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Judging creatives — spend and cold-audience results over in-platform ROAS

Why Barry Hott and Savannah Sanchez judge new ads first by whether the system spends on them, why high-spend / low-ROAS ads are often the ones reaching cold audiences (AppLovin — users see ~8 ads before buying), and how to use Meta's audience-segment breakdown (new / engaged / existing) and the incremental-attribution column to stop crowning ads that just harvest 1-day-view credit from existing customers.

Updated 2026-10-24·4 sources·ad-creativecreative-analysisattributionmeta-adsapplovinaudience-segmentsroas

Judging creatives by spend, not in-platform ROAS

TL;DR

  • First signal of a winner: the system wants to spend on it. Set up the account so it spends on promising ads and not on duds. Then you don’t need to force budget onto every new ad.12
  • Don’t punish high-spend ads with weak ROAS/CPA. The algorithm is usually taking them to colder, bigger audiences, which lowers account costs and helps the warm-audience ads perform.3
  • Break results down by audience segment (new / engaged / existing customers). Pick and brief creative for what wins with the coldest audience, not the highest-ROAS row.4
  • On AppLovin, users see about 8 different ads before buying. The first, high-spend, “lowest-ROAS” ad still did work, so be patient and don’t kill early.5

Details

Barry’s caution. Sometimes Meta does spend on attention-grabbers that drive no action. These days he rarely sees it, and he’d still ask why the system is spending before cutting.3 He looks mainly at spend: so many hidden variables (a comment thread, something in the top corner of the frame) drive an ad that dissecting it before launch isn’t worth it.6

Audience segments breakdown. Define existing customers and engaged audience at ad-account level. The breakdown then shows spend and revenue by new / engaged / existing in every sales campaign, not only Advantage+ shopping.7 In one account Barry audited (7-day click + 1-day view, no customer exclusion):

  • Reported: $82K spend → $178K revenue (2.17 ROAS), but $75K of it was 1-day view. Adding 1-day engaged view (10 s or 97% watched) cut that to $7K.89
  • Engaged audience: reported 3.2 ROAS vs 1.2 on incremental attribution. More sales were credited to view than to click, which he calls a red flag.10
  • Existing customers (~8% of budget): reported 4.21 ROAS vs 1.58 (1-day click), 1.99 (7-day click), ~1.94 incremental.11
  • New audiences: incremental sat between 1-day click and 7-day click, only ~0.55 below the reported number.12

The highest-ROAS cell in the grid was 1-day view on existing customers. Optimising toward it produces “ads that are just really good at taking credit for sales” that would happen anyway.13

Meta’s incremental attribution column (rolled out quietly in spring 2025): Barry reads it as landing between 1-day and 7-day click. Use it as a sanity check, not as gospel.14

What to do.151617

  • Optimise on 7-day or 1-day click, exclude existing customers (or target them in a separate controlled campaign), and stop optimising for 1-day view.
  • Apply a business multiplier to click-attributed revenue: shares, off-platform word of mouth and later email activation never show in Ads Manager. Matching Shopify one-to-one shouldn’t be the goal.
  • Rank and brief creative by results in the new-audience segment.

Savannah’s routine. On AppLovin she lets new creative “marinate” for weeks, works in one-month test sprints and watches which ads the platform pushes spend to, before looking at CPA/ROAS.18 On Meta and AppLovin alike: if a new concept gets no spend, treat it as a flop and don’t force budget onto it (“trust the robots”).19

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes

  1. Who cares about ad hit rate?! @ 07:42 — Barry Hott ↩

  2. Who cares about ad hit rate?! @ 06:25 — Barry Hott ↩

  3. Who cares about ad hit rate?! @ 13:49 — Barry Hott ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 11:55 — Barry Hott ↩

  5. AppLovin Ad Creative Secrets from The Top eCommerce Advertisers @ 33:52 — Savannah Sanchez ↩

  6. I spoke to 3 Founders about MAKING ADS (feat. Dara Denney) @ 24:33 — Barry Hott ↩

  7. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 01:38 — Barry Hott ↩

  8. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 02:31 — Barry Hott ↩

  9. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 03:24 — Barry Hott ↩

  10. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 07:32 — Barry Hott ↩

  11. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 08:17 — Barry Hott ↩

  12. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 05:46 — Barry Hott ↩

  13. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 12:42 — Barry Hott ↩

  14. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 00:00 — Barry Hott ↩

  15. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 11:08 — Barry Hott ↩

  16. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 16:37 — Barry Hott ↩

  17. This 1 NEW Line in Ads Manager Could Save You Thousands @ 17:28 — Barry Hott ↩

  18. AppLovin Ad Creative Secrets from The Top eCommerce Advertisers @ 42:22 — Savannah Sanchez ↩

  19. AppLovin Ad Creative Secrets from The Top eCommerce Advertisers @ 54:19 — Savannah Sanchez ↩

  20. I spoke to 3 Founders about MAKING ADS (feat. Dara Denney) @ 23:42 — Ovadia Lebaton ↩