The Profit Placebo (Incremental Lift)

The ROAS Mirage: Why Your 4.0x Return is a Lie

Stop looking at your ad account. It’s lying to you.

If you are logging into Facebook Ads Manager, staring at a 4.0x ROAS, and patting yourself on the back, you are not a marketer. You are a mark.

For those who skipped Econ 101, ROAS stands for Return on Ad Spend. It is the metric that supposedly tells you how many dollars you made for every dollar you burned.

• The Theory: You spend $1. You get $4 back.

• The Reality: You are suffering from a financial hallucination induced by a platform that is designed to take credit for things it didn't do.

Asking Mark Zuckerberg to report on how much money his ads made you is like asking a barber if you need a haircut. He’s holding the scissors, he has a boat payment due, and he is going to tell you whatever keeps you in the chair.

Asking Mark Zuckerberg to report on how much money his ads made you is like asking a barber if you need a haircut. He’s holding the scissors, he has a boat payment due, and he is going to tell you whatever keeps you in the chair.

It is time to wake up and realize that "Return on Ad Spend" is a vanity metric for the intellectually lazy.

The "Attribution Window" Scam

Most agencies love ROAS. They worship it. They send you colorful PDF reports showing a 5x return on retargeting campaigns and claim they are "scaling your business."

They aren't scaling your business. They are taxing your existing traffic.

Here is how the scam works, courtesy of the default Attribution Window:

1. A customer visits your site because they saw a TikTok, heard a podcast, or got an email.

2. They leave to check their bank account.

3. Facebook notices they were on your site and immediately slaps a retargeting ad in their face while they are on the toilet.

4. The customer buys (which they were going to do anyway).

5. Facebook claims 100% of the credit for the sale.

This is the equivalent of a pizza delivery guy standing at your door, handing you the pizza you ordered an hour ago, and then claiming he cooked it, grew the tomatoes, and built the oven.

You are paying for sales you would have gotten for free. You are lighting margin on fire to "acquire" customers who were already standing at the register with their wallets out.

The Only Metric That Matters: Incremental Lift

If you want to stop bleeding cash, you need to stop asking "What is my ROAS?" and start asking "What is my Incremental Lift?"

Incremental Lift is the measurement of sales that would not have happened without the ad.

It asks the one question your agency is terrified to answer: "If I deleted this ad campaign right now, would these people still have bought?"

If the answer is "Yes," your ad isn't a growth engine. It’s a toll booth you erected in front of your own checkout page. You are charging yourself a fee to let your own customers in.

How to Calculate It (Without Being a Nerd)

You don't need a PhD to figure this out. You just need the guts to run a Holdout Test.

Think of it as a scientific hostage situation.

1. Take your target audience. Let's say, 100,000 potential buyers.

2. Split them in half.

3. Group A (The Victims): Show them your ads. Bombard them. Stalk them.

4. Group B (The Control Group): Show them nothing. Complete radio silence. Treat them like they don't exist.

After 30 days, you look at the sales from both groups.

• If Group A bought $10,000 worth of stuff...

• And Group B (who saw ZERO ads) bought $9,000 worth of stuff...

Congratulations, you played yourself. You spent thousands of dollars to generate an extra $1,000 in revenue. Your "ROAS" might look huge on the dashboard because it's claiming credit for the $9,000 that was going to happen anyway, but your Incremental Lift is pathetic.

Real lift is when Group A buys $10,000 and Group B buys $0. That means your ads actually did something.

Asking the Dealer if the Supply is Clean: Platform Lift Studies

Meta and Google have automated robots that do this for you. They call them Conversion Lift Studies.

Technically, they use "Ghost Bidding" or "Intent-to-Treat" methodologies. They identify people who would have won the bid to see your ad, and then deliberately hide it from them to create a perfect scientific control group.

It is sophisticated. It is statistically sound. And it is run by a company that was sued for inflating video metrics by up to 900% to trick advertisers into spending more money.

Using their tool is like asking a drug dealer if his supply is pure. He’ll run the test for you, sure. But he’s also the guy collecting the cash.

Even so, I encourage you to run them. Why?

Because even with their thumb on the scale, the results are usually so shocking they’ll make you want to vomit. You’ll see that 15x ROAS retargeting campaign come back with a 0.8x lift.

They bury these tools deep in the "Experiments" tab for a reason. If every advertiser looked at them, their stock price would crash by noon.

• The ROAS Marketer: Spends $1,000 on retargeting "Add to Carts." Gets $5,000 in sales. Celebrates a 5x ROAS. Reality: $4,500 of those people were going to buy anyway via your abandoned cart email flow. Actual Value: $500. You lost money.

• The Apex Marketer: Spends $1,000 on cold traffic. Gets $2,000 in sales. Sees a 2x ROAS. Reality: These are brand new humans who didn't know you existed yesterday. Actual Value: $2,000 in new revenue + LTV.

Retargeting is shooting fish in a barrel and calling yourself a sniper. It looks impressive on a scorecard, but it doesn't fill the freezer.

Stop Optimizing for ROAS. Start Optimizing for Profit.

Your bank does not accept "ROAS" as a deposit. They do not care about your "Click-Through Rate." They care about Net Profit Dollars.

When you optimize for high ROAS, the algorithm does exactly what you tell it to do: It finds your existing customers, your email list, and your grandmother. It is definitely retargeting your Mom right now, charging you a $45 CPM just so she can click the link and leave a comment saying, "Looks great, honey! Love you!" You just paid Mark Zuckerberg $4.50 for a digital hug. 

It cannibalizes your organic traffic. 

To grow, you must be willing to accept a lower reported ROAS in exchange for higher incremental profit.

You need to bid on the expensive audiences. You need to fight for the 97% who aren't ready to buy yet. You need to measure Blended CPA and Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER).

The Verdict

If your agency is scared to show you your lift metrics, fire them. They are hiding behind the attribution window because it’s the only thing keeping them employed.

I don’t play the attribution game. I don’t care what the dashboard says. I care about how much heavier your bank account is at the end of the month.

I don't look for credit. I look for cash.

We are currently accepting 2 partners who are ready to stop looking at mirages and start building a fortress.

If you want a comforting lie about your 10x ROAS, go hire a "guru" who learned media buying on YouTube last week. If you want to know exactly how much money your ads are actually making, let’s talk.

👉 [BOOK YOUR STRATEGY SESSION] 👈