your 6x ROAS might actually be a 1x

over the last two emails I showed you the fun side of going ai-native.

the google ads agent that runs on its own (if you’ve missed the video here’s a link) the openai ads manager I’m testing. my brother and cousin doing €1.7k in 7 days with basically no skills

They’re at €4k+ currently

(quick update on that openai ads manager btw - still too early… I’ll report back the second I get more data)

but here’s the part that’s been sitting in my head for long time.

you can hand the whole work to AI. great.

but if the numbers it’s directing your business are wrong… it doesn’t help you grow. it just drives you off the cliff faster

and most of you are making a decision by a fake number right now.

your in-platform ROAS

I’ve said this for years and I’ll keep saying it: no single platform tells you the truth.

Facebook says one CPA. Google says another. Every platform wants to take credit for its own homework and gives itself an A+

here’s data:

46 Meta incrementality studies got run on DTC brands early last year - proper geo-holdouts, some brands with 4x+ “reported” (or platform) ROAS had a true incremental ROAS under 1.0.

under ONE!!!

Which means: turn the ads off, make roughly the same money.

the gap between what the platform CLAIMS and what your ads actually CAUSED is usually 2-3x.

Why?

last-click.

The sale that was already gonna happen gets recorded by whatever ad showed up last. your ad walks in at the finish line and takes credit for the whole race.

why this matters more THIS month than last month

If you’re not living under a rock, you already know that anthropic dropped a new model a few weeks ago (Fable 5). first one ever to break 90% on their analytics benchmark. it can run for days inside an agent, pulling data and checking its own work.

which means AI can now calculate your numbers better than most analysts.

so the bottleneck of data analysis is slowly getting removed

It’s not “can I process the data” anymore.

it’s “am I feeding it a number that’s actually TRUE.”

Which mean, garbage in, scaled-garbage out.

So here’s how I optimize most of my accounts.

I don’t start with metrics. I start with the goals.

the only screen I trust has 4 things on it:

• blended total spend vs total revenue (this number literally cannot lie to you)
• contribution margin (the profit after the real costs)
• new customer % (am I actually growing, or re-buying the same people)
• cost per NEW customer (not blended CPA, new)

everything else

• platform ROAS,
• CTR,
• CPM

is just a directional metric or serves a different purpose when guiding the account, and if a number doesn’t have a goal, you just remove it from your dashboards.

three questions the dashboard has to answer:

1. We invested X in marketing, what was the Y result.
2. What’s our weekly, monthly, quarterly goal and how do we get there
3. What KPI can I influence

Here’s a screenshot of an audit and the numbers that probably lie the media buyers (or confuse the founders):

So what does this means for you?

before you trust another on-platform ROAS number, get your REAL (money in the bank) one.

next email I’m gonna show you the single biggest lie dashboards exposed for me…

it’s your retargeting.

the campaign you’re proudest of. the “8x ROAS, obviously working” one.

it’s probably the least incremental thing in your whole account.

Talk soon,

Kris