Every week, we get some version of the same question from brand owners:
"Our ROAS is down. What do we fix in the ad account?"
Nine times out of ten, that's the wrong question.
We see this constantly in Google Ads audits too. Brands chase campaign structure and bid strategy while the real leak is somewhere upstream. And this problem is even worse on Meta.
So today, I asked a friend of ours, Marin Istvanic, to break down how he thinks about this. Marin runs Inspire and has managed over $150M in Meta ad spend for brands like The Oodie and Vessi.
He's got a framework for diagnosing performance problems that applies whether you're running Meta, Google, or both.
Here's Marin.
Something that took me managing $150M+ in Meta spend to fully accept:
Your ad account is not your business.
I know that sounds obvious. But you just need to watch how most people actually behave. They obsess over bidding strategy, campaign structure, audience targeting, like the ad account is the engine of the whole operation.
But it's not. If your business was the car, your ad account would actually be the exhaust pipe.
You can't make a car go faster by polishing the exhaust pipe. But it is important.
There’s a simple rule that explains this called the 70-30 rule.
But to understand it let’s break down the framework I use across every brand I work with, from six figures to nine figures in revenue.
At the top is your product. Does it solve a real problem for a real customer? If not, nothing else matters. Great ads on a bad product still lose money.
Below that is your offer. Not just price, the whole value prop, bundling, guarantee, perceived value. I've documented cases where changing offer structure alone, without touching a single ad, took creative hit rates from 20% to 45%.
Below that: your landing page. A great ad sending traffic to a broken page is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.
Below that: your angle. Are you speaking to what your customer actually cares about, or what you assume they care about?
Below that: your creative execution. Research consistently shows creative accounts for roughly 56% of an ad's performance. It's the biggest lever inside the advertising system itself.
And below all of that:
Account structure, optimization process, bidding, the advanced tactics everyone obsesses over.
Sadly, most media buyers spend 90% of their time on the bottom of that list.
But the brands that actually scale spend 70% of their time on the top four levels. Product, offer, landing page, angle. Only then do they touch the ad account.
Where this 70/30 number comes from
If your product, offer, landing page, and angle are all dialed in, imperfect media buying will still be profitable. The fundamentals carry you.
If those four things are weak, the best media buying in the world just helps you lose money faster.
So how do you actually find the problem?
Work down the hierarchy instead of jumping straight to the ad account:
No ads ever work, at all: that's a product or offer problem.
Some ads work but won't scale: that's usually your landing page or angle.
Good creative, poor ROAS: creative quality or account structure noise.
Performance swings week to week: your optimization process isn't systematic.
Performance plateaus despite doing everything right: you've hit the ceiling of your current tactics.
Diagnose before you optimize. Now I just want to highlight one thing specifically that is a very underused lever… and that’s offer testing.
Because most brands test creative and audiences religiously. But they almost never systematically test the offer.
A high-perceived-value free gift with a qualifying purchase can lift conversion rate 30 to 50%.
Price anchoring, showing a basic, standard, and premium tier instead of one option, can lift AOV 20 to 40%.
A specific, no-questions-asked guarantee can lift conversion rate 10 to 20%.
None of that is media buying.
And it moves ROAS more than any bid change ever will.
Before your next creative test, run a parallel offer test instead. Same creative, different offer, five to seven days. I'd bet the offer wins.
If you want to see how this plays out across real accounts.
Marin Istvanic - Inspire
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