The Risk of Optimizing Into a Loop While New Customer Growth Stalls
Did you know that many high-ROAS campaigns are actually just paying for the same customer twice?
For marketing agencies and e-commerce brands, relying solely on in-platform ROAS often leads to a treacherous paradox: your numbers look fantastic (e.g., a "6x to 10x ROAS"), but your core business metric—new customer growth—has stalled.
This was the exact challenge faced by our partner, One Core Media, and their e-commerce client, SweetLegs. They were leaning hard on retargeting and re-buy activity. The result, as One Core’s Denis Melnik put it:
“They spent last year paying for existing customers again and again… no top-of-funnel prospecting. Platform return on ad spend looked 6–10x — but it was misleading.”
The Hidden Cost of the Attribution Gap
The core problem is the lack of a Single Source of Truth that bridges the gap between ad spend, web analytics (GA), and CRM/Order data.
Without this unified view, cross-referencing UTMs and platform data is slow, messy, and fails at the most critical task: attributing campaign-level spend to new customer outcomes. This creates an environment where you are optimizing for persuasive platform ROAS—the easy win—rather than for profitable nCAC (New Customer Acquisition Cost).
The Solution: FunnelVision and Unbiased Truth
One Core Media needed an unbiased, shared source of truth that both the agency and the client’s executive team could rally around. They implemented Wicked Reports FunnelVision to put platform and revenue data side-by-side, achieving a clear, model-aware analysis.
They achieved clarity by:
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Standardizing Views: Creating dedicated reporting for Top-of-Funnel (TOF) vs. Retargeting/Bottom-Funnel spend allocation.
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Model-Aware Analysis: Using First-Click and Full-Impact models to fairly judge new-customer prospecting, while keeping Linear models for blended sanity checks.
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Smart VTC: Carefully tuning view-through confidence for brand-lift and video (where it matters) without the risk of over-crediting.
The SweetLegs Result: Half the Spend, More New Customers
The results of this strategic pivot speak for themselves:
After refocusing away from double-paying for existing customers and re-balancing toward new-customer acquisition, One Core reports that in the first 7–8 months under the new approach, their client generated more revenue and more new customers on roughly HALF the spend compared to the prior year period.
This isn't just an anomaly—it’s the difference between marketing that looks good and marketing that drives profit.
Are you ready to stop subsidizing the retargeting loop? See how our platform can transform your attribution and shift your budget from optimization to profitable scaling on our Wicked Reports Platform Overview page. You can also explore more real-world Case Studies to see how businesses like yours are achieving success with our solution.
FAQ
Why is high in-platform ROAS sometimes misleading for e-commerce growth?
High in-platform ROAS is often misleading because it over-credits retargeting campaigns (bottom-funnel activity), causing companies to double-pay for existing customers. This masks the true cost of acquiring new customers (nCAC), stalling overall business growth.
What is FunnelVision, and how does it solve the attribution problem?
FunnelVision is a reporting feature in Wicked Reports that acts as an unbiased, single source of truth. It puts platform and order data side-by-side, allowing users to apply specific models (like First-Click and Full-Impact) to clearly evaluate Top-of-Funnel (TOF) prospecting and accurately measure new customer lifetime value.
How did One Core Media's client, SweetLegs, benefit from this approach?
By using Wicked Reports to re-balance spend away from the retargeting trap and toward profitable new customer acquisition, SweetLegs generated more total revenue and more new customers on roughly half the advertising spend compared to the prior year period.
