Why can an ad with a ROAS of 3.8 still lose money?

This is one of those cases where a good ROAS can be pretty misleading. I’ve had campaigns look great in Meta and then look a lot less exciting once you account for the actual costs behind the order.

I also wouldn’t use one fixed break-even ROAS across the whole store. A product with a 70% margin and one with a 30% margin can have completely different thresholds even if they’re both running through the same ad account.

For me, the useful number is what is left after the sale, not just how much revenue Meta is claiming. COGS, shipping, discounts and refunds can completely change the picture.

I think the same principle applies to SEO. Traffic and rankings are useful, but they don’t tell you much if you don’t know which pages are actually contributing to revenue. That’s one reason I like having the Analytics revenue data alongside the SEO data in SiteGuru. It makes it easier to prioritize the pages that are actually worth working on rather than chasing numbers that look good in a report.