There are only four ways to improve your ROAS on paid social.
Don’t overcomplicate it:
1. Lower your CPM
This is the cost to show your ads to 1,000 people. If it’s high, you’re paying more just to get in front of an audience.
2. Increase your CTR
This is how many people click after seeing your ad. Improve your ad, more people click, more people land on your site.
3. Increase your CVR
This is how many people actually buy after clicking. If people land on your page and don’t convert, you don’t have a traffic problem- you have a landing page or offer problem.
4. Increase your AOV
The average amount people spend. Higher AOV = higher revenue from the same traffic.
That’s it.
Here’s an example:
• CPM = $20
• CTR = 2%
• CR = 3%
• AOV = $100
This gives you a 3x ROAS.
Now:
• Cut your CPM in half → ROAS doubles to 6x.
• Double your CTR → ROAS doubles to 6x.
• Double your CR → ROAS doubles to 6x.
• Double AOV → ROAS doubles to 6x
Every time, it’s the same effect.
The mistake most D2C brands make is they don’t know which lever is broken.
The smarter way is:
• Track CPM, CTR, and CR separately.
• Identify the bottleneck.
• Fix that first.
That’s how you scale ads without wasting money.
2018 - Moved to Thailand to become a professional fighter (broke my hand in my first fight & moved back home)
2019 - Started and shut down my first online business while in university (SEO)
2020 - Joined royal naval reserves as an auxiliary nurse in covid hospitals. (Lining up a graduate medicine degree to become a doctor)
2021 - Realised I can't fund the degree, dropped out and started my 2nd online business. (ads for language businesses)
2022 - Scaled to $10k / month - lost all clients within a week and decided to pivot to DTC eCommerce.
2023 - Locked in and scaled the business to $50k / month with 14 clients (moved to Dubai the same year)
2024 - Travelled the world with my best friend Evan Carroll and merged agencies.
2025 - Scaled the agency to $200k / month with over $1M in profit
2026 - Scaling the business & mentoring other agency owners on their journey.
The biggest lesson I've learned:
No matter what you choose to do in your life, always give it your all.
It will either reward you, or it will open another door that will take you somewhere you couldn't imagine beyond your wildest dreams.
Here's to 8 more years of adventure.
Great media buyers are arrogant.
So if your media buyer can't defend their decisions when you question them, they're probably not going to be the person that scales your brand.
To back up that confidence, a good media buyer will have solid:
- Research
- Frameworks
- Strategy
- Execution
If they have all of those 4 things + confidence in their ability to execute, they're the right person for the job.
The worst mistake a 7-figure DTC brand can make is mindlessly copying the ad creative of a much larger competitor in the same niche.
There are two reasons:
1. You don't have their brand recognition.
They've already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing and brand.
So they can run a simple product shot with a one-line offer and it converts.
2. You don't know what's working for them under the hood.
They have a much larger budget than you, so they're testing far more angles and producing far more failures.
The ad library shows you what's live right now - but It doesn't show you spend or results.
This is why it's so important to treat a competitor's ads as research and never as the brief itself.
Here's how to use them properly:
→ Check the start date - an ad that's been live for months is probably making money.
→ Look for repetition - If they're running the same angle across multiple ads, that angle is working
→ Check the likes & comments - you can tell a lot about an ads performance based on engagement
Bigger brands are a great place to find ideas.
But copying their ads outright will not scale your business.
If I had to take a DTC brand from $100k to $1M / month, these are the only 9 tools I'd use:
1. Claude (copywriting)
2. Foreplay (creative research)
3. Higgsfield (AI creative production)
4. Motion (creative analysis)
5. Triple Whale (attribution)
6. Replo (page building)
7. Intelligems (price / offer / bundle testing)
8. Microsoft Clarity (heatmaps & session recordings)
9. Klaviyo (retention marketing)
You literally don't need anything else.
The richest DTC brand owners I know:
→ CEO of an $100M / year supplement brand
→ Founder (8-figure exit) cosmetics brand
→ Founder of a $15M / year women's shape-wear brand
→ CEO of a $10M / year men's accessory brand
All have 3 things in common:
→ Are the number 1 fans / users of their own product
→ Always pay a premium to work with the best people
→ Do everything to keep all their customers happy
They had all these attributes before the became 8-9 figure brand operators.
They just did it long enough until their product became impossible to ignore.
It's crazy how many creative strategists still don't know what modular frameworks are.
We interview creative strategists on a monthly basis, and we have them make an ad from scratch for us on the call with no prep just to see how they think
90% of them still build video ads the same way:
Hook, body, CTA.
Most of the times the hooks are sound and the CTAs are standard, but when we try to go deeper on why they wrote the body the way they did, they struggle.
This is why modular frameworks are so important
Essentially, you break the whole ad into sections called modules, and every module gets a different job depending on the angle of the ad you're trying to make.
Before anyone films, every module is planned, so the ad goes from just being a script to becoming an entire timeline.
Here's what the difference looks like:
Standard framework:
→ Hook
→ Body
→ CTA
Modular framework:
→ Hook
→ Problem
→ Agitate Problem
→ Product Intro
→ Product Benefits
→ Desired End Result
→ CTA
It's a simple fix, but this one shift is what decides if a winning concept scales into 4-5 winning iterations or if it fatigues over the span of a couple of months.
5 life hacks I know at 28, I wish I knew at 18:
1. Sleep Earlier
As the saying goes, nothing good ever happens after 2AM.
Even if you’re in a season of your life where you have to put in long hours,
12 hour days from 7-7 will always be more productive than 12 hour days from 2-2
2. Relax
Your composure gets passed on to everyone around you
That includes your clients, your employees, and everyone in your personal life.
3. Don’t try to impress people
Trying to impress people is the fastest way to lose the respect of the people you actually want to impress.
The right people are drawn to substance.
4. Have deeper conversations
The depth of your relationships is a direct reflection of the depth of your conversations.
Most people stay shallow because it's safer - go deep and get the most out of every conversation.
5. Celebrate other people
After a certain age, most people stop celebrating the day-to-day moments.
Successes at work, birthdays, milestones - they all get swept under the rug as the years go by.
But no one ever forgets the person who showed up to celebrate them.
2018 - Moved to Thailand to become a professional fighter (broke my hand in my first fight & moved back home)
2019 - Started and shut down my first online business while in university (SEO)
2020 - Joined royal naval reserves as an auxiliary nurse in covid hospitals. (Lining up a graduate medicine degree to become a doctor)
2021 - Realised I can't fund the degree, dropped out and started my 2nd online business. (ads for language businesses)
2022 - Scaled to $10k / month - lost all clients within a week and decided to pivot to DTC eCommerce.
2023 - Locked in and scaled the business to $50k / month with 14 clients (moved to Dubai the same year)
2024 - Travelled the world with my best friend Evan Carroll and merged agencies.
2025 - Scaled the agency to $200k / month with over $1M in profit
2026 - Scaling the business & mentoring other agency owners on their journey.
The biggest lesson I've learned:
No matter what you choose to do in your life, always give it your all.
It will either reward you, or it will open another door that will take you somewhere you couldn't imagine beyond your wildest dreams.
I lost everything 3 times before I hit $1M / year with my agency.
A few months after starting my 3rd business, I thought I'd made it:
→ I had 4 clients.
→ I was making $5-6k/month.
→ I moved out of my parents house.
Everything felt like it was finally coming together.
Then within a week I’d lost all my clients.
I had no personal money left (I'd spent it all on upfront rent).
I had $8k that was in my business bank account that I hadn’t paid myself yet.
I genuinely considered just paying that $8k to myself, paying the tax on it, moving back into my parents' house and finding a job.
I nearly quit.
Instead I found someone online who said he could help me with a system to get more clients.
Paid him $4k of my hard-earned $8k I had left.
But he scammed me with useless info - $4k completely gone.
$4k left to my name, decided to take a chance on another coach
Paid him everything I had to teach me what to do.
At that stage I was left with nothing.
Eating microwave meals, training in the park because I couldn’t afford a gym membership.
I was working 16 hour days. 7 days per week. 100% focus on trying to make it work.
Then within a few weeks, first client signed.
A few months later - $20k/month.
The month after that $30k.
Client after client, month after month.
Fast forward to now we’re doing $200k+/mo.
Last year we did $2.5M at $1M+ profit.
Moral of the story: you always have to move like you're just 1 more failure away from making your first million dollars.
Some get lucky on their first go, but the only way to truly achieve everything you want in life is to not quit.
Elite creative strategists know how to balance 2 things:
1. Taking big creative swings
2. Making safe bets they know are likely to pay off
80% of the ads you launch should be educated bets - iterations of proven concepts and angles that you already know are working inside your ad account.
And the remaining 20% are where you can take your big creative swings - these are new angles, new formats, and ideas nobody in your industry has tried yet.
Because those risks are how you find your next big winner.
But most creative strategists do not get this balance right.
Some play it too safe - only iterating on what’s already working in the ad account.
While others are too reckless and only focus on big creative swings.
So what you need to do is keep that balance to have the highest risk-adjusted returns possible.
Keep 20% of creative tests for big creative swings to bring you those outsized returns, and keep 80% of creative tests for iterating on what’s already working.
5 AI predictions that will reshape how DTC brands operate in the next 24 months:
1. AI will become a meaningful sales attribution channel.
(Trend will increase over time as AI eats into search)
2. Reddit will become a very strategic platform
(40% of all LLM citations come from Reddit)
3. YouTube organic will become the most valuable content investment in DTC.
(YouTube is cited in 16% of all LLM answers)
4. Every DTC brand will have an AI customer agent on their website.
(Especially brands with high SKUs)
5. Consumers will fatigue from AI-generated content.
(Most brands will over-leverage AI UGC)
16 UGC frameworks that will crush in Q4 this year:
1. Problem → Solution
2. Before → After
3. Customer Story
4. Unboxing Montage
5. Three Reasons Why
6. Testimonial Mashup
7. Green Screen Explainer
8. Podcast Style
9. Industry 'Secret'
10. My BF/GF Got Me [X]
11. Stop Wasting Your [X]
12. I Regret Using [X]
13. Honest Review of [X]
14. 'What If I Told You'
15. 'If You [X], You're [Y]'
16. Why I Switched from [X] to [Y]
I recently aduited a supplement brand spending $350k/month on Meta at a 2.1 ROAS.
Something with their backend financials felt off to their founder.
So we started by auditing their backend numbers:
→ COGS
→ Shipping + pick and pack
→ Transaction fees
→ Return rate
We found out that at a 2.1 ROAS they were losing roughly $65k a month on first orders.
And that their actual break-even ROAS was closer to 2.6
Mind you, this was a brand that was taking home over $700k/month in revenue.
I see this same issue with at least 2-3 brands I audit every quarter.
Every month, you need to check your:
1. Gross profit per order after every cost
2. Breakeven CPA and ROAS
3. What a customer is worth at 30, 90 and 180 days
Staying disciplined with your numbers is the only way to stay profitable in this business.
This year @_evancarroll & I gave our most in-depth live speech in Affiliate World to date.
We've been thinking a lot on what truly ends up separating 7 & 9 figure DTC brands in 2026 when it comes to advertising on Meta.
So we broke everything down on stage in 20 mins in Budapest.
Evan just uploaded the full speech over on his YouTube channel.
look up “Evan Carroll” on YouTube to watch it - tons of value in there if you're running a DTC brand.
I audited a $300k/mo brand who replaced 80% of their creative team with AI.
CPA has increased by 60%.
Their creative output went from 40 ads/month to 400 ads/month.
But every single one of those 400 ads was built on the same 3 angles their old team was already burning out on.
This is the trap many execs aren’t paying attention to:
AI doesn't fix bad strategy - it just scales it 10x faster.
If your customer research is shallow, AI will write hundreds of shallow scripts.
If your offer doesn't convert, AI will produce hundreds of ads pointing to a bad offer.
If your angles are tired, AI will iterate on tired angles at 10x the speed of a human.
The brands winning with AI right now aren't the ones using it to replace their creative strategists.
They're using it to amplify a creative team that already knows what to brief, what to test, and why.
AI is a force multiplier on whatever you already have.
If what you have is broken, you're now broken at scale.
Fix the strategy first - don’t let internet hype ruin your business.
Every ad in your account is an equation.
Persona × Angle × Format.
→ Persona = who it's for
→ Angle = why they should care
→ Format = how it's delivered
A lot of brands change all 3 at once and call it a creative test.
Then after a few days the decide whether the ad was a winner or a loser.
But that's not much different than going to a casino and betting it all on black.
If you want to test like an elite media buyer:
1. Document your ad variables in a database before they go live
2. Test only one variable at a time, keep everything else constant
3. Give it enough spend to actually get results
4. Do a weekly report on findings & performance
6, 7, and 8-figure DTC brands are playing completely different games when it comes to scaling with paid ads:
6-figure brands need to focus on precision to get to 7-figures.
7-figure brands need to focus on iteration to get to 8-figures.
8-figure brands need to focus on volume to get to 9-figures.
This is why copying your biggest competitors creative on Meta ads library usually ends up being the worst performing ad in your campaign.
You're not playing the same game - what's required for you to grow is completely different than what's required from them.
There's no such thing as a good MER in eCom.
There's only your MER.
Every DTC founder wants to know what MER they should be hitting.
But the first question I ask every founder is different:
What's your breakeven CPA?
Because the right MER depends completely on your margins and overheads.
Here's a rough guide:
→ High margin + low overheads: 2.5-3.3x MER can still be profitable
→ Low margin: 7-10x is normal
→ Low margin + high overheads: you might need 10-20x
So 2 brands can both run a 4x MER.
One is printing money, and the other is bleeding cash on every order.
Work out what your breakeven numbers are.
Check if your contribution margin is growing consistently
And track your MER like your life depends on it.