We’ve known for years that in‑platform reporting often inflates performance, with overlaps and double-counted conversions across different channels. And with data privacy laws breaking attribution models even further, what a single platform reports is rarely reliable.

That’s where Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) comes in. By comparing total business revenue against total marketing spend, MER gives a clean view of how efficiently your marketing actually performs, across everything, not just a handful of pixels.

• It cuts out inflated in-platform reporting.
  
• It overcomes messy, overlapping attribution.
  
• It puts incrementality front and center: Did your marketing actually grow your business?

If your ROAS looks great but MER stays flat, or gets worse, that gap is where trust is broken and where strategy needs to shift.

What You Should Do Now

Audit Platform ROAS vs. Business Reality

• Compare Meta ROAS against your own revenue data for correlated days or campaigns.
  
• Flag discrepancies that look too good to be true.

Start Tracking MER

• Gather your total revenue over a time period and divide by your total marketing spend for that same window.
  
• Use it as a North Star KPI across channels, no platform filter.

Recalibrate Budget Against MER, Not ROAS

• If a channel’s ROAS seems inflated, but MER doesn’t budge, shift budget to channels with clearer, business-aligned ROI.

Educate Your Stakeholders

• Explain why platform data may be inflated.
  
• Present MER as the more strategic, performance-aligned metric.

ROAS alone led us astray; platforms had every incentive to make results look glossy. But if your business health isn’t matching the ads platform story, something’s off. MER brings you back to business reality and protects against vanity metrics.

Need help calculating MER, auditing ad performance, or aligning your spend with the true revenue impact? Let’s schedule a session and get your marketing moving toward real efficiency.