$85k/mo spend · Google + Meta · 2.1× ROAS · last-click attribution
Six months of increased spend. ROAS went nowhere. Turns out 38% of the budget was funding channels that never drove a single purchase.
The Problem
The marketing director had been telling the board ROAS was "stable." What she didn't know: 38% of monthly spend was cycling through social touchpoints that never influenced a purchase — they just happened to appear before a conversion that was going to happen anyway. Attribution was last-click only, so the channel that got the final click took all the credit. The channels doing the actual work got defunded. She'd been optimising the wrong thing for six months.
What We Built
We rebuilt attribution before touching a single campaign. A data-driven multi-touch model exposed exactly where spend was leaking. Within 14 days, ML bidding was live across Google Shopping and Meta — reallocating budget toward high-intent signals in real time. A structured creative testing cadence identified winning formats in the first two weeks. No budget increase. Just the same money going to the right places.
“"Stable ROAS" meant we weren't looking hard enough. The data was there the whole time. We just weren't reading it right.”
— DTC E-Commerce Client