Every CFO wants to see strong ROAS numbers. A 10x or 20x return looks great in a report; it signals control, efficiency, and confidence.
But the truth is, a high ROAS doesn’t always mean your marketing is performing well. In many cases, it’s a sign that your growth system has stopped expanding.
Because great marketing isn’t about finding the highest ROAS. It’s about building a structure that connects efficiency, incrementality, and profitability; and knowing how to balance them over time.
Why ROAS Alone Misses the Point
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) measures the revenue generated by a specific amount of advertising spend. It’s useful, but limited, especially when you rely on platform-attributed ROAS, which only shows the conversions that an ad platform can see and take credit for.
That means it often double-counts, overstates, or misrepresents what’s really driving revenue. It’s not that the data is wrong, it’s that it’s incomplete.
Then there’s last-click ROAS, which attributes the sale to the final touchpoint before conversion. It ignores the upper- and mid-funnel work that built intent in the first place.
Both of these views are narrow. They optimize for efficiency, not growth.
The Shift from ROAS to Triangulation
Instead of searching for a single source of truth, the best marketers build confidence through triangulation, comparing multiple perspectives to understand what’s actually happening.
We use three lenses to measure performance:
- Efficiency – Platform data that helps guide short-term optimization (ROAS, CAC, CTR).
- Incrementality – Testing frameworks that measure what sales media truly adds (geo splits, holdouts, modeled lift).
- Business Impact – Broader financial metrics that show how marketing drives overall performance (MER, revenue growth, profit).
Each lens tells a different part of the story. Efficiency shows how your ads perform in isolation. Incrementality reveals what’s truly additive. Business impact connects it all back to financial outcomes.
When you view all three together, you don’t need perfect visibility, you gain directional confidence.
MER: The Growth Lever
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio), total revenue divided by total marketing spend, is often the most stable lens in this framework. It’s not about attribution; it’s about outcomes.
MER helps you understand the relationship between growth velocity and profitability:
- A lower MER means more aggressive investment. You’ll drive faster top-line growth but take on lower short-term profit.
- A higher MER means greater efficiency and profitability, but slower growth.
Neither is inherently better. The key is to know which direction to lean based on your business goals, audience maturity, and cash flow strategy.
That’s why we treat MER as a growth lever, not a target. Adjusting it lets you control how quickly you scale while maintaining healthy margins.
The Role of ROAS in the Bigger Picture
ROAS still matters, just in the right context.
It helps diagnose what’s happening within a channel or audience segment. A sudden drop might signal creative fatigue or audience saturation. But the goal isn’t to optimize every campaign for the highest ROAS possible. It’s to make sure each piece of the system contributes to your broader MER and profitability targets.
That’s what separates campaign-level optimization from strategic media management.
Building Confidence in an Imperfect System
No single metric can tell the full story of your marketing performance. But triangulation gives you something far more valuable than precision: confidence.
- Confidence to invest when attribution looks messy.
- Confidence to scale when ROAS temporarily dips.
- Confidence to defend spend because you understand the system, not just the snapshot.
That’s how great marketing teams operate, not by chasing perfect data, but by building a framework that makes sense of imperfect signals.
The Takeaway
A high ROAS might look like success, but it’s not the goal.
True performance comes from managing the balance between efficiency, incrementality, and profitability; and using MER as the dial that adjusts your speed of growth.
When you connect these lenses, you stop chasing metrics and start running a system designed to grow, sustain, and scale; no matter how imperfect the data looks on the surface.
