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Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.

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No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.

Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190363560457647...

[2] http://www3.cfo.com/article/2012/2/banking-capital-markets_g...

[3] http://blogs.smeal.psu.edu/grumpyoldaccountants/archives/530

[4] http://www.scalefinance.com/accounting-finance-and-groupons-...

[5] http://blog.agrawals.org/2011/09/24/groupons-cost-of-revenue...

[6] http://takingpitches.com/2011/06/04/groupon-s1-ipo-marketing...

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