Tips to make your digital marketing strategy succeed in Black Friday
Black Friday is one of the most important shopping occasions during the year. All brands compete with each other for the attention of users, so it is...
In the fast-paced digital marketing landscape, the competition for consumer attention is fiercer than ever. It's no longer enough to have a great product and a creative campaign; success is defined by the efficiency and intelligence with which you operate. Every day, marketers face an ever-expanding ecosystem of channels, from established giants like Google and Meta to emerging platforms like TikTok and Twitch, each with its own language, audience, and dashboard. This landscape, while full of opportunities, presents a monumental challenge: data chaos.
The reality for many teams is a daily struggle against "information silos." Hours are spent in a manual and error-prone ritual: exporting reports from Google Ads, downloading spreadsheets from Meta Business Suite, capturing screenshots from TikTok Ads Manager, and then trying, with varying degrees of success, to unify all that information into a single spreadsheet. This process not only consumes valuable time that could be spent on strategy, but also offers a fragmented, retrospective view of reality. It answers the question "What happened last week?" but rarely provides a definitive answer to the more important one: "What should we do next week to grow?"
Amidst this whirlwind of metrics, clicks, and impressions, there's a compass that guides every decision toward the true north of profitability: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) . ROAS is more than just a KPI; it's the universal language that translates marketing efforts into business results. It's the metric that demonstrates value, justifies budgets, and ultimately determines the sustainability of any paid growth strategy.
This article is a guide to transforming this data chaos into a source of strategic clarity. We'll explore how to go beyond simply measuring ROAS to make it the linchpin of a continuous optimization machine. We'll demonstrate that the solution lies not in working harder, but in working smarter, adopting a methodology and tools that overcome fragmentation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- How to take advantage of marketing reports
- What is ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)?
- Keys to maximizing your ROAS based on your reports
How to take advantage of marketing reports
Building a data-driven business is a difficult task, but how about starting with your brand's marketing reports? Let's look at some tips for gaining more accurate data that will allow you to make more informed decisions, create precise strategies, adjust goals, and find opportunities to grow your business.
-
Start with a plan: Gaining consistent insights should be one of your goals, but first you need to decide how to find them.
-
Find opportunities in your strategy: Gain qualitative insights from your campaign metrics. Measure your strategy execution with equivalent KPIs and attribution windows across all platforms.
-
Consider qualitative data: Don't overlook data such as social media comments, online reviews, related images, and many other sources of information that speak to your brand. There are many business opportunities in this unstructured but qualitative content.
-
Monitor, adjust, and experiment with data: Take control of all your brand's data sources, optimize every step of the collection process, and experiment with the opportunities you find.
Using marketing reports correctly can boost the ROAS of your campaigns.
What is ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)?
If you're looking for a metric to understand how an ad campaign is performing and determine whether it's making or losing money for your brand, ROAS is the answer.
It's a ratio that shows how much revenue is generated for each amount spent on advertising. It's not a return on investment, as ROI measures the success of the overall strategy. You can think of ROAS as the ROI of paid media.
A simple formula for calculating return on ad spend (ROAS) is
ROAS = Campaign Revenue / Campaign Cost
So what is considered a “good ROAS”?
This is the key question, and the answer is: it depends . A "good ROAS" isn't a universal number. It intrinsically depends on your profit margins and operating costs.
- A business with an 80% margin can be highly profitable with a 3:1 ROAS.
- A business with a 20% margin will need a ROAS above 5:1 just to cover costs and become profitable.
Therefore, the first step is to calculate your break-even ROAS , the point at which you neither make nor lose money. From there, you can define a Target ROAS that ensures the desired profitability.
Keys to maximizing your ROAS based on your reports
A well-structured marketing report is your dashboard. Use it to implement these key strategies and take your performance to the next level.
Key 1: Define clear objectives and measure what matters
Your reports should reflect your goals. Not all campaigns aim for immediate sales.
- Performance Campaigns: The main objective is direct conversion (sales, leads). Here, ROAS is the key KPI, along with Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and Conversion Rate (CVR) .
- Branding/Reach Campaigns: The goal is brand visibility and awareness. Direct ROAS will be low or zero. Here, you should measure metrics such as reach, impressions, frequency, and brand lift .
Your reports should clearly separate the performance of each campaign type to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions.
Key 2: Know and analyze the customer journey
A customer rarely buys the first time they see an ad. The customer journey often involves multiple touchpoints across different channels (social media, search, email).
- Use your reports to: Map out the most common conversion paths. Do users discover your product on Instagram, then search for it on Google, and finally purchase after receiving an email?
- Attribution Models: Ditch the "last click" model. It doesn't give credit to the channels that initiated the interest. Explore models like "data-driven," "linear," or "position-based" in your Google Analytics or advertising platform reports. This will allow you to allocate budget more intelligently to the channels that assist in the conversion, not just those that close it.
Key 3: Segment, segment, and segment again
An overall ROAS of 4:1 can hide an important truth: you could have one campaign with a 10:1 ROAS and another with a 1:1 ROAS that's draining your budget. Segmentation in your reporting is crucial.
Break down your ROAS by:
- Channel and Platform: What works best: Google Search, Instagram Stories, or TikTok?
- Campaign and Ad Group: Identify the most profitable themes, offers, and angles.
- Audience: Compare the ROAS of your remarketing audiences (generally high) with that of similar (lookalike) audiences or interest-based audiences. This will tell you where to scale your investment.
- Creativity: Tag your ads (e.g., "video testimonial," "product image," "discount offer") and analyze which format and message resonate most and generate the greatest return.
- Demographic and Geographic Data: Find out if certain age groups, genders, or locations are more profitable for your business.
Key 4: Optimize creatives and landing pages
Your reports will tell you which ads aren't working, but your analysis needs to uncover why.
- Ads with high CTR but low CVR: The ad is compelling, but the landing page doesn't deliver on its promise or is confusing. The problem isn't with the ad, but with the website. Optimize the landing page to match the ad, improve loading speed, and simplify the purchasing process.
- Ads with low CTR: The message or image isn't relevant to the audience. This is a clear signal to run A/B tests with new images, videos, text, and calls to action (CTAs).
Key 5: Act on data for continuous optimization
A report is only useful if it leads to action. Establish a routine (weekly or biweekly) to review your reports and make decisions:
- Pause what's not working: Stop campaigns, ads, or audiences that are consistently below your break-even ROAS.
- Scale what works: Gradually increase (15-20% each time) the budget of your winning campaigns, closely monitoring that the ROAS remains stable.
- Optimize Average Order Value (AOV): If you acquire a customer, maximize their value. Implement cross-selling and upselling strategies on your website. An increase in AOV directly impacts ROAS without the need to increase advertising investment.
- Build loyalty to improve lifetime value (LTV): A modest initial ROAS can be very profitable in the long run if the customer returns to buy again. Use your reporting data to create remarketing and loyalty campaigns targeting existing customers.
Ultimately, transforming your marketing reports into a tool for maximizing ROAS requires a shift in mindset: from simple observation to strategic action. By defining clear objectives, understanding the customer journey, segmenting accurately, and relentlessly optimizing, you'll ensure that every dollar invested is working as intelligently as possible to grow your business.
Stop getting lost in spreadsheets : with Adsmurai's dashboards and reporting, you'll have all the information you need in one place visual, up-to-date, and ready for quick decision-making. From campaign performance to cross-channel comparisons, all with a click.
Leave a comment!
10 Key digital marketing trends for 2025
2025 promises to be a year of profound transformation in the digital marketing landscape, driven by technological advances, changes in consumer...
How Rising Feminism in China is Shaping Brands’ Marketing Strategy
Feminist movements in China are developing in a quiet yet steady manner. During COVID-19, chinese feminists and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) organized...