Your ad platform reports 1,000% ROAS. Where’s the money?
Your ad platform says you’re making ten dollars for every dollar spent.
You look at your actual revenue. You cannot find anything resembling that return.
Before celebrating the campaign or increasing its budget, figure out why.
Platform dashboards assign credit according to their own attribution rules. Those rules can make the report look much better than the business.
Here are a few places to look.
Brand search gets blended with customer acquisition. Someone searches for your app by name, clicks an ad and purchases. The campaign gets credit. Combine those results with non-brand searches, and the report can suggest you’re acquiring new customers far more efficiently than you actually are.
Existing customers get counted as new growth. A customer who already knows and buys from you sees a retargeting ad before purchasing again. That revenue appears in the report. Without separating new and existing customers, you can mistake repeat purchases for successful acquisition.
Multiple platforms claim the same purchase. A customer interacts with ads on several platforms before buying. More than one platform may claim credit. Add their reported revenue together, and you can end up reporting money the business never received.
The attribution window does a lot of the work. A purchase happens days after someone clicks or views an ad. Depending on the settings, the platform may still claim it. A longer window can make reported performance look better without an equivalent improvement in the business.
The revenue being reported isn’t the money you collect. Gross purchases, predicted lifetime revenue and actual proceeds are different things. Refunds, fees and failed payments matter. So does whether you’re comparing revenue earned over months with cash collected this week.
Start with a basic check: does the revenue being claimed reconcile with actual purchases?
Look at your payment processor, subscription records or app-store proceeds. Account for refunds, fees and payout timing so you’re comparing like with like. Your bank balance won’t match an ad dashboard line for line, but your team should be able to explain the difference.
Brand search and retargeting can be useful. The problem is using their reported returns to justify a broader acquisition budget without understanding what those numbers contain.
If the report says 1,000% ROAS and nobody can explain where that revenue is, you don’t yet have a case for increasing the budget. You have a report to investigate.
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