5 Paid Ad Mistakes That Are Killing Your ROAS

After managing millions in ad spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok, we've seen the same mistakes over and over. The good news: they're all fixable, and fixing them usually doubles ROAS within 30 days. Here are the five we see most often.

Mistake #1: Sending Traffic to Your Homepage

Your homepage is for people already interested in your brand. Ad traffic is cold — they clicked because of a specific promise you made in the ad. If you send them to a homepage full of navigation options and competing messages, they bounce. Every campaign needs a dedicated landing page that mirrors the exact offer in the ad.

Mistake #2: Targeting Too Broad (or Too Narrow)

The Facebook algorithm is extraordinarily good at finding buyers — but only if you give it room to work. Audiences under 500k are often too restricted. On the flip side, running no targeting at all burns budget fast. The sweet spot is usually a well-defined interest stack or a strong lookalike audience with a minimum of 1–2M reach.

Mistake #3: Running One Creative and Calling It a Test

If you're not testing at least 3–5 creatives per ad set, you're not running ads — you're gambling. The creative is responsible for 70–80% of your ad performance. We always test different hooks, formats (video vs. image vs. carousel), and angles (pain-point vs. aspiration vs. social proof) before scaling anything.

• Test minimum 3 creatives per ad set before drawing conclusions
• Let each creative run for at least 3–5 days with meaningful spend
• Kill anything underperforming by 20%+ vs. your best creative
• Iterate on winners — small changes to hooks can 2× CTR

Mistake #4: Ignoring Retargeting

Only 2–3% of cold traffic converts on the first visit. The other 97% need to see you again. Retargeting campaigns targeting website visitors, video viewers, and engagement audiences are consistently the highest-ROAS campaigns in any account. If you're not running them, you're leaving the warmest leads on the table.

Mistake #5: Not Tracking Conversions Properly

This is the silent killer. If your pixel isn't firing correctly, or you're tracking page views instead of actual purchases or form submissions, the algorithm optimises for the wrong thing. Before touching anything else in your account, verify your conversion events are set up, firing, and deduplicating correctly. This alone can shift your reported ROAS by 30–40%.