Why reported ROAS is the wrong basis for a budget decision
Platform-reported ROAS is the most confidently wrong figure in marketing. It is not fraud; it is a structural artifact. Each platform can only observe the conversions it touched, so it reports on those and stays silent about the counterfactual. Run the exercise of summing reported revenue across all your channels and comparing it to the P&L, and the gap tells you exactly how much double-counting is baked into your optimization decisions.
The consequence is not academic. Budgets get shifted toward whichever channel is best at observing conversions, typically branded search and retargeting, which mostly intercept demand that already exists, and away from the channels that created the demand in the first place. The dashboard improves. The business does not.
Two areas: intent and measurement
The work splits into two questions that depend on each other. Intent decides where the money goes; measurement decides whether it worked, and referees the argument the first one starts.
Intent
Full-funnel planning organized around where the buyer actually is, matching channels to each level of intent, from latent demand to active demand, instead of by channel budget.
Intent & full-funnel →Measurement
Incrementality, media mix modeling, and attribution used for what each is good for, separating the spend that created revenue from the spend that just observed it.
Measurement & incrementality →What I do instead
Establish causality before allocating. Holdouts and geo tests are cheap relative to the budgets they govern. A test that costs a fraction of a quarter’s spend and reveals that a channel is half as productive as reported pays for itself immediately.
Allocate on contribution, not revenue. Revenue-based ROAS targets quietly push spend toward high-revenue, low-margin products. Allocating on contribution margin changes which campaigns look like winners, sometimes dramatically.
Model the whole mix, including what cannot be clicked. CTV, video, audio, and out-of-home (OOH) do real work that click-based systems cannot see. Modeling them alongside the trackable channels is the only way to stop underfunding the top of the funnel by default.
Keep the plan executable. Measurement that does not change a buying decision is a research project. Every read should terminate in a specific action: shift this budget, kill this line item, extend this test, raise this bid floor.
Where the work usually starts
Most engagements begin with the audit, because it is the fastest way to separate the three failure modes that look identical from the outside: an account executed badly, an account measured badly, and an account doing fine inside a strategy that was wrong to begin with. Those need entirely different responses, and guessing between them is how quarters get lost.
From there the sequence is typically: fix the obvious execution problems, stand up a measurement design you can defend, run the first tests, and then rebuild the allocation on what the tests actually said.
Player-coach, not slide deck
I still build the media plans, sit in the accounts, and produce creative. That is deliberate. A media strategy written by someone who has not looked at the account in a year is a hypothesis, and the difference between a hypothesis and a plan is whether the person writing it knows what will break.
Prefer this handled, not just explained? I take on fractional and advisory engagements in exactly this kind of work.