How To Improve ROAS (And When To Ignore It)

ROAS tells you how much tracked revenue a channel reported against its spend. It doesn't know your margins, your returns, your repeat rate, or whether the revenue would have happened anyway. Optimising it in isolation reliably produces a smaller, more efficient, less profitable business.

Ways to genuinely improve it

• Raise average order value through bundling and thresholds — the fastest lever on the revenue side.
• Improve landing page conversion so the same traffic produces more orders.
• Increase creative variance so delivery finds better matches.
• Fix event coverage so revenue that already happened is actually attributed.

Ways it improves while the business gets worse

• Cutting prospecting and living on retargeting — high ROAS, shrinking new-customer count.
• Heavy branded search spend that harvests demand you already had.
• Discounting into a ROAS target and destroying contribution margin.
• Narrow targeting that finds existing customers and calls them acquisition.

What to look at instead

1. New-customer CAC and new-customer share of revenue.
2. Contribution margin after ads, returns, shipping and payment fees.
3. Blended marketing efficiency: total revenue over total marketing spend.
4. An incrementality check — geo holdout or spend-down test — at least twice a year.

A sane reporting setup

Keep platform ROAS as an in-account diagnostic for comparing creative. Use blended efficiency and contribution margin for budget decisions. Never let those two views be maintained by different people who don't meet.