Moving beyond channel-specific metrics isn't about abandoning them, but about putting them in their proper place. The core challenge for ecommerce brands right now is that the old playbook of optimizing campaigns to a target ROAS or LTV has become a race to the bottom. It creates a fragile dependency on ad platforms and ignores the single biggest driver of long-term value: a brand that is culturally relevant and adaptable. The real goal is to build a business with a strong, resilient foundation that isn't wholly dependent on the whims of Meta or Google's algorithms.
The landscape has shifted dramatically. Post-ATT signal loss made in-platform metrics less reliable, and the rise of AI-driven campaign management on platforms like Meta means the old levers for optimization are less effective. As Connor Rolain and the Marketing Operators crew often discuss, we're in Meta’s “Andromeda Era,” where the algorithm has more control. Your primary input for differentiation is now your creative and your brand's story. In this world, the most important metric isn't your cost per acquisition but the strength of your brand's underlying pulse.
This is why I'm convinced the most important metric to start tracking is your baseline revenue. Connor Rolain on the Marketing Operators podcast defines this as the revenue your business generates without any paid media spend. It is the clearest indicator of your brand's health, momentum, and resilience. If you turn off the ads, do people still seek you out? Does your brand have gravity? A growing baseline revenue means you're building real enterprise value, while a flat or declining baseline indicates you're just buying customers on a treadmill.
From Tactical Tweaks to Foundational Strength
The consensus is right that you can't trust last-click attribution, but it's wrong about the solution. The answer isn't a more complex attribution model that tries to perfectly assign credit for every dollar. That's just a more sophisticated version of the same old thinking. The real solution is to zoom out. The Hierarchy of Metrics framework, which Richard and Tony Chopp broke down on Ecommerce Playbook, is the perfect mental model for this. You start at the top with your business goals, like contribution margin and profitability. Then you move down to customer-level metrics (new vs. returning), and only then do you get to channel-level metrics like ROAS. In this model, ROAS is just a lever you pull to achieve the higher-order goals, not the goal itself.
This perspective shift gives you permission to make investments that don't have a clean, immediate ROI. Ash McMullen’s story on Ecommerce Braintrust about a major brand re-launch is a powerful example. He stressed that success required looking beyond ROAS, even planning for it to get worse in the short term, because the primary driver was