A while ago I had a call with a brand owner who runs a 30-year-old martial arts equipment brand.

He told me his Google Ads agency was reporting an 8-12x ROAS consistently.

Then in the next sentence, he told me he couldn't scale spend past a certain point without the whole thing collapsing.

Those two sentences don't belong in the same conversation.

If your ROAS is really 8-12x, you should be spending every dollar you can get your hands on. Borrow from your mom. Take a loan. Max out the credit cards. At 8x, every additional dollar of ad spend is printing money.

Unless...

The 8x isn't real.

Which is exactly what we found when we looked at his account.

I see this pattern almost every week at $1 to $5M brands.

The agency dashboard shows great numbers.
The bank account tells a different story.
The founder feels crazy because the math doesn't add up.

The math isn't wrong. The inputs are.

Here's what's actually happening, and how to spot it in your own account in the next 15 minutes.

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What Your ROAS Number Is Actually Counting

When your Google Ads dashboard shows 8x ROAS, it's counting every sale that had a Google ad somewhere in the attribution path.

Every single conversion that touched your Google account in any way gets bundled into that number.

That sounds reasonable until you realize what's hiding in that number.

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Bucket 1: People searching for your brand name.

Someone sees your brand on Instagram.

Reads about you in a newsletter.

Hears about you from a friend.

Three days later, they type your brand name into Google, click your branded search ad (or even just see it), and buy.

Google Ads counts that as a Google Ads conversion.

Your ROAS on "Google" looks amazing.

But that person was going to buy from you anyway.

They literally searched for your name.

The Google ad didn't acquire them.

It just collected a toll on a sale that was already happening.

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Bucket 2: Repeat and B2B customers.

This one hit my martial arts brand owner hard.

His business has a strong B2B/wholesale side.

Gym owners who've been buying from him for years would occasionally click a Google ad (because they're also regular Google users) and get attributed as a "conversion."

Same story for repeat DTC customers.

Someone who bought a pair of boxing gloves last year, got a Google-served ad when browsing, clicked it, and bought their second pair.

Google Ads takes credit for acquiring them.

Those repeat buyers would have come back anyway.

The ad just happened to be in front of them on the day they clicked.

It didn't change their behavior.

They would have repurchased with or without seeing a sponsored listing.

This is especially brutal for brands with a strong retention base.

The better your retention, the more your ROAS gets inflated by people who would have come back regardless.

Your best customer loyalty can actually make your acquisition numbers look deceptively strong, which is the opposite of what a healthy metric should do.

What that means in practice: when we stripped his account down to real cold-traffic, non-brand, new-customer-only numbers, his actual ROAS on new acquisition was closer to 2x. Not 8x. Not 12x.

Nothing about the account changed.

Same campaigns, same spend.

The only thing that changed was how the numbers were being filtered, and that changed the entire picture of his business.

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Why This Keeps Happening to Founders

Agencies don't do this maliciously.

Most of them are just reporting what the platform reports.

Google Ads shows them an 8x number, so they show you an 8x number.

The problem is that the platform ROAS was designed to justify the platform spending, not to help you make business decisions.

This is the same thing I wrote about two months ago with attribution windows.

That newsletter was about Meta and Google claiming credit for sales that happened 18 days after someone saw an ad once.

This is the cousin of that problem: platforms claiming credit for sales from people who were already your customers or already searching for you.

Both lead to the same outcome.

Inflated numbers. Bad scaling decisions. Founders losing trust in their own data.

The fix for both is the same too.

Stop trusting platform ROAS as your primary metric.

Build a clean view of new-customer economics and make decisions from that.

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The 15-Minute Clean-ROAS Audit

Do this on your own Google account this week.

It will take you 15 minutes and it might change how you think about scaling.

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Step 1. Separate brand search from non-brand search.

Open your Google Ads account and look at your Search & PMax campaigns.

If you have a campaign running on your brand name (or if your PMax is catching brand terms, which it almost always does), that spend and those conversions need to come out of your "new customer acquisition" bucket.

The easiest way: add a negative keyword for your brand name in every non-brand campaign.

Then in PMax, look at the search terms report (or use the Insights tab) to see how much of your "conversions" are coming from branded queries. Subtract those.

A quick sanity check: if more than 30% of your Google Ads conversions are coming from branded keywords, your real acquisition ROAS is much lower than your dashboard number. I've seen this ratio go as high as 50-60% on brands that had strong organic presence and a PMax campaign swallowing up brand searches.

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Step 2. Separate repeat customers from new customers.

In Google Ads, go to Audiences and check whether you're excluding existing customers from your prospecting campaigns.

Most brands aren't. That means a chunk of your "acquisitions" are actually repeat buyers who would have bought anyway.

If you have a customer list uploaded to Google Ads, create an audience from it and exclude that audience from your cold prospecting campaigns.

Then watch what happens to your ROAS over the next 2 weeks.

Here's the uncomfortable part: your ROAS will almost certainly drop when you do this.

That's the point.

The drop isn't a performance regression, it's you finally seeing what your actual new-customer acquisition looks like.

Before this fix, you were making scaling decisions based on a number that included people you already owned.

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Step 3. If you have B2B or wholesale, isolate it completely.

For my martial arts brand owner, this was the biggest fix.

His B2B revenue was showing up in his D2C ROAS because the same Google account was technically "touching" wholesale customers.

If your business has both B2B and D2C, you need to either run them in completely separate accounts or set up proper conversion labels so you can filter B2B transactions out of your reporting.

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Step 4. Recalculate.

Take your cleaned conversion data (non-brand, new-customer-only, D2C-only) and divide it by your ad spend.

That's your real ROAS. That's the number you should be making scaling decisions from.

For my brand owner, his "real" ROAS went from 8x to 2x.

Which sounds like a disaster, but it actually explained why scaling had been impossible.

At 2x, you can't just double spend without tanking profit, because the additional dollars are going to colder traffic that converts at a lower rate.

At 2x, you scale with surgical precision. Not with agency-flex screenshots.

The Real Win

Here's the thing that might surprise you. When my martial arts brand owner saw the real numbers, he wasn't upset.

He was relieved.

For three years he'd been told his ROAS was incredible.

And for three years he'd been confused about why he couldn't grow.

He assumed something was wrong with him. Wrong with his operations. Wrong with the market.

None of that was true.

The metric he was being shown was lying to him, and once he could see the real number, everything else clicked into place.

If you've been feeling the same thing, like your ads look great on paper but the business isn't actually growing, this is almost certainly what's happening.

Go run the audit this week.

You might not like what you find, but you'll finally understand why scaling has been so hard.

Talk soon,
Andrej

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PS: If you want me to actually run this audit on your account for free (no catch, no pitch), hit reply with "audit" and I'll send you the 3 things I need to see. I can usually tell you within 48 hours how much of your reported ROAS is real vs inflated.

PPS: When the founder realized his 8x was actually 2x →​