The paid media agency is reporting a ROAS that looks strong. The business is not growing at the rate that ROAS should produce. You have been trying to explain the gap between those two things for two quarters and the explanation has not landed in a way that changes the budget conversation.
ROAS measures revenue attributed to spend. It does not measure whether that revenue would have occurred without the spend. In a business with established brand equity and significant organic and direct traffic, a performance campaign running on branded keywords is capturing revenue the brand was already generating and calling it return on ad spend. The number looks excellent. The incrementality, the actual commercial contribution of the marginal pound spent, is a fraction of what the ROAS is reporting.
This is not fraud. It is the natural consequence of a measurement framework that was built to justify spend rather than interrogate it. Every pound attributed to a branded search campaign that converted a customer who was already going to purchase is a pound of ROAS that exists in the report and not in reality.
The agency knows this. The question is whether the conversation about it is one your organisation is currently structured to have.
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