“The most recent article I wrote... I spoke about tracking cost per winner This is a metric that we track closely that considers production costs as well as actual ad spend costs.”

Track Cost Per Winner, Not Just Cost Per Creative — Production + Ad Spend Together

Most growth teams track CPC or CPM; Nathan Hudson argues the right metric is cost per winning creative — the fully-loaded cost of finding an ad that actually works, combining production expense and testing spend. AI lowers production cost but increases the quantity of losers to test through, so the cost-per-winner metric captures the real efficiency gain (or loss) of moving to AI-generated creatives.