Google Ads Devotee | 10M+ in ad spend | Stop losing profit on P-Max | Founder & PPC expert @ Prominence

Michael De Boeck

Supplier: Your invoice is due in 30 days.
E-com founder: I would like to pay my invoice with ROAS please.

Supplier: Excuse me?

Founder: Look at my Meta dashboard. 6x ROAS. We are "crushing it."

Supplier: That’s funny, but we need you to pay your invoice in actual dollars...

This sounds like a joke, but I see it in account audits every single week.

Founders are obsessed with "Efficiency" (ROAS) while their actual bank account is bleeding out.

The hard truth: You cannot spend your ratio.

ROAS is a platform metric, not a business health metric. If you’re managing your brand strictly by the ROAS column in Ads Manager, you’re likely making one of these three fatal errors:

1️⃣ overspending on existing customers 
A 5.0x ROAS sounds elite, but also screams "existing customers". Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of every e-commerce brand.

2️⃣ Not evaluating Contribution Margin at different efficiency levels
I’ve seen brands refuse to scale because their ROAS would "drop" from a 6.0x to a 4.0x, but would you rather have a 6x ROAS on $10k spend or a 4x ROAS on $100k spend ($200k profit)?

3️⃣ Optimizing for Revenue, not Contribution Margin 
Standard ROAS treats every dollar of revenue the same. But a $100 sale of a high-margin accessory is worth infinitely more to your business than a $100 sale of a low-margin hero product.

What you should be looking at instead:

👉 Contribution Margin (CM): What is left after COGS, Ad Spend, Shipping, and Transaction fees? This is the money that actually pays your staff and your rent.

The Bottom Line: 

If your media buyer is bragging about ROAS but hasn't asked to understand your P&L or shipping costs, they aren't a growth partner. They’re a vendor looking for a pat on the back.

Stop optimizing for the dashboard. Start optimizing for the bank account.

#ecommerce #performancemarketing #roas #profitability #dtc #growthmarketing #facebookads #googleads #shopify

Voted 3x Top 100 Most Influential PPC Expert | 20M+ In Yearly Ad Spend | Founder & Head Of Growth Strategy @ Prominence

✔️ List & pixel exclusions. ✔️ 64 purchases. ❌ 41 new customers.
Meta exclusions are fundamentally broken.

If you are relying on Meta's exclusions to keep your acquisition campaigns free of existing customers, you are being misled.

But even worse, you have no idea whether that new creative you are testing is showing a positive CPA because the creative is good, or because it accidentally hit a pocket of existing customers who converted.

Here's what you can do right now to improve your accuracy in Meta:

1️⃣ Use a NewCustomerPurchase event

This is the cleanest solution. Don't just fire a standard 'Purchase' event for everyone. Configure your tracking to fire a specific NewCustomerPurchase event only when the order count is 0. Optimizing your prospecting ad sets for this specific event forces the algorithm to hunt for new blood, not just easy wins.

2️⃣ Prioritize 7-day click
If your "prospecting" success relies heavily on 1-day view, you're likely just tagging people who were already going to buy. 7-day click is significantly more incremental. 1-day view often captures existing customers who just received an email or SMS and happened to see your ad in their feed. If the performance doesn't hold up on a click-only basis, it’s not acquisition.

3️⃣ Leverage CAPI with customer tags
Browser-side cookies are too fragile for reliable exclusions. By passing an external_id and a customer_status parameter via the Conversions API, you give Meta a much higher match rate against your database. If Meta knows for a fact that User A is a past purchaser, the exclusion actually stands a chance.

Efficiency isn't a lower CPA in the dashboard. It’s making sure your spend is actually driving incremental growth.

#facebookads #meta #shopify #ecommerce #performancemarketing #metaads #googleads

Return Customer Rate (%) is one of the most pointless numbers in e-commerce.

I see it in almost every e-commerce reporting deck;

 Brands brag when it’s high and panic when it’s low.

The problem? As a standalone metric, RCR tells you absolutely nothing about the health of your growth engine.

Here is why RCR is a "trap" metric:

1️⃣ It punishes growth.
If you have a massive month of new customer acquisition (top-of-funnel success), your RCR will naturally drop. Does that mean your retention got worse? No. It means your denominator grew. You’re being "penalized" for scaling.

2️⃣ It hides the "Churn Gap."
A 30% RCR looks great, until you realize those are the same 30% buying every month, while 70% of your new customers never come back for a second order. You have a "leaky bucket" masked by a loyal core.

3️⃣ It ignores Timing.
RCR is a snapshot. It doesn’t account for latency between orders. If your product has a 60-day consumption cycle, looking at a monthly RCR is a waste of time.

What we track at Prominence instead:

Instead of a flat percentage, we look at Cohort-Based Retention & n-Day LTV.

The Second Order Gap: What % of customers acquired in Month X bought again by Month X+1? If this isn't increasing, your creative-to-product alignment is off.

LTV/CAC Ratio by Cohort: We don't just want "returners." We want to know if the customers we bought in January are more profitable by June than the ones we bought in December.

Time-to-Second-Purchase: Are we shrinking the gap between Order 1 and Order 2? This is the only way to actually improve cash flow.

---

Stop looking at a blended RCR. It’s a vanity metric that fluctuates based on how many new customers you acquire.

If you want to measure the strength of your brand, look at your Retention Curves. If the curve flattens out, you have a business. If it goes to zero, you just have a temporary arbitrage play.

#ecommerce #shopify #facebookads #performancemarketing #dtc #growthmarketing #ltv

What is your one Google Ads take that most people will disagree with? I'll go first 👇

- 

👉 Historical search term performance is a bad reason to exclude a search term from a campaign that runs on smart bidding.


Let me know what yours is in the comments.

#googleads #ppc #adwords #ecommerce #shopify #facebookads #tiktokads

How often do you get searched for vs. your competitors? 
Get free access to our Share Of Search tool 👇

In performance marketing, we spend so much time obsessing over our CPA and ROAS that we often forget to look up and see the bigger picture: Market Share.

If your ROAS is stable but your search volume is declining relative to your competitors, your efficiency might be leading to the consumer forgetting about you.

At Prominence, we wanted an easier way to track this. So, Kishalaya Mukhopadhyay built a Share of Search tool that moves beyond generic "industry trends" and gets specific.

How it works:
You input your brand name and your 3–5 closest competitors. The tool then maps out the search interest landscape over the last 12 months.

Why Share of Search (SoS) matters more than you think:
👉 It’s a leading indicator of Market Share: Historically, a sustained increase in SoS predicts a rise in actual market share.
👉 It measures "Mental Availability": It shows how often your brand is the "top of mind" solution when a problem arises.
👉 It identifies "Competitor Conquesting" opportunities: If a competitor’s search volume spikes while their sentiment drops, it’s the perfect time to aggressive-bid on their keywords.

Are you actually winning market share, or just winning your own small pocket of retargeting?

We’re opening up access to the tool for free.

 If you want to see exactly how you stack up against your competitors over the last year, drop a comment with "SEARCH" below, and I’ll reach out.

#googleads #ppc #shareofsearch #facebookads #ecommerce #shopify

E-com brands, how many new creatives do you need to launch next month to hit your goals? 👇 Let's find out;

TL;DR
Comment "Creative" & let's calculate how many creatives you need to hit your goals next month.*

Most brands treat creative volume like a guessing game. 

"We need 40 videos a month" sounds like a solid plan, but it’s rarely based on the actual math of the account.

At Prominence, we’ve moved past the guesswork. 

We developed a predictive model that calculates your required creative output by looking at your backend performance data, not just your gut feeling.

Here are the 5 levers our model uses to solve the creative math:

1️⃣ Ad Spend & ROAS Goal
The baseline. If we don't know how much you are trying to spend next month, we can't calculate how many new creatives you'll need.

2️⃣ Hit Rate (Historical)
What percentage of your launches actually become "winners"? Our model pulls this automatically. If only 1 in 10 ads successfully scales, your production pipeline needs to reflect that 90% "failure" rate.

3️⃣ Winner Average Spend Rate
Not every winner is equal. Some ads can handle $5k/day; others cap out at $500 before the CPA spikes. We calculate how much "load" your typical winners can actually carry.

4️⃣ Winner Average Lifespan
Creative fatigue is the silent killer of scale. If your average winner dies after 14 days, your production needs to be twice as fast as a brand whose winners last 30.

5️⃣ Revenue Forecasting
We map these variables against your growth targets for the next 30, 60, and 90 days to find the exact "Creative Gap" you need to fill.

The Reality Check:
Scaling isn't just about increasing your budget; it’s about out-producing your creative decay. 

If your (Hit Rate) x (Winner Lifespan) doesn't outpace your spend growth, you will hit a performance plateau every single time.

Stop guessing your production schedule. Start engineering your creative pipeline.

👉 Curious what your required creative volume is? Comment "creative" or DM me, and let's run the numbers.

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#performancemarketing #creativestrategy #metaads #ecommerce #growthmarketing #prominenceagency #facebookads

E-com founder: We produce & launch 25 new ads per week on Meta.
Me:
So, the volume is the same throughout the year?

(TL;DR - comment "creative" and let's discover how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals next month.)

E-com founder: Yes, I wanted to get my team in a consistent rhythm.

Me: I understand that, but... The production rhythm doesn't make sense to me.

E-com founder: What do you mean?

Me: Well, your brand experiences seasonality, right? So I guess your ad spend is about 40% less in the summer months compared to the holidays?

E-com founder: Yes... We've spent €80k in July last year and €155k in December.

Me: So, why would your ad account need the same amount of creatives for a €155k month compared to a €80k month?

E-com founder: Okay, I see what you mean... But how do we plan this properly?

Me: You can use our Creative Production Model. Based on your historical data, it will analyze & predict your needed creative velocity.

E-com founder: Uhm, in plain English, please?

Me: The model will look at the following things:

👉 What are your ad spend & ROAS goals?
👉 How many tests do you need to find a winner?
👉 How much do winners spend on average?
👉 How long do your winners live inside the account?

and based on that data, it will compute how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals.

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Do you also want to find out how many creatives you need to produce to hit your goals next month?

Comment "creative" or send me a DM, and let's run the creative production model for your business.

#facebookads #googleads #tiktokads #metaads #shopify #ecommerce #ppc #performancemarketing

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