ROAS or profit — which should you optimise for?

ROAS is a measure of efficiency, not a measure of profitability. An account turning over ₺200,000 a month at 8x ROAS can leave less profit than one turning over ₺900,000 at 3x.

When margin is left out

If different product groups carry different margins, setting a single ROAS target across the whole account inevitably shifts budget to the wrong place. A lower ROAS is acceptable on high-margin products, while low-margin products need a considerably higher one.

Return rate

Return rates can run high in fashion and footwear. The ad dashboard does not see returns; a campaign that looks profitable there may in fact be losing money. The solution is to feed return data back as an offline conversion.

New customers versus existing ones

Remarketing campaigns almost always show a high ROAS, because they capture users who were going to buy anyway. Growth comes from acquiring new customers, and there ROAS is naturally lower.

What should you do?

Sending conversion value as gross profit rather than revenue moves the target the algorithm optimises for to the right place, with a single-line change.