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Passive acoustic surveys provide a convenient and cost-effective way to monitor animal populations, and methods for conducting and analysing such surveys are undergoing rapid development. However, no standard metric exists to evaluate the proposed changes. Furthermore, the metrics that are commonly used are specific to a single stage of the survey workflow, and may not reflect the overall effects of a design choice. Here, we attempt to define the effectiveness of acoustic surveys conducted in two common frameworks of population inference—occupancy modelling and spatially explicit capture-recapture (SCR). Specifically, we investigate precision as a possible metric of survey performance, but we observe that it does not lead to generally optimal designs in occupancy modelling. In contrast, the precision of the SCR density estimate can be optimised with fewer experiment-specific parameters. We …