ROAS Isn’t Enough for Media Measurement
For more than a decade, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) has been the north star of performance marketing. It’s easy to calculate, easy to communicate, and it seems to give a clear answer: “Did my ads make money or not?”
The truth is in 2025, ROAS alone can’t tell you whether your media strategy is actually driving growth. In fact, an overreliance on ROAS often leads brands to underinvest in the future and overcredit the past.
It’s time we move beyond ROAS as the primary measure of success.
Why ROAS Falls Short
It’s a Lagging Indicator
ROAS is backward-looking. It tells you how dollars performed after the fact but not whether your strategy is creating future demand or customer loyalty.
It Ignores Incrementality
A high ROAS might look great, but without incrementality testing, you don’t know how much of that revenue would have happened without your ads. This is how brands end up “buying their own sales” and mistaking correlation for causation.
It Penalizes Upper-Funnel Investment
ROAS naturally favors bottom-funnel channels like search or retargeting because they capture conversions closest to the sale. But that bias often comes at the expense of awareness, brand equity, and the mid-funnel work that fuels sustainable growth.
It Overlooks Customer Value
Not all customers are created equal. Two conversions with the same ROAS can have wildly different impacts depending on repeat purchase behavior, lifetime value, and margin contribution.
A Smarter Framework for Media Measurement
Brands that want to grow need to replace single-metric thinking with a portfolio of measurement approaches:
Incrementality Testing – Prove what’s truly driven by media vs. what would have happened organically.
Blended ROAS – Step back and assess efficiency across channels, not just in siloed platform dashboards.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Models – Measure not only what a customer spends today, but what they’re likely to spend over their lifetime.
Media Mix Modeling – Apply statistical models that account for cross-channel influence and privacy limitations.
Together, these methods give a more complete picture of both efficiency and effectiveness.
Shifting the Mindset
ROAS still has a place. It’s quick, accessible, and directional. But it should be treated as one data point in a broader measurement framework and not the decision-maker.
The brands that win over the next five years will be those that balance short-term efficiency with long-term brand growth, investing in measurement systems that reflect the true complexity of the customer journey.
In other words: ROAS is the starting point, not the finish line.