You Can't Eat ROAS. You Can Only Eat What Hits Your Bank Account.
A platform can report a beautiful ROAS number while your bank balance tells a completely different story. Here's why those two numbers are allowed to disagree.
ROAS is a ratio built on reported revenue, not deposited revenue
Return on ad spend divides platform-reported revenue by platform-reported spend. The spend side is close to exact. The revenue side is not: it depends on which conversions the platform decided to attribute to itself, using an attribution model it chose, over a window it defaults to. A campaign can show a strong ROAS while the revenue behind that number was never reconciled against what actually landed in the bank. Two different things, treated as one.
A healthy ratio can sit on top of an unhealthy business
ROAS blends every sale into one efficiency number without distinguishing revenue that was genuinely incremental from revenue that would have shown up anyway. A brand can hold a strong blended ROAS for months while the actual new-customer economics underneath it quietly worsen, because the ratio has no mechanism for separating the two. The number stays green. The bank account is the thing that eventually tells the real story.
What to check instead of chasing a better ratio
Topline revenue that reconciles against your own bank deposits and order records is the number that can't be modeled around. It doesn't require picking an attribution window or trusting a platform's self-reported credit. Building that reconciled record, and checking ROAS against it rather than treating ROAS as the destination, is what turns a platform metric back into a business decision.