Hi everyone,
My shopify store’s ROAS is stuck around 1.3 and I need to lift it fast. What specific changes (audience tweaks,creative angles,budget shifts) helped you push your ROAS higher?
Any concrete tips or workflows are welcome. Thanks!
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Hey there!
Improving ROAS is tough, but a few things can really help: testing different creative angles, refining your audience targeting (especially lookalikes), and cutting spend on underperforming segments. Sometimes just tweaking the messaging or format makes a big difference.
On our side, I work on Kuma, and one strategy that’s worked well for our users is using the Champion audience we generate by default (based on RFM). Creating lookalikes from that group has literally doubled ROAS for some stores.
Happy to share more if helpful!
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Hi CDiaz,
Thanks for posting! I know how frustrating it can be when your ROAS plateaus : but there are a few proven levers you can pull to try to lift it fast. Here are some concrete strategies that have worked for other merchants:
1. Refine Your Audience
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Narrow down to high-intent segments (e.g. website visitors in last 30 days, cart abandoners).
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Exclude low-performing broad interest audiences to stop wasting budget.
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If you’re not already, try lookalike audiences built from high LTV customers.
2. Test New Creative Angles
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Highlight different pain points or benefits in your ads, emotional storytelling sometimes outperforms product-focused visuals.
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UGC (User-Generated Content) often drives stronger trust and performance than polished creatives.
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Run 3–5 variations at once and kill underperformers quickly.
3. Budget Optimization
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Consolidate ad sets: fewer, stronger audiences tend to perform better after iOS14.
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Shift budget toward platforms/ad types showing best ROAS in your breakdown (e.g. Stories vs. Feed).
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Set tighter conversion windows (1-day click) to optimize for faster buyers.
4. Post-Purchase Email & SMS Funnels
- Make sure you’re not leaving retention money on the table. Sending upsells, review requests, or timed offers can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.
If you need help automating post-purchase email flows or recovering abandoned carts, you might consider trying our app Retentionly – AI Email Marketing it’s built specifically for Shopify stores and can help boost ROAS through smart win-back sequences and timed discounts (all AI-powered). Just a gentle suggestion if email isn’t part of your strategy yet 
Hope this gives you some actionable ideas to test! Feel free to share what you try, happy to provide feedback on ad angles or audience setups too.
Cheers,
Retentionly Team
If this helped, please give it a Like or mark it as a solution so others can find it too!
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Hey there,
I recommend incorporating a creative strategy. Show your product in real-life situations, not just studio shots. Short videos that follow a “problem > product > solution” format tend to perform well. Try unboxing videos, first-person views, or customer testimonials. Test 3–5 creatives weekly and pause the ones that don’t perform. Use tools like Motion or Shopify reports to track what works.
Next, your site needs to load fast, ideally under 2 seconds. Use tools like Hotjar to see where users drop off. Place a clear headline and call-to-action at the top. Add real customer photos and reviews for social proof. Highlight discounts with price anchoring (e.g., strike-through on original price). Try bundle deals or flash sales to create urgency.
When it comes to budgeting, avoid spreading small budgets across too many ad sets. Use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) to let Meta allocate funds effectively. Once you have consistent sales, test manual bidding or cost caps to scale profitably.
While you are at it, I also suggest boosting your Shopify operations with a product feed management app like AdNabu, which enhances your productivity and improves store performance with AI optimization to increase reach, headless store integration, keyword generation, instant Shopify sync, and more. The app focuses on improving the overall ROAS.
It aligns with GMC’s product rules, so AdNabu reduces or removes the chances of product disapproval.
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on your ad campaign, make more ads and change your targeting.
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ROAS stuck at ~1.3 is something we’ve seen a lot, especially with broad targeting and aggressive campaign scaling. When you hit that ceiling, it’s usually a signal-to-audience mismatch — not necessarily bad products or bad ads, but the wrong messaging to the wrong segments.
Here are some concrete changes that have lifted ROAS for stores we’ve worked with:
Audience Tweaks- Break out warm audiences by lifecycle stage (e.g., high spenders vs. one-time buyers) and tailor creative separately.
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Exclude low-LTV clusters when scaling — these often click but rarely convert.
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Use custom lookalikes built from your best clusters instead of default purchase events.
Creative Angles- Speak directly to the need-states of specific customer types (e.g., urgency for frequent buyers, social proof for first-timers).
- Build creative around top products per segment rather than general catalog highlights.
Budget Strategy- Don’t pour more into top-performing ad sets — identify why they work, and replicate that logic with new clusters or creatives.
- Test segment-specific funnels with lower budgets first, then scale what proves efficient.
All of this becomes a lot easier (and faster) when you have the right customer intelligence.
That’s where Lumino comes in. It’s like having your own business intelligence consultant: it automatically clusters your customers using k-means, analyzes behavior and product trends, and gives you plain-language, actionable strategies based on real data — the kind of stuff big brands rely on teams of analysts to uncover.
Instead of guessing what drives ROAS, Lumino helps you focus budget on what actually works.
You can try it out for free here: https://apps.shopify.com/lumino-solution
More info: https://www.luminosolution.com/
Hi @cDiaz
I’ve run into this situation with a few stores before — ads bring in some results but the ROAS just won’t climb higher. In most cases, it’s not only about the ads themselves but how the whole funnel is set up. Here’s what I’d look at:
1. Audience Tweaks
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Problem: Broad targeting burns budget fast, and too much overlap between ad sets confuses the algorithm.
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Solution: Create custom audiences from your top 20% of customers (high spenders / repeat buyers) and then build lookalikes from them. Retarget people who added to cart or reached checkout in the last 30 days — these usually convert at 3–5x higher ROAS than cold traffic.
2. Creative Angles
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Problem: Same product creatives get ad fatigue quickly, and “catalog” style ads often don’t trigger emotion.
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Solution: Test UGC-style content (short video of someone unboxing or using the product) or “problem → solution” storytelling ads. Even small changes like adding captions, showing social proof (reviews), or highlighting “what makes your brand different” can improve CTR and conversions. Rotate creatives every 10–14 days to avoid fatigue.
3. Budget Shifts
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Problem: Many stores spread budget across too many ad sets, so none gather enough data to optimize.
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Solution: Consolidate into fewer campaigns. Scale the ad sets that already show ROAS >2.0 by increasing spend slowly (e.g., 20% every 3 days). Cap or pause anything that consistently stays below 1 ROAS — don’t let weak campaigns eat your budget.
4. Landing Page & Store Speed
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Problem: Even if ads are good, if the landing page loads slowly or feels cluttered, users bounce — which kills ROAS. From your PageSpeed screenshots, mobile performance especially is a concern (35 score is low).
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Solution: Compress images, remove unused apps/scripts, and enable lazy loading. A tool like Website Speedy (what I use) can automate most of this on Shopify — so your ad spend isn’t wasted on users dropping before the page even loads. Faster site = higher conversions = better ROAS.
Don’t just look at ads in isolation. ROAS improves when your targeting, creative, budget allocation, and store experience all align. Test one change at a time, measure impact, and double down on what works.
Recommended: making sure your site runs smoothly with optimized images, faster load times, and cleaner scripts can actually support your ad results too. When visitors land on a page that loads instantly and feels effortless to use, you naturally reduce cost per acquisition, lift ROAS, and stretch your ad budget further. .You can check it out here: Website Speedy app on Shopify app store is designed to handle this automatically in the background, so you can focus on scaling ads while your store stays fast.
(Disclaimer : we are the developers of this app happy to answer any questions)
You don’t need to improve your ROAS, 1.3 it’s fine, don’t let people to convince you otherwise.
What do you need is to use customer segmentation actively with Shopify email to send relevant campaigns to existing customers.
Repeating sales is the real growth.
Acquisition drains, Retention compounds