How to Increase ROAS: 10 Proven Methods

GuidesNummbas TeamApril 2, 202612 min read

To increase ROAS, focus on two things: get more revenue from the people who click your ads, and stop spending money on people who will never buy. The 10 methods below cover both sides, from better targeting and creative to higher order values and cutting waste.

If you are new to ROAS or need a refresher on the formula, start with our complete ROAS guide.

Why Your ROAS Is Low

Before you try to improve ROAS, figure out why it is low in the first place. Most of the time, one of these five problems is the cause.

1. You are targeting the wrong people. If your ads reach people who have no interest in your product, clicks cost money but do not turn into sales. Broad audiences might seem like a good idea because they reach more people, but they often include too many people who will never buy from you.

2. Your creative is stale. When the same audience sees the same ad too many times, they stop paying attention. Ad platforms call this "creative fatigue." Your click-through rate drops, your cost per click goes up, and your ROAS falls. If your ads have been running for more than three to four weeks without a refresh, this is likely part of the problem.

3. Your landing page does not convert. You might be running great ads that bring the right people to your site, but if the page they land on is slow, confusing, or missing key information (like reviews or clear pricing), they leave without buying. Every visitor who clicks but does not buy makes your ROAS worse.

4. Your average order value is too low. ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend. If each customer only buys one small item, you need a lot of conversions to cover your ad cost. Stores with higher average order values get more revenue per conversion, which directly raises ROAS.

5. You are not tracking conversions correctly. If your tracking pixel is broken, firing on the wrong page, or missing events, the platform cannot optimize for actual buyers. It ends up showing your ads to people who are less likely to purchase, and your reported ROAS will not match reality.

Understanding your breakeven ROAS is the first step. Once you know the minimum ROAS you need to stay profitable, you can set clear targets for every campaign.

How to Improve ROAS on Meta Ads

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is the most common ad platform for ecommerce brands. Here are four specific ways to improve your ROAS on Meta.

Method 1: Build Lookalike Audiences From Your Best Customers

Instead of targeting broad interest groups, upload a list of your highest-value customers and let Meta find similar people. A lookalike audience based on your top 1 to 2 percent of buyers by lifetime value will almost always outperform a broad interest audience.

To do this well, segment your customer list before uploading. Do not use all customers. Use only those who have purchased two or more times, or those with an order value above your average. The more specific the seed audience, the better Meta can find people like them.

Method 2: Test Creative Constantly

The single biggest lever on Meta is creative. One winning ad can carry your entire account for weeks. But you need to test regularly to find those winners.

Run three to five new ad variations every week. Change one element at a time so you know what worked: the hook (first three seconds of video or the headline), the image or thumbnail, the call to action, or the format (static image versus video versus carousel). Kill ads with a cost per purchase above your target after 48 to 72 hours, and scale the ones that beat your average.

Method 3: Use Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns

Advantage Plus (ASC) campaigns let Meta use its algorithm across all your audiences without manual targeting restrictions. For many ecommerce brands, ASC campaigns deliver a higher ROAS than manually targeted campaigns because Meta can find buyers across placements and audiences you might not have tested.

Start by giving ASC 20 to 30 percent of your budget alongside your existing campaigns. Compare performance over two weeks before shifting more budget.

Method 4: Exclude Past Purchasers From Prospecting

If your prospecting campaigns are showing ads to people who already bought from you, you are paying to reach customers you have already acquired. Create a custom audience of all purchasers from the last 180 days and exclude them from your prospecting campaigns.

This forces your prospecting budget to work on finding new customers, while your retargeting campaigns handle existing buyers separately (usually at a much higher ROAS). For more on splitting your budget effectively, see our guide on ad budget allocation for ecommerce.

How to Improve ROAS on Google Ads

Google Ads works differently from Meta because people are actively searching for products. Here are three methods to improve your ROAS on Google.

Method 5: Add Negative Keywords Aggressively

Every irrelevant search term that triggers your ad costs money without producing revenue. Review your search terms report weekly and add negative keywords for anything that does not match buyer intent.

Common waste on Google includes: informational queries (people researching but not buying), competitor brand names (unless you are deliberately bidding on them), and unrelated terms that happen to match your broad keywords. A well-maintained negative keyword list can cut wasted spend by 15 to 25 percent, which directly increases your ROAS.

Method 6: Use Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) let you bid higher on search queries from people who have already visited your site. Someone who visited your product page last week and now searches for your product category is much more likely to buy than a first-time searcher.

Set up RLSA audiences for site visitors (last 30 days), cart abandoners (last 14 days), and past purchasers (last 180 days). Increase your bids by 20 to 50 percent for these audiences. The higher cost per click is offset by the much higher conversion rate.

Method 7: Optimize Your Shopping Feed

Your Google Shopping performance depends heavily on your product feed. Titles, descriptions, images, and product attributes all affect which searches your products appear for and how often people click.

Optimize your product titles to include the most important search terms: brand, product type, key feature, size, and color. Use high-quality images with clean backgrounds. Make sure your prices, availability, and shipping information are accurate and up to date. A well-optimized feed can improve click-through rates by 20 to 40 percent without changing your bids.

How to Increase ROAS on TikTok Ads

TikTok is a newer advertising platform for ecommerce, but it is growing fast. The key to TikTok is that ads need to feel like native content, not traditional advertisements.

Method 8: Use Spark Ads With Creator Content

Spark Ads let you boost organic posts from creators or your own account as paid ads. These perform better than traditional in-feed ads because they look and feel like regular TikTok content. Users are more likely to watch, engage, and click through.

Partner with creators who already make content in your product category. Send them your product, let them create an authentic video, and then boost that video as a Spark Ad. The combination of genuine creator content and paid reach consistently delivers higher ROAS than polished brand ads on TikTok.

Method 9: Run Catalog Ads for Retargeting

TikTok catalog ads show specific products to people who have already browsed your site. If someone looked at a pair of shoes on your store, they see that exact pair in their TikTok feed. This personal relevance drives higher click-through rates and more conversions.

Set up your product catalog in TikTok Ads Manager, install the TikTok pixel on your store, and create a retargeting campaign targeting people who viewed products or added to cart in the last 7 to 14 days. Catalog retargeting on TikTok often delivers 2 to 3 times higher ROAS than broad prospecting campaigns on the same platform.

How to Increase ROAS Without Spending More

You do not always need to change your ad campaigns to increase ROAS. Sometimes the best improvements happen on your website and in your post-purchase flows. This is where Method 10 comes in, and it covers several tactics that all share the same principle: get more revenue from the traffic you already have.

Method 10: Optimize Your Store for Higher Revenue Per Visitor

Every improvement you make to your conversion rate or average order value raises your ROAS without touching your ad account. Here are the most effective ways to do this.

Increase your average order value. When each order is worth more, every conversion drives more revenue against the same ad cost. Tactics that work well include:

Bundle products together at a slight discount (buy two, save 10 percent)
Set a free shipping threshold just above your current average order value
Add one-click upsells on the cart page or checkout page
Offer quantity discounts for consumable products

A store that raises its average order value from $45 to $60 sees a 33 percent increase in revenue per conversion. That flows directly into higher ROAS.

Fix your checkout flow. Every extra step between "Add to Cart" and "Order Confirmed" is a place where customers drop off. Simplify your checkout to as few steps as possible. Offer guest checkout. Make sure payment options load quickly. Reduce form fields to only what is necessary.

Even a small improvement matters. If your checkout completion rate goes from 60 percent to 70 percent, you get 17 percent more orders from the same number of cart additions, and your ROAS improves by the same amount.

Speed up your landing pages. Pages that take more than three seconds to load lose a significant portion of visitors before the page even appears. Compress images, remove unnecessary scripts, and use a fast hosting provider. Every second you shave off load time recovers visitors who would have bounced.

Set up post-purchase email and SMS flows. When a customer buys once through an ad, the ad platform paid for that acquisition. If that customer buys again through an automated email or SMS sequence, you get additional revenue with zero additional ad cost. That second purchase raises the total revenue attributed to the original ad spend.

Build flows for: order confirmation with a related product suggestion, a review request at 7 days, a replenishment reminder at 30 to 60 days (for consumable products), and a win-back offer at 90 days. For more on how email fits into your overall marketing efficiency, see our guide on MER vs. ROAS.

How to Improve ROAS by Cutting Waste

Half of improving ROAS is getting more revenue. The other half is spending less on things that do not work. Here are four ways to cut waste across all your ad platforms.

Audit your audience exclusions. On every platform, make sure you are excluding people who are unlikely to convert. Exclude recent purchasers from prospecting campaigns (they already bought). Exclude people who visited your site and immediately bounced (they were not interested). Exclude locations where you do not ship. Every dollar you do not spend on the wrong person is a dollar that can go toward the right one.

Use dayparting to shift budget to your best hours. Look at your conversion data by hour and day of week. Most ecommerce stores see significantly higher conversion rates during certain hours (often evenings and weekends). If your ads run 24/7 with equal budget distribution, you are spending the same amount during low-converting hours as high-converting hours. Shift more budget toward the times when people actually buy.

Set frequency caps on awareness campaigns. Showing the same ad to the same person 10 times does not make them 10 times more likely to buy. After three to five impressions, additional views rarely lead to new conversions. They just cost more money. Set frequency caps on your prospecting and awareness campaigns to avoid paying for impressions that will not convert.

Pause and reallocate from underperforming campaigns. Review your campaigns weekly and pause anything with a ROAS below your breakeven threshold for more than seven days. Move that budget to campaigns that are performing above your target. This sounds obvious, but many store owners let underperforming campaigns run for weeks because they hope performance will improve. It rarely does without changes to targeting or creative.

Setting up automated alerts that notify you when ROAS drops below your target helps you catch problems before they drain your budget. Our guide on smart ad spend alerts walks through how to set this up.

Choosing Between ROAS and ROI

As you optimize your ad spend, you will see ROAS and ROI used in different contexts. ROAS tells you how much revenue your ads brought in per dollar spent. ROI tells you whether your business actually made money after all costs. A high ROAS does not always mean high profit, because ROAS does not account for product costs, shipping, or overhead. For a detailed comparison of when to use each metric, see our guide on ROAS vs. ROI.

Understanding both metrics helps you set the right ROAS targets. If your profit margins are thin, you need a higher ROAS to be profitable. If your margins are strong, you can accept a lower ROAS and still make money. Knowing your blended ROAS across all platforms gives you the most honest picture of overall ad performance.

Track Your ROAS Improvements Over Time

Improving ROAS is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing process of testing, measuring, and adjusting. The challenge is keeping track of what is working when you are running ads across Meta, Google, and TikTok at the same time.

Nummbas pulls your ad spend from Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads alongside your revenue from Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix. You can see your ROAS by platform, by campaign type, and as a blended number across all your advertising, all in one dashboard.

When you make a change (like testing new creative on Meta or adding negative keywords on Google), you can see the impact on your ROAS within days, not weeks. And because Nummbas also tracks your product costs, shipping, and operating expenses, you can see whether a higher ROAS is actually translating into higher profit.

Stop switching between ad platforms to piece together your performance. Get started with Nummbas to see your ROAS across every platform in one place.