Your ROAS is lying to you: an attribution field guide
In our audits, reported ROAS overstates real blended return by 20–30% on average. Not because anyone is cheating — because Meta, Google and GA4 each claim the same sale. One DTC client’s dashboards summed to 122% of actual revenue.
Add up platform-attributed revenue for one month and divide by actual revenue. Above 110% you’re double-counting — most audits land at 120–160% — and over-funding whichever platform claims most aggressively.
Compare branded-search and retargeting spend against what organic and CRM would capture anyway. In our marketplace audits, up to 29% of paid search bought clicks the brand already ranked #1 for.
Re-score campaigns on contribution margin — profit after all variable costs — per SKU or cohort, not blended ROAS. In 8 of 10 e-commerce audits, 20–30% of spend was buying revenue below break-even after shipping and returns.
Fixing attribution rarely recovers much money directly — median $3k. But it changes where every other dollar goes: it’s the finding that makes the other findings visible. All three checks run on exports you already have; the audit runs them (and thirty-four more) against your verified revenue data.
See how the audit verifies attribution →