I sat down with Aly Hathcock on her podcast Humans of Growth to unpack a problem every ecommerce marketer eventually runs into - the numbers on your dashboard keep improving, but the business isn't actually growing faster.
They called it the ROAS trap. The short version — every ad platform reports on its own performance and every platform is incentivized to take credit. Meta grades Meta's homework. Google grades Google's. Stack those self-reported numbers together and you get a picture that looks great and hides where growth is really coming from (and where it isn't).
My argument on the episode is that blended ROAS tells you almost nothing about new-customer economics. A brand can post a strong blended number while its cost to acquire an actual new customer quietly climbs. The metric that matters isn't how much revenue an ad platform claims — it's what it costs you to bring in a customer who wasn't coming anyway. That's the number Wicked Reports was built to isolate.
The conversation gets into why "spend more where ROAS is high" is often exactly the wrong move, how holdout thinking changes the questions you ask and what a marketing scoreboard looks like when you decide the intention before you read the score.
It's a sharp, practitioner-level conversation and worth the half hour.
→ Listen to the full episode on Humans of Growth
Thanks to Aly Hathcock and the Perisson Network for having me on.
