u/paxtonpro

Running $30k+/month on Meta and making kill/scale decisions based on platform ROAS? You're probably cutting profitable campaigns.

Here's the problem: iOS14 attribution gaps mean Meta only captures 40-60% of actual conversions. In-platform ROAS will always look lower than reality.

The fix is blended MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio):

Total Shopify Revenue / Total Ad Spend = Blended MER

This accounts for ALL revenue against ALL spend, regardless of attribution windows or pixel gaps.

Quick toggle test to find your real Meta contribution:

1. Pause Meta for 7 days

2. Watch blended revenue drop

3. Restart Meta

4. Calculate the revenue gap

That gap is your actual Meta-driven revenue. Compare it to what Meta's dashboard reported — that's your attribution gap %.

Most brands running this find Meta contributes 1.5-2x what the platform claims. Campaigns that "aren't working" per ROAS are often your volume drivers.

Before you kill anything based on in-platform ROAS alone, run the blended MER check first.

If you are planning a giveaway, drop the prize idea and a little context. I will reply with the biggest quality risk I would fix before launch.

The useful question is not "will people enter?" It is "will the right people still care after the winner is picked?"

Please include:

• What you sell or promote
• Who you want to attract
• The prize or reward you are considering
• Where the first entrants would come from
• What you want entrants to do after the giveaway

I will look at five things:

1. Whether the prize filters for likely buyers or fans
2. Whether the entry action proves intent or just creates friction
3. Whether the distribution plan has a real seed audience
4. Whether the follow-up is ready before launch
5. Whether the pass/fail metric goes beyond raw entries

A few examples:

• A candle brand giving away its own bundle has better audience fit than a generic gift card.
• A creator giving away gear may need a topic-specific requirement so the list does not fill with prize hunters.
• A SaaS giveaway usually needs a narrower use-case prize or it becomes broad traffic with weak follow-up.

I will not ask for private account details, customer data, or anything sensitive. If the issue is billing, privacy, or account-specific support, take that to private support instead of posting it here.

Disclosure: I am part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Short answer: a giveaway tool should support entry actions that prove intent, create relevant distribution, or make follow-up better. Everything else is noise, even if it makes the campaign look bigger.

The mistake is treating entry actions like a checklist. More actions can mean more friction, weaker data, and a bigger list of people who only wanted the prize.

The actions I would actually support

1. One required relationship action

Usually this is an email opt-in. It gives you a way to announce the winner, follow up with non-winners, and measure whether entrants do anything after the giveaway.

If the campaign does not create a reachable audience, it has to win entirely on short-term attention.

2. One referral or share action

A referral action is useful when distribution matters. The important part is that each entrant gets a trackable link or share path, so you can tell whether the campaign spread through relevant people or just bounced around low-quality traffic.

This should be simple. If people need a long explanation to understand how to refer a friend, the action is probably too heavy.

3. One channel action only if the channel matters later

A follow, subscribe, watch, or social action can make sense when that channel is part of the real follow-up plan.

For example:

• A creator may want YouTube subscribers or TikTok followers who will actually watch after the prize ends.
• An ecommerce brand may care more about email opt-ins and referral links than three different social follows.
• A local business may want a simple signup plus one partner-share action, not a full social task wall.

If you will not use the channel after the giveaway, do not make it an entry action just because the tool allows it.

4. A purchase, signup, or customer event for the right campaign type

This is where the campaign type matters. A giveaway usually rewards entries and referrals. A customer referral program may reward a signup or purchase. An affiliate program may reward a tracked sale.

Those are not the same thing. The tool should keep the event, reward, and report separate so the campaign does not mix "brought a contest entrant" with "brought a paying customer."

5. A qualifier only when it changes follow-up

A short question can help if it tells you how to segment entrants later: product interest, use case, audience type, or buying timeline.

But do not ask questions just to collect trivia. If the answer will not change the welcome email, offer, or sales follow-up, it is probably noise.

What creates noise

These are the actions I would cut first:

• Five social follows that all attract the same low-intent person
• Tag-a-friend mechanics that reward spammy tagging instead of relevant sharing
• Actions that are hard to verify for a high-value prize
• Anything that adds friction but does not improve lead quality
• Actions that look good in the entry count but do not help after the winner is picked

A clean giveaway might only need email, one referral link, and one qualifier. That can be more useful than a campaign with ten tasks and no clear follow-up plan.

Where Blitz Rocket fits

Blitz Rocket supports giveaway entry actions, referral links, social actions, fraud checks, email sync, and purchase or signup tracking depending on the campaign type. The useful part is not adding every possible action. It is choosing the few actions that match the campaign goal.

The setup question should be: "What will this action prove, and what will we do with the entrant afterward?"

If the answer is unclear, I would remove the action.

Limitations

Verification is never perfect. Social actions can be affected by account connection, privacy settings, timing, browser settings, or whether someone already followed before entering. Fraud checks can reduce obvious abuse, but they do not prove that a lead is a good customer.

That is why I would not judge the campaign only by completed actions. Judge it by qualified entrants, referral quality, and what happens in the follow-up window.

My practical rule: every entry action should earn its place by improving intent, distribution, or follow-up. If it does not, it is noise.

What entry action have you seen create the most junk traffic: extra follows, tags, referrals, or something else?

Disclosure: I am part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Short answer: not total entries. A giveaway worked if it produced enough qualified next-step actions to justify the prize, promotion, and follow-up work. Entries, shares, and referral counts are useful diagnostics, but the deciding metric should be tied to what the business wanted after the giveaway ended.

Start with the job

A giveaway can be doing different jobs, so the metric changes:

Goal	Better success metric
Awareness	Qualified reach, relevant new subscribers, and follow-up engagement
Email/SMS growth	Qualified opt-ins plus opens, clicks, replies, or segment fit
Referrals	Referred entrants or customers who match the target audience, not just invites sent
Sales	Purchases, trials, demos, bookings, or repeat visits after follow-up
Creator/community growth	Returning viewers, subscribers, or members who keep engaging after the prize

If you pick the metric after the campaign ends, it is too easy to tell yourself the giveaway worked because one number looked good.

The three-layer scorecard I would use

1. Lead quality: what percentage of entrants match the buyer, fan, subscriber, or partner you actually wanted?

2. Distribution quality: which channels or partners brought relevant people, and what was the referral rate from those people?

3. Follow-up value: what happened 7, 14, or 30 days later? Opens, clicks, replies, purchases, trials, bookings, or another real next step.

That last layer is usually the one that decides the campaign. A giveaway that creates attention but no useful follow-up path is mostly a spike.

Simple example

Campaign A gets 1,000 entries from a generic prize. Most people never open the follow-up email, and only 5 look like real buyers.

Campaign B gets 180 entries from a niche prize. 90 match the target audience, 35 engage with the follow-up, and 12 take the next buying or booking step.

Campaign B is probably the better giveaway even though Campaign A looks better in a screenshot.

When entry count still matters

Entry count is not useless. If a campaign gets almost no entries, the problem might be distribution, prize appeal, partner fit, or friction in the entry flow. You need enough volume to learn.

The mistake is treating entry count as the final score. It is more like a pressure gauge: helpful, but incomplete.

My practical rule

Before launch, write the pass/fail sentence:

"This giveaway is worth it if it produces X qualified leads, Y referral rate, and Z follow-up actions by [date]."

Then judge the campaign against that sentence, not against the biggest number in the dashboard.

How do you usually judge a giveaway: raw entries, cost per lead, referral rate, purchases, or something else?

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Short answer: Blitz Rocket keeps contest referrals and customer referrals separate by treating them as different campaign contexts. A contest referral usually means "this entrant brought another entrant and may earn bonus entries." A customer referral usually means "this customer brought a signup or purchase and a reward may be owed." The tracking only stays useful when the link, reward rule, conversion event, and follow-up segment are defined before launch.

The difference

A contest referral is part of a time-boxed giveaway or contest. Someone enters, gets a unique share link, and earns extra entries or milestone rewards when friends join the contest.

A customer referral is part of an ongoing referral program. A customer or subscriber shares a unique link, and the important event is usually a friend signing up, buying, booking, or completing another conversion tied to the product.

Those can look similar because both use referral links. They should not be measured the same way.

How the workflow stays clean

1. Scope the link to the campaign. The participant link should belong to the specific giveaway, referral program, or affiliate program instead of being treated as one generic referral source.

2. Track the action that matters. For a contest, that might be referred entries or verified entry actions. For a customer referral program, it might be a signup, purchase, subscription, or other conversion event.

3. Keep rewards separate. Bonus entries, milestone prizes, store credit, and commission payouts create very different incentives. Mixing them makes fraud review and reporting harder.

4. Segment the people afterward. Entrants, referred entrants, customers, referred customers, and partners should not all receive the same follow-up. The business value usually shows up after the first action.

5. Review suspicious patterns before rewards go out. Duplicate accounts, disposable emails, self-referrals, VPN-heavy activity, or strange purchase patterns should be checked before winner selection or reward delivery.

Where Blitz Rocket fits

Blitz Rocket supports unique tracking links, referral actions, signup and purchase tracking, fraud checks, email sync, and reward workflows. The useful part is not just "more tracking." It is deciding which event makes a referral valid for that campaign.

For example:

• Giveaway: reward an entrant when a friend enters through their campaign link.
• Customer referral: reward a customer when a friend signs up or purchases through their referral link.
• Affiliate: pay a partner when a tracked sale meets the program rules.

Same family of mechanics. Different goal, different reward, different pass/fail metric.

Limitations

Attribution is only as good as the setup. If people share screenshots instead of links, switch devices, buy offline, use copied coupon codes, or come through privacy-heavy browsers, some source data can get messy. Fraud checks help reduce obvious abuse, but they do not replace a clear campaign rule or manual review for high-value rewards.

I also would not use referral tracking to prove lead quality by itself. A referral can show distribution. It does not automatically prove the new entrant or customer is a good fit.

Practical rule

Use contest referrals when you need campaign distribution around a deadline and prize. Use customer referrals when the existing customer relationship is the source of trust. You can run both, but I would not put them in the same report without labeling the goal, reward, and conversion event separately.

What usually causes more confusion in your campaigns: tracking who referred whom, deciding when a referral counts, or judging whether the referred person was actually qualified?

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Six months ago we stopped reporting Meta ROAS to clients and switched to blended MER. Here's what actually happened.

The attribution problem that pushed us there: we had clients running both Meta and Google. Meta was claiming credit for orders, Google was claiming credit for the same orders. Add them up and you'd get 200% of actual Shopify revenue. Neither number was wrong by platform logic. Both were useless for decision-making.

Blended MER fixed this. Formula is simple: Total Shopify Revenue / Total Ad Spend across all channels. If you spent $10k on ads and drove $40k in Shopify revenue, your MER is 4x. No attribution fights. No platform self-reporting.

A few things that actually changed once we switched:

Retargeting looked a lot worse. It was consuming 30-40% of budget at some accounts and claiming outsized ROAS. When you look at blended MER, retargeting is mostly harvesting people who would have bought anyway. We cut retargeting budgets and MER held or improved.

New customer acquisition became the actual priority. Blended MER doesn't care which campaign drove the sale. It cares whether total revenue justifies total spend. That makes you think differently about prospecting.

Creative testing got more honest. You stop optimizing for which ad Meta says drove conversions and start looking at whether total revenue moved when you changed creative.

One thing that didn't change: we still look at platform ROAS for campaign-level decisions within a single channel. It's useful context. It's just not the number we use to evaluate whether marketing is working overall.

Curious how others are handling attribution at this stage. Are you still primarily using platform ROAS or have you moved to something blended?

Short answer: the right format depends less on the prize and more on what you can distribute to, what action you want after entry, and how you will follow up. Share the basics and I'll suggest whether I would use a contest/giveaway, referral campaign, affiliate program, paid ads, or nothing yet.

Useful context to include:

• Business/product:
• Goal:
• Current seed audience:
• Available partner channels:
• Prize or offer idea:
• Follow-up plan:
• What would count as a qualified result:

How I think about it:

• Contest/giveaway: useful for awareness or list growth when the prize qualifies the audience.
• Referral campaign: better when current users, customers, or subscribers already like the offer enough to share.
• Affiliate program: better when partners can repeatedly recommend or sell to the right audience.
• Paid ads: better when the offer and landing page are proven enough that buying traffic teaches you something.
• Wait: better when the prize, audience, follow-up, or success metric is still unclear.

I'll keep feedback practical, not roast-y. I may ask follow-up questions if the answer depends on margin, audience, or channel constraints.

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Short answer: giveaways attract freebie hunters when the prize is more interesting than the product, the entry actions are too easy to game, and the follow-up does not separate qualified entrants from people who only wanted the prize. You reduce it by making the prize, entry requirements, referral loop, and post-campaign offer all point at the same audience.

## What “freebie hunter” means

A freebie hunter is not just someone who likes winning things. Everyone who enters a giveaway wants the prize.

The problem is an entrant who has no realistic interest in the brand, product, category, or next step after the winner is chosen. If most entrants fit that pattern, the campaign can look good on entry count and still create weak business results.

## 1. Start with prize-audience fit

The prize does most of the filtering. A broad prize creates broad demand. Cash, generic electronics, and unrelated luxury items can drive volume, but they usually tell you very little about whether someone cares about the business.

Better options are usually:

- Your own product or store credit

- A bundle tied to a specific use case

- Access, setup help, or an upgrade the right buyer would value

- A partner prize where the partner’s audience overlaps with yours

The test I use is simple: would this entrant still have a reason to care if there were no giveaway? If the answer is mostly no, the prize is probably too broad.

## 2. Add useful friction, not busywork

Friction is not always bad. The wrong kind lowers completion without improving lead quality. The right kind helps identify intent.

Useful friction might be:

- A clear email or SMS opt-in with consent

- One referral/share action if distribution matters

- One qualifier question tied to segmentation

- A purchase, demo, booking, or content action only when it matches the campaign goal

Weak friction is usually a long checklist of follows, comments, tags, and shares that the team will never use later. If an action will not change how you score, segment, or follow up with entrants, it is probably noise.

## 3. Design the referral loop so it does not reward spam

Referral entries can be powerful, but they can also reward whoever blasts the link the hardest.

A cleaner setup is to make sharing easy, explain the reward clearly, and avoid unlimited incentives that encourage low-quality volume. Depending on the campaign, you can use caps, weighting, fraud checks, or manual review for suspicious patterns.

The goal is not to punish people for sharing. The goal is to reward relevant sharing instead of raw volume.

## 4. Decide the follow-up before launch

A giveaway without follow-up is mostly a temporary attention spike. Before launch, define what happens to:

- The winner

- Non-winners who match the target audience

- Entrants who referred qualified people

- Entrants who look low-intent or suspicious

- People who answered a qualifier question in a useful way

This is where the campaign becomes measurable. If every entrant gets the same generic email afterward, you lose the chance to learn who was actually worth acquiring.

## 5. Measure quality, not just entries

Entry count is a weak success metric by itself. Better checks are:

- Qualified entrant percentage

- Referral rate from entrants

- Email or SMS engagement after entry

- Cost per qualified lead

- Purchases, trials, bookings, demos, or repeat visits after follow-up

- Fraud or duplicate-entry rate

A smaller campaign with fewer qualified entrants can beat a huge campaign full of people who disappear after the prize is awarded.

## When I would not run the giveaway

I would skip or delay it if the prize is unrelated to the buyer, the team cannot define a qualified entrant, there is no follow-up plan, or the business needs immediate profitable sales from day one. In those cases, paid ads, direct outreach, partnerships, or a simpler email capture offer may be cleaner.

My rule: a giveaway is worth testing when the prize, audience, entry action, referral mechanics, and follow-up all point at the same future customer.

What part tends to create the most low-quality entries in your experience: the prize, the sharing mechanic, or the follow-up?

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Most of the advice when Meta campaigns plateau is "refresh the creative" or "broaden your audience." Sometimes that's right, but it's usually not the first thing I check.

Before touching anything, here's my actual diagnostic order:

1. Check your frequency on winning audiences vs. new audiences separately. If frequency is spiking on your retargeting/warm audiences but flat on cold, you have an audience saturation problem, not a creative fatigue problem. The fix is audience expansion, not new ads.

2. Look at your cost per landing page view vs. CPM separately. If CPM is up but CTR is stable and CPLPV is up proportionally, you're paying more for the same attention — that's a bid competition issue, often seasonal or vertical-specific. If CTR is dropping but CPM is stable, that's creative fatigue.

3. Check your placement breakdown. Feed, Reels, Stories, and Audience Network can have wildly different CPMs and CVRs. When a campaign "stops scaling," it's often because one placement absorbed most of the budget at bad economics while your best placement is starved. Pull the placement breakdown and see if you have a clear winner that's only getting 20-30% of budget.

Once I know which of these is the root cause, the fix is usually obvious. The mistake is jumping to creative before ruling out the other two.

What's your go-to first diagnostic when a campaign stalls?

Short answer: Blitz Rocket helps turn a giveaway entry into a trackable follow-up path. The entry is only the start. The useful work after that is confirming who entered, giving each person a referral path, filtering low-quality entries, syncing the list, and measuring whether the campaign created qualified leads or sales instead of just entries.

1. Capture the entrant cleanly

A giveaway should collect the basics you need to follow up, usually email plus the entry actions that matter for the campaign. Keep this narrow. If the form asks for too much, completion drops. If it asks for too little, the list may be hard to use later.

2. Give every entrant a reason to share

After someone enters, Blitz Rocket can give them a unique referral link and bonus-entry path. This is where the campaign can move from a one-time prize draw into distribution: entrants invite people who are likely to care about the same prize or brand.

The important tradeoff is quality. A referral loop is only useful if the prize and message attract the right audience. A broad prize can still create broad, low-intent referrals.

3. Verify actions and reduce obvious noise

Entry actions are more useful when they prove something real: following the right channel, joining a list, visiting a page, sharing with a relevant friend, or making a purchase when that fits the campaign. Blitz Rocket supports verified actions and fraud checks, but the campaign still needs a sensible setup. No tool can make a vague prize or weak offer produce high-quality leads by itself.

4. Move entrants into follow-up

The best post-entry flow is usually simple:

• confirm the entry immediately
• remind entrants how referrals or bonus entries work
• sync qualified entrants to the email platform
• send one useful follow-up tied to the prize or product
• separate serious prospects from people who only wanted the prize

That follow-up is where the giveaway becomes useful for the business. Without it, the campaign mostly rents attention for the length of the contest.

5. Measure more than entry count

Entry count is easy to celebrate, but it is not the whole result. Better metrics are:

• qualified entrant percentage
• referral rate
• email or SMS engagement after entry
• cost per qualified lead
• purchases, demos, bookings, trials, or other post-campaign actions
• winner-selection quality after fraud screening

When Blitz Rocket is not the right fix

I would not expect the tool to solve a campaign where the prize is unrelated to the buyer, there is no follow-up plan, the team cannot define a qualified entrant, or the offer after the giveaway is unclear.

The tool helps organize the mechanics: entry capture, referrals, action verification, fraud screening, list sync, reward delivery, and attribution. The strategy still has to come from the brand: who should enter, why they should care, what they should do next, and how success will be judged.

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Short answer: use a giveaway when the main goal is owned-audience growth, referral reach, or learning who is interested before you sell. Use paid ads when the goal is immediate purchase intent, predictable targeting, or faster testing of a specific offer.

Both can work, but they solve different problems.

## Use a giveaway when distribution matters

A giveaway is strongest when you need people to share the campaign with others who might also care about the product. That usually fits:

- Pre-launch list building

- Product drops

- Creator or community growth

- DTC brands with a prize tied closely to the buyer

- Partnerships where both audiences overlap

The giveaway should still qualify people. A narrow product bundle, store credit, access, setup help, or niche prize usually creates better leads than a generic cash or electronics prize.

## Use paid ads when purchase intent matters more

Paid ads are usually better when you already know the offer converts and you want more control over audience, creative, budget, and timing.

They are also cleaner when the product needs an urgent sale, demo, booking, or trial rather than a longer follow-up sequence.

## The middle ground

A practical setup is to use ads to seed a giveaway, then let referrals reduce the cost of each qualified lead. In that case, the campaign should be judged by more than entry count:

- Cost per qualified lead

- Referral rate from entrants

- Email or SMS engagement after entry

- Sales, demos, bookings, or trials after follow-up

- Percentage of entrants who match the intended customer profile

## When I would skip the giveaway

I would not run one if the prize is broader than the buyer, the follow-up sequence is not ready, or the team cannot separate qualified leads from people who only wanted the prize.

A giveaway is not a shortcut around positioning. It works best when the prize, audience, entry action, referral loop, and follow-up all point at the same customer.

What would you choose for a first campaign: a small giveaway, paid ads, or both together?

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

Running 6 separate prospecting campaigns felt like the "safe" approach - cleaner data per creative angle, more control. Then we consolidated down to 2 broad campaigns with larger budgets and let Meta distribute more freely.

A few things shifted that I did not fully anticipate.

The creative that had been middle-of-the-pack in isolated campaigns started winning far more impressions once it competed in a larger pool with real budget behind it. Some creative just needs scale to find its audience.

CPMs dropped roughly 12% in the first two weeks post-consolidation. Fewer campaigns competing against each other in the same auction seemed to help, though timing could be a factor too.

The learning phase cleared faster on the consolidated campaigns despite more variables inside each one. Higher daily spend velocity appears to help Meta exit learning mode quicker than I expected.

The tradeoff: diagnosing what is actually working inside campaigns is harder now. You lose clean creative isolation when angles share budgets.

Has anyone else run a consolidation like this and tracked the before/after carefully? Curious whether the delivery changes I saw are typical or account-specific.

If you are unsure whether a giveaway idea will bring in real potential customers or mostly prize hunters, share the rough version here and I'll pressure-test it.

Helpful details to include:

- What you sell and who the ideal buyer is

- The prize you are considering

- The entry actions you want people to complete

- Whether referral sharing is part of the campaign

- What follow-up happens after someone enters

- How you will define success: qualified leads, referral rate, purchases, demos, bookings, or something else

I will look at three things:

1. Prize-audience fit: does the prize filter for people who might actually want the product after the giveaway ends?

2. Entry-action quality: do the required actions prove intent or create useful distribution, or are they just adding friction?

3. Referral loop and follow-up: is there a clear reason for entrants to share, and is there a plan for what happens after entry?

Please keep account-specific, billing, private customer data, and sensitive numbers out of the thread. General ranges are enough.

Disclosure: I'm part of the Blitz Rocket team, so I work on giveaway and referral campaign tooling.

We spent months testing creatives, audiences, and bid strategies trying to fix declining ROAS on a DTC brand. Every week, new hooks, new copy, new formats. Marginal improvements at best.

Eventually we ran a full CRO audit on the landing page and found:

• Mobile load time was 4.8 seconds (industry benchmark is under 2)
• Product page had 3 competing CTAs
• No social proof above the fold
• Add-to-cart button wasn't visible without scrolling on most phones

Fixed those 4 things. ROAS improved 31% without touching the ad account.

The lesson: ads get people to click. The page either converts them or kills the return. Both matter equally.

What's the biggest CRO win you've found that impacted your paid performance?

Been running paid social for ecom brands for years and this comes up constantly: a brand sees a 4x ROAS in Ads Manager and thinks they're printing money. Then you look at Shopify and the numbers don't match. At all.

Here's what's actually happening in our account.

Facebook's default attribution is 7-day click, 1-day view. That 1-day view piece is sneaky. Someone sees your ad, doesn't click, buys anyway through email or direct. Facebook claims that sale. Your email platform claims that sale. So does Google if they touched it. You're double-counting revenue across every platform, and the one claiming the most is usually Meta.

The 7-day click window has the same problem. Customer clicks your ad on Monday, abandons cart, gets a Klaviyo abandoned cart email Thursday, buys Friday. Meta takes credit. Klaviyo takes credit. Everyone wins except your understanding of what actually drove the purchase.

So what do you do?

MER - marketing efficiency ratio. Dead simple: total revenue divided by total ad spend across all channels. If you did $500k in revenue and spent $100k on ads, your MER is 5. That's your real number. It doesn't care which platform claims what.

The brands I see scaling past $500k/month aren't optimizing for platform ROAS anymore. They set a MER floor (usually 3-5x depending on margins) and use that as the north star. Meta ROAS becomes directional, not absolute.

Reality check you can do right now: pull your Shopify revenue for last week. Divide by total ad spend (Meta + Google + whatever else). Compare that to what Meta says your ROAS is. If Meta's number is 40%+ higher than your blended MER, your attribution is lying and you're probably making budget decisions on bad data.

This doesn't mean Meta isn't working. It just means you need better inputs to know how hard to push it.

What attribution model are you using? Curious how others are handling this. Or other tools? We also use Triple Whale to solve this but it's expensive.