Every morning, before anyone on my team even opens Ads Manager, we look at the same five metrics.
Not because platform metrics don’t matter, but because they’re only one piece of the story. Even with attribution platforms in place, platform metrics have become increasingly difficult to trust. At one point, we tested two attribution platforms on the same brand partner at the same time, and they were telling completely different stories.
So we start with the health of the business instead. These are the metrics we pay attention to most:
- Revenue pacing
- CAC
- MER
- New customer trends
- AOV
Those numbers tell us much more than platform ROAS ever could.
A campaign can have a great ROAS while quietly hurting the business. It might be relying too heavily on existing customers. Frequency might be climbing. New customer acquisition could be slowing down. None of those problems are obvious if you’re only looking at what’s happening inside platforms like Meta.
Ad buying has changed substantially, as it does almost every year. Understanding where your spend is going, how many net new customers you’re bringing in, and whether the business is actually getting healthier matters much more than chasing a high platform ROAS.
That’s how we’ve chosen to operate for years, and I genuinely believe it’s one of the reasons so many of our clients have stayed with us for 3+ years.