This episode challenges the common misconception that a high Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) directly translates to business growth. It reveals how metrics within ad platforms like Google and Meta can be inflated by existing customer sales, brand traffic, and attribution models, leading ecommerce operators to mistakenly believe their advertising is scaling effectively. Learn to look beyond platform-reported ROAS to truly understand new customer acquisition and overall revenue growth.
Your Google and Meta ROAS looks great. Ad spend is increasing. The platforms are telling you everything is working. So why isn’t the business actually growing? In this episode, Mark and Ian Hammersley unpack one of the most common problems they see in ecommerce businesses: brands dramatically increasing their advertising spend while recruiting the same number, or even fewer, new customers. They explain why a high ROAS inside Google or Meta can give you a completely misleading picture of performance, particularly when existing customers, brand searches and attribution are inflating the numbers. The conversation covers how to step back from the advertising dashboards and answer the question that actually matters: When we put more money into advertising, did we get more money and more new customers out? Mark and Ian also break down the ecommerce advertising S curve, where increasing spend initially drives growth before eventually reaching a point where putting more money into the account stops producing meaningful additional revenue. And when you hit that limit, the answer is not always better ads. Sometimes you need to improve the business itself. They discuss: • Why a high ROAS does not automatically mean your ads are working • How Meta can attribute existing customer sales to advertising • Why one day view attribution can distort performance • How Google brand traffic can inflate ROAS • Why new customer revenue matters more than platform ROAS • How to identify when an ad account has reached its scaling limit • The ecommerce advertising S curve • Why simply increasing your budget eventually stops working • How conversion rate, AOV and lifetime customer value affect how far you can scale • Why agencies can sometimes show you the numbers you want to see instead of the numbers you need to see If you run an ecommerce business and keep increasing your advertising budget without seeing the growth you expected, this episode could help explain ex