Every now and then, you look at the numbers and something feels off.

Sales suddenly dip.

Performance looks worse than usual.

And the natural reaction is to start looking for what broke.

This Monday we had one of those moments with a client.

Month-to-date revenue was down 20% vs. last year.

At first glance, it looked like something was seriously wrong. But once we walked through the numbers step by step, the story turned out to be very different.

And it reminded me of something important:

Sometimes, the most expensive mistake in marketing is solving the wrong problem.

In today’s newsletter I’ll walk you through how we analyzed it, what we discovered, and how you can approach situations like this the next time performance suddenly dips.

Let’s go!

Topics we'll cover today:

💠 Why Your Meta ROAS Might Suddenly Look Worse
💠 Before You Fix the Ads, Ask This Question First
💠 How Weekly Product Drops Helped Scale a Niche Brand
💠 Latest news in the DTC space

Heads up.

Your Meta ROAS might dip this month.

Not because performance dropped.

Because Meta just fixed one of the most confusing things in Ads Manager.

For years, “click-through attribution” didn’t actually mean clicks.

Meta grouped several interactions under the same umbrella:

If someone liked your ad, never visited your site, and later converted, it could still appear as a click-through conversion.

Most marketers assumed this metric meant:

“Someone clicked the link and converted.”

But that wasn’t always the case.

And that’s what Meta is now correcting.

Meta is simplifying how it counts clicks.

Going forward, click-through attribution will only include real link clicks.

Meaning:

If someone clicks your link, goes to your site, and converts, it counts.

If someone only likes, saves, or shares your ad, that conversion will no longer show up under click-through attribution.

This change is designed to align Meta’s reporting with how most third-party tools already work.

Platforms like:

Those tools generally only count actual link clicks when attributing conversions.

Which is why many advertisers saw discrepancies between Meta Ads Manager and their analytics tools.

Meta is essentially fixing that gap.

Your click ROAS will likely look lower.

Especially when comparing month over month or year over year.

But performance didn’t necessarily drop.

The attribution model changed.

What you’ll see now is a much cleaner picture of true traffic-driven conversions.

And the numbers should align more closely with your other reporting platforms.

They’re not disappearing.

Meta is simply moving them into a different bucket.

The platform is renaming “Engaged View Attribution” to:

Engage-through attribution

This new metric will track conversions that come from social engagement actions, such as:

Meta actually encourages advertisers to monitor this metric, because social engagement can still influence conversions even without a direct click.

But now those conversions will be clearly separated from link-click conversions.

Which makes the data easier to interpret.

Meta is also adjusting how it defines an engaged video view.

Previously:

An engaged view meant 10 seconds of watch time.

Now it will be 5 seconds.

Why?

Because people convert much faster when consuming short-form video.

Meta shared that 46% of Reels purchase conversions happen within the first 2 seconds of attention.

So shortening the engagement window better reflects how users actually behave on the platform today.

For advertisers, this is actually a good update.

Cleaner attribution.
Less inflated click data.
Better alignment with analytics tools.

But expect some confusion internally.

At some point this month someone will ask: “Why did our Meta ROAS drop?”

And the real answer will be simple.

It didn’t.
The attribution just got more honest.

--
Follow me on LinkedIn for more growth marketing content in the e-commerce space.

In 2025, we audited over 90 brands, and we found that many of them have been stuck in a revenue plateau for 2, and even 3 years.

So, the question is: will you stay in the same place for yet another year, or will you draw a line in the sand and start a new chapter for your brand?

At BSR, my agency, we’re offering just 1 spot for brands that want to unlock the next level of growth.

Will you be one of them?

On Monday, we had our weekly call with a jewelry brand we work with.

While reviewing the report, something immediately stood out.

Month-to-date revenue for March was down 20% vs. the same period last year.

Not exactly the kind of thing you want to see on a Monday. 😅

Who hasn’t been there, right?

So we started digging…

First stop was Shopify: orders were down.

At that point the question becomes simple: “where in the funnel is the issue?”

So we moved one step up: conversion rate.

Interestingly, conversion rate was actually up.

Which meant the site wasn’t converting worse. If anything, it was converting better.

So if orders were down while conversion rate was up, the issue had to be happening earlier in the funnel.

That’s when we looked at traffic: it was lower.

Now, this is the moment where most teams immediately jump to ads. ⚠

But one thing we constantly remind clients, and ourselves, is this:

Not every business problem is an ad problem.

So instead of staring at a single tree, we try to step back and look at the forest first.

Start with the business.
Then the funnel.
Then the channels.

Only after that do we go deeper.

When we reviewed paid media, everything looked stable.

Traffic was consistent.
Conversion rates were healthy.
ROAS was right where we expected it.
So ads clearly weren’t the issue.

At that point we had one key question in mind, which we saved for the call we had with the client a few hours later:

“Was there anything specific that happened last March that could explain the difference?”

And that’s when the missing piece appeared. 💡

Last year they had run a promotion with a large influencer.

That campaign created a big spike in organic traffic.

This year there was no influencer push.

Which meant nothing was broken….

Last March simply had an extra boost.

And this is where analysis can get dangerous. Because if we had assumed the wrong root cause, we might have started “fixing” the ads.

New campaigns.
New creative production.
Budget reallocations.
Landing page tweaks.

All aimed at solving a problem that didn’t actually exist.

That’s how teams end up wasting time, money, and energy, while also disrupting systems that were already working.

Sometimes the most expensive mistake in marketing isn’t poor execution.

It’s solving the wrong problem.

The reminder here is simple.

Data tells you what happened. Context tells you why.

And sometimes the missing context isn’t in a dashboard.

It’s in a conversation.

--
Follow me on LinkedIn for more growth marketing content in the e-commerce space.

They’ve been releasing new products every single week for years.

Every Friday.
No hacks.
No viral lottery tickets.

Just consistent drops.

In today’s episode of The DTC Insider podcast, Brian Roisentul sat down with Claire Wolfson, founder of bean goods.

Check it out. 👇

🎧 Tune in

If you found this interesting, please leave us a review. It’d mean the world to me.

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📰 Meta tests a shopping research feature inside of its chatbot [read more]

Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.

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