“I’ve Got These ROAS Goals… Revenue Goals… New Subscriber Goals. I’ve Got to Hit All of Them.”

“We were hitting our ROAS goals, but our new subscribers were really low.”

That’s what one marketing leader heard from leadership.

And their response was pretty straightforward:

“I mean, we have to have new subscribers.”

Her response?

“Which one do we want?”

Because she knew exactly how to make ROAS look good.

“I can do a ton of retargeting and upsell people and make the ROAS look good.”

So if ROAS was the goal, she could optimize for ROAS.

But if leadership wanted new subscribers?

That required a different strategy.

So she shifted.

“I’m spending like 70% of the budget top of funnel now.”

Suddenly, they were “crushing the new subscribers goal” because they were getting new people in.

But there was a catch.

ROAS took the hit.

Which left her stuck in the same frustrating loop a lot of marketing leaders find themselves in.

ROAS.

Revenue.

New customers.

Sometimes brand awareness.

Sometimes LTV or AOV.

Leadership wants all of them.

But when your entire marketing program is judged against one primary number, improving one can make it look like you’re failing somewhere else.

She summed it up perfectly:

“It’s like I’m optimizing for ROAS, but I really just want revenue to be up and new subscribers.”

And that’s where something interesting happened.

Because the problem wasn’t necessarily that her goals were conflicting.

She was treating her marketing like it had one job.

Think about what happens when ROAS becomes the scoreboard for everything.

Retargeting can look fantastic because you’re harvesting people who are already close to buying.

An upsell campaign can generate efficient revenue from customers you already acquired.

Meanwhile, the campaigns introducing completely new people to the company can look worse by comparison.

But those campaigns aren’t doing the same job.

So why should they all have to win on the same metric?

That’s when the conversation changed.

Instead of forcing the entire account to optimize toward one goal, she could break her campaigns into groups based on what each was actually supposed to accomplish.

Her top-of-funnel campaigns could be grouped together and optimized toward new subscriber cost per result.

Her retargeting campaigns could be optimized toward ROAS.

Her creative testing campaign could be separated entirely, because as she explained:

“I don’t expect it to produce results. All it’s doing for me is finding good creative.”

Suddenly, a campaign didn’t have to look “bad” simply because it wasn’t designed to accomplish the goal being used to judge it.

And she immediately saw what that could mean when leadership came asking questions.

“If I can find ways to show, like, hey, the campaigns that we were really focused on driving ROAS did what it was supposed to do, and these campaigns are bringing in new customers…”

Exactly.

Now the conversation isn’t:

Which goal do you want me to hit?

It becomes:

Here’s what each part of our marketing was supposed to do… and here’s whether it did it.

And this can go much further than ROAS versus new subscribers.

Because the metric leadership cares about today might not be the metric that matters most six months from now.

Maybe the business needs revenue.

Maybe it needs lower CAC.

Maybe it discovers customers coming from one channel have a dramatically higher AOV.

Or that another channel brings in customers who stick around longer and produce substantially more LTV.

Your marketing can eventually be organized, measured and optimized around the business outcome that actually matters.

Not whichever metric happened to become the default marketing scoreboard.

That changes the leadership conversation too.

Instead of walking into the room with one blended number and trying to explain why it went down while another goal went up…

You can show what each investment was intended to accomplish.

What actually happened.

And where the next dollar should go based on what the business needs next.

Because maybe ROAS, revenue and new customers were never asking you to choose between them.

Maybe your marketing just needed more than one scoreboard.