Chapter 01
The lie inside a blended number
A blended ROAS averages your cheapest clicks with your most expensive ones. It tells you almost nothing about whether you're growing.
When we picked up this account, the headline was a 4.0x blended ROAS and a team that felt good about it. The problem with a blended number is that it mixes two completely different jobs into one figure. Branded search, where someone already typed the company name, converts cheap and high. Non-brand, where you're actually buying a stranger, costs more and returns less. Average them and you get a number that hides the only thing that matters: is the part that grows the business working?
We pulled the two apart. Brand search was running at roughly 14x on $7K a month. Non-brand and the catalogue inside Performance Max were running at 2.4x on $45K, and Performance Max was quietly serving on branded queries and claiming the credit. So the real acquisition engine was at 2.4x, the flattering 14x was mostly demand that already existed, and nobody could see it.
What the split exposed
Before: one blurry number
- Brand and non-brand sharing campaigns and budget
- Performance Max serving on branded queries and taking the credit
- A 4.0x blended ROAS nobody could break down
- Non-brand quietly capped because it looked inefficient next to brand
After: two systems you can steer
- Brand isolated with its own budget and an impression-share target
- Performance Max brand-excluded at the account and campaign level
- Non-brand tiered by intent with margin-based targets
- Non-brand budget doubled once the real ROAS was finally visible