ROAS is a deceptive metric that often hides a bad Amazon Ads strategy Most brand
By Jasonlandro · March 7, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
ROAS is a deceptive metric that often hides a bad Amazon Ads strategy
Most brands treat high ROAS as a sign of health, but it’s usually a low ceiling for real growth
Because ROAS only indicates the return you’re getting on an advertised keyword and doesn’t account for other factors like impact on organic sales
Even if your ROAS is skyrocketing while your total sales are stagnant or slightly increasing, you aren’t winning
Instead, you’re cannibalizing your own organic reach.
This happens when brands over-index on branded search terms and pay for terms you would win organically
You’re essentially paying Amazon a tax to acquire customers who were already looking for you.
To achieve hyper-efficient scaling, we focus on three KPIs:
1. Incrementality
Identify which ad dollars are actually driving new-to-brand customers versus just capturing existing intent.
We use search query performance data and Amazon marketing cloud to do this
You can measure purchase share in search through SQP data and correlate your ad spend to determine incrementality
AMC is useful for analyzing which ads are driving the most purchases, conducting CLTV analysis, and more
2. The Bottom Line
Your profit is what ultimately matters
We track our client partners’ SKU-level profitability with our iDerive analytics platform
Sometimes, certain SKUs are loss-leaders, which is fine
We can measure that by rolling up the profitability analysis by parent ASIN or custom group
3. Market Share
If you’re growing slower than the market or your competitors, you have a huge problem
You wouldn’t know either if you’re not measuring market share
If you’re using ROAS as your North Star, I strongly encourage you to reevaluate your strategy.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help