Yes, you must look past Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), but you can ignore most of the other metrics. For most businesses, the only numbers that provide more signal than noise are Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), and conversion rate. On its own, ROAS just tells you revenue for ad spend, not profit or customer quality. As guests like Robert Row and Dane Atkinson have pointed out, the real goal is to use data to inform strategy. Brendan Hughes made a great point on The eCom Ops Podcast about moving away from guesswork and toward metrics that show long-term value. Obsessing over ROAS can lead you to prioritize campaigns that attract one-time buyers, which looks good today but won't build a sustainable business.
The important nuance is that you don't need a complex, real-time analytics dashboard. The magic is in the relationship between the metrics, not the sheer volume of them. The key is understanding your LTV:CAC ratio. If it costs you $50 to acquire a customer who only spends $55 with you over their lifetime, your business is on a knife's edge. But if that customer is worth $300, you have a healthy margin to reinvest. Jake Cook talked about using RFM analysis on his show to segment customers, which is a simple and powerful way to see who your best customers are. As Oliver Palmer discussed on eCommerce Australia, this is what real data-driven decision-making looks like. It’s about using a few key numbers to answer specific questions and guide your strategy, not just collecting data for its own sake.