Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Here's what most Facebook Ads "experts" won't tell you: your 2.5 ROAS isn't actually 2.5. It's probably closer to 8 or 9, but Facebook's attribution is lying to you.
I discovered this working with an e-commerce client who was stuck in the classic paid ads trap. They had "solid" metrics on paper, but something felt off. Every guru was telling them to optimize audiences, test new creative angles, and scale successful ad sets. Standard playbook stuff.
But here's the thing about paid loops in 2025: your creative IS your targeting. The detailed audience targeting everyone obsesses over? It's dead. Privacy regulations killed it. Yet most businesses are still optimizing for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
After helping multiple clients shift from traditional audience-focused campaigns to creative-driven paid loops, I've learned something crucial: the best performing "paid" campaigns are actually omnichannel growth engines where paid ads are just one touchpoint in a complex customer journey.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why Facebook's ROAS reporting is fundamentally broken (and what to track instead)
The shift from audience targeting to creative testing that actually works in 2025
How to build true paid loops that compound rather than just spend
My 3-creative weekly testing framework that transformed campaign performance
Why embracing the "dark funnel" is the key to sustainable growth
This isn't another "10 Facebook Ads hacks" guide. This is about understanding how paid advertising actually works when privacy regulations, attribution failures, and customer behavior changes collide with your growth targets. Let's get into it.
Industry Reality
What Every Marketing Team Has Already Heard
Walk into any marketing team meeting and you'll hear the same paid advertising playbook being repeated like gospel. It's the framework every agency sells and every course teaches:
Detailed Audience Targeting: Spend weeks building "perfect" custom audiences, lookalikes, and interest-based segments
Campaign Structure Optimization: Create elaborate campaign hierarchies with different audiences in separate ad sets
Bid Strategy Mastery: Obsess over CPA targets, ROAS goals, and bidding algorithms
Attribution Model Faith: Trust Facebook's reporting and make decisions based on platform-reported ROAS
Scale the Winners: Find profitable ad sets and increase budgets to scale performance
This approach made sense in 2018. Facebook had detailed user data, iOS tracking worked perfectly, and customer journeys were simpler. Agencies built entire methodologies around audience research and campaign structure optimization.
The problem? This conventional wisdom is based on capabilities that no longer exist. iOS 14.5+ destroyed detailed targeting effectiveness. Privacy regulations limited data collection. Customer journeys became increasingly complex and multi-touch.
Yet most businesses are still optimizing for 2018's reality while operating in 2025's landscape. They're spending thousands on audience research for targeting capabilities that have been fundamentally broken for years.
The result? Campaigns that look "successful" in platform reporting but don't actually move business metrics. Teams celebrating 3x ROAS while overall revenue stays flat. The disconnect between reported performance and actual business impact has never been wider.
Even worse, this approach treats paid advertising as an isolated channel rather than part of a broader growth system. You're optimizing for platform metrics instead of business outcomes, missing the compound effects that make great campaigns truly scalable.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with a B2C e-commerce client, they presented what looked like a decent paid advertising setup. Their Facebook Ads were generating a 2.5 ROAS with a €50 average order value. Most marketers would call that acceptable performance.
But something didn't add up. With their small margins, a 2.5 ROAS barely covered advertising costs, let alone contributed to profitable growth. They were stuck in the classic trap: running ads that "worked" according to Facebook but didn't meaningfully impact their bottom line.
The client had over 1,000 SKUs in their catalog - everything from vintage leather goods to minimalist accessories. Their strength was variety and discovery, but their paid advertising approach was fighting against this natural advantage.
Here's what they were doing wrong: They were using Facebook Ads' quick-decision environment to promote a business model that required browsing time. Their customers needed to explore, compare options, and discover unexpected products. But Facebook Ads demanded instant decisions on specific items.
The mismatch was fundamental. While successful Facebook campaigns typically thrive on 1-3 flagship products with clear value propositions, my client's catalog was designed for serendipitous discovery. They were forcing a square peg into a round hole.
Their campaign structure followed the "best practices" playbook: detailed audience segments, product-specific ad sets, and conversion-optimized bidding. They'd spent months building custom audiences and testing different demographic targets. The setup looked professional, but the underlying strategy was flawed.
What made this particularly frustrating was watching Facebook's attribution model claim credit for conversions that were clearly driven by other channels. Customers would see an ad, visit the website later through Google search, browse the catalog, and eventually purchase. Facebook would claim the conversion, inflating ROAS numbers while masking the true customer journey.
This attribution problem meant they couldn't accurately measure which elements of their marketing were actually driving growth. They were optimizing based on incomplete data, making decisions in the dark.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of fighting against their catalog's natural strengths, I completely restructured their approach around what I call "paid loop optimization." This isn't about optimizing individual campaigns - it's about creating compound growth systems where paid advertising amplifies other channels rather than competing with them.
Step 1: Embracing Attribution Reality
First, we had to accept that Facebook's attribution reporting was fundamentally unreliable. Instead of trusting platform metrics, we implemented comprehensive tracking that captured the full customer journey across channels.
Within a month of building this holistic view, something remarkable happened: Facebook's reported ROAS jumped from 2.5 to 8-9. But here's the key insight - we hadn't improved Facebook's actual performance. We'd simply started giving proper credit to the channels that were actually driving conversions.
SEO traffic was generating significant purchases, but Facebook's attribution model was claiming credit for organic wins. This revelation changed everything about how we measured and optimized campaigns.
Step 2: The Creative-First Restructure
With accurate attribution in place, we rebuilt their campaign strategy around a simple principle: creatives are the new targeting. Instead of multiple audience-segmented campaigns, we consolidated into:
1 broad campaign (letting Facebook's algorithm do the heavy lifting)
Multiple ad sets with different creative angles
3 new creatives every week without fail
This approach aligned perfectly with how modern ad platforms actually work. By feeding the algorithm diverse creative options, we let it learn which messages resonated with which segments - without manually defining those segments ourselves.
Step 3: Building the Actual Loop
Real paid loop optimization isn't about individual campaign performance - it's about creating systems where paid advertising feeds into and amplifies other growth channels. We implemented:
Content Amplification Loop: Paid ads drove traffic to high-value blog content, building organic authority while capturing email subscribers for long-term nurturing.
SEO Compound Effect: Paid traffic data revealed high-converting search terms, informing our organic content strategy and keyword targeting.
Retargeting Multiplication: Instead of immediate conversion focus, initial ads built broad awareness, creating larger retargeting pools for higher-intent campaigns.
Step 4: The Weekly Creative System
The breakthrough came from treating creative production as a systematic process rather than occasional inspiration. Every week, we produced three distinct creative approaches:
Lifestyle Creative: Showing products in aspirational contexts
Problem-Solution Creative: Addressing specific customer pain points
Social Proof Creative: Featuring customer testimonials or user-generated content
This wasn't about quantity - it was about giving Facebook's algorithm diverse signals to optimize around while maintaining creative freshness to prevent audience fatigue.
Attribution Overhaul
We implemented cross-channel tracking to reveal that SEO was driving most conversions Facebook claimed credit for, instantly "improving" ROAS from 2.5 to 8-9 without changing ad performance.
Creative-First Strategy
Abandoned detailed audience targeting for broad campaigns with multiple creative angles, treating creative variety as the primary optimization lever rather than audience segmentation.
Systematic Production
Established weekly creative production schedule: lifestyle shots, problem-solution videos, and social proof content to prevent audience fatigue and maintain algorithm learning.
Loop Integration
Connected paid advertising to SEO strategy, email capture, and content amplification rather than treating it as an isolated conversion channel.
The transformation was immediate and eye-opening. Within 30 days of implementing our attribution overhaul, we could see the real customer journey for the first time. Facebook's reported ROAS jumped from 2.5 to 8-9, but this wasn't campaign improvement - it was measurement reality.
The creative-first approach delivered consistent performance improvements. By testing 3 new creative angles weekly, we maintained fresh messaging while giving Facebook's algorithm diverse optimization signals. Creative fatigue - previously a constant problem - became manageable through systematic rotation.
Most importantly, we started seeing compound effects across channels. Paid traffic strengthened SEO performance by revealing high-converting search terms. Email list growth accelerated as ads drove traffic to valuable content rather than just product pages. The entire marketing ecosystem began working together instead of competing for attribution credit.
Revenue attribution became significantly more accurate, enabling better budget allocation decisions across all channels. Instead of believing Facebook was the hero of every conversion, we could invest appropriately in the channels actually driving long-term growth.
The client moved from break-even advertising to profitable growth, but more importantly, they built a sustainable system that could scale without depending on any single platform or channel.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from optimizing paid loops in the post-iOS 14.5 reality:
Attribution is broken everywhere - Build your own tracking system or make decisions blindfolded
Creative IS your targeting - Stop obsessing over audience research and start systematizing creative production
Embrace the dark funnel - Customers touch multiple channels before converting; optimize for the journey, not the click
Platform metrics lie - Facebook reporting optimizes for Facebook's business model, not yours
Consistency beats perfection - 3 decent creatives weekly outperform 1 "perfect" creative monthly
Loops require integration - Paid advertising works best when feeding other channels, not replacing them
Product-channel fit matters - Complex catalogs need discovery time; quick-decision ads fight against natural browsing behavior
The biggest mindset shift: stop treating paid advertising as a standalone profit center and start using it as an amplification system for your entire growth strategy. When you optimize for loops instead of campaigns, every dollar works harder.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies implementing paid loop optimization:
Focus on demo requests rather than immediate signups - longer sales cycles need nurturing loops
Use ads to drive content engagement - build authority before pushing product features
Create retargeting sequences based on feature interest rather than demographic data
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores building effective paid loops:
Match creative tempo to catalog complexity - more SKUs need more creative variety
Use broad campaigns for discovery-based products, specific campaigns for hero items
Build email capture loops - not every visitor converts immediately but can be nurtured long-term