The numbers don't lie, most people read them wrong

Short answer:there are only three decisions you can make about an advertising channel: scale it, optimise it, or cut it. The number that decides which one is not your sales figure and not the return shown on the platform’s dashboard. It is your profit after cost of goods, shipping and fees, set against what you spent on that channel alone.

The question as it arrived

A Saudi account that relays merchant questions published a message it received from a store owner, verbatim. He said he was exhausted from running paid Snapchat and TikTok ads and still had zero sales; he asked whether the problem was usually the product, the pricing, the content or the targeting, and whether there was a practical way, or a person who understood this, to review the store and the campaigns and identify where the fault was. He finished by saying he had lost the entire marketing budget he had set aside since the start of the project, for nothing.

Five possibilities in one message: product, price, content, targeting, and the store itself. He cannot rule out a single one of them, because he has no number that separates them.

A Saudi marketer described the same pattern from the other side with a line that has stuck: the numbers don’t lie, most people read them wrong. He is writing it while selling a service, but the line is correct and the problem he is describing is real.

Why the confusion happens

Because the numbers you see first when you open the dashboard are the ones least connected to the decision.

Impressions always rise with budget. Clicks always rise with broad targeting. Cost per click falls when you target a cheaper audience, which looks like an achievement and usually is not. All three can improve in the same period your bank balance does not move.

Even the sales figure on its own deceives. A store selling 100,000 that spent 40,000 on ads, 45,000 on goods and 12,000 on shipping and fees is a loss-making store whose dashboard says it is winning.

The three decisions, and the condition for each

• Scale. When the channel is profitable after every cost and steady over a period longer than your sales cycle, not one good week. Scale gradually, because doubling a budget at once changes which audience you reach, so the numbers collapse and you conclude the channel broke.
• Optimise. When the channel is near break-even and the fault has a known location: one ad eating most of the spend with nothing to show, an audience too broad to mean anything, or a landing page losing people after the click. Optimising means changing one thing and measuring it, not changing everything at once.
• Cut. When the channel loses money after costs, over a sufficient period, and after you have fixed measurement. That last condition matters most: do not cut a channel until you are certain the fault is not in the measurement itself. Plenty of channels that look like losers turn profitable once measurement settles, because part of what they sold was never arriving in the first place.

There is a fourth state people call a decision that is not one: leaving it running and waiting. Waiting is a decision to pay the cost of not knowing, every day.

The one number that settles it

Your profit from the channel after cost of goods, shipping and fees, divided by your spend on that channel. Above 1, the channel pays for itself and more. At 1, you are working for free. Below 1, you are buying revenue at a loss.

Most people have never calculated it, because it needs data from three places: the ad platform, the store, and your own costs. Assembling that by hand every week is tiring work, so the decision gets made on the platform’s number instead, because it is the only one already prepared.

Where MIQAS comes in

The ROI view builds exactly this number and returns the classification ready-made: scale, optimise or cut, for each channel.

Revenue comes from your actual orders, from your store, your point of sale or your delivery-app exports, rather than from platform claims. Spend comes from the connected ad accounts. Your costs are entered once and are then counted in every reading after that.

Every figure in the dashboard shows what changed against the previous period, so you see the trend rather than the snapshot. The trend is what separates a channel worth scaling from a channel that had a good week.

And if the gap between your number and the platform’s is large, the Conversion Check with the Ad Claims Audit tool, on Growth and above, shows you that gap plainly before you make a decision to cut.

What to do this week

• Write down your real costs: goods, shipping, payment fees, return rate. Once, and it is done.
• For each channel, calculate profit after those costs divided by that channel’s spend.
• Sort every channel into one of the three, and write the decision down.
• Set a date to review, longer than your sales cycle.

The owner above was asking about five possibilities at once. The answer is that he does not need to eliminate all five. He needs one number that tells him where to start.