, manually exporting CSVs and uploading cost data week after week can still feel like a chore that gets pushed down the to-do list. At Graphed, we built our platform to automate this exact kind of busywork. By connecting our Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and other marketing accounts in just a few clicks, we can instantly create dashboards that track ROAS and CPA in real-time, all by simply asking for it in plain English. This frees up our time for us to focus on strategy instead of report-building, ensuring our marketing burn is always an investment, not just an expense.

Try it today by signing up at Graphed