A mini-guide by Brian Roisentul, Founder & CEO of BSR and The DTC Insider.

Who is this for

Your ROAS looks fine. Spend is steady. Nothing looks broken. But sales are flat?

This is for you.

When was the last time you checked whether your Meta ads are pushing the products you really need to push?

Never? A while ago? This is for you.

If your Meta ad account looks like this:

This is for you.

Why the account looks fine and the business doesn't

That last one is the most common thing I hear from brands that come to us.

What usually happens next is the brand starts tweaking. New creative, new audiences, more budget, less budget. Maybe a new agency. Sometimes that helps a little, but most of the time they're fixing the wrong thing, because the problem isn't inside the campaigns. You won't find it by looking at the campaigns.

Look at that table again. An "August" campaign still running in October. Tests that never ended. Two retargeting campaigns at 7x–9x. Interests, a lookalike, a copy of an old sale, a catalog campaign from July. Almost everything ABO.

Nobody built this on purpose. It grew over time. Every new idea became a new campaign, and nothing got turned off. The account-level ROAS looks fine, so everyone's happy. But:

• The budget is spread too thin. No campaign gets enough data to find new buyers.
• Campaigns overlap. "Retargeting" isn't really retargeting anymore, and "prospecting" reaches warm audiences too.
• The algorithm is being micromanaged. ABO, saved audiences, interests and lookalikes are no longer needed.
• And the big one: nobody knows which products are actually getting the money.