ROAS Formula Template for Early Stage Startups and DTC Shopify Brands

If you've ever managed social media or Facebook / Instagram ads for conversions, where you're trying to get a specific outcome like leads or sales, you might know that your campaign starts out slowly. Then as the algorithm starts working, results improve. Eventually, like a surfer coming ashore, your campaign loses steam and craps out. If you've been spending $25/day, this may have occurred over a few weeks.

But you start to scale paid media spend, from $100, up to $500, then $1,000 and up things can go haywire, quickly. There are significant ramifications if something isn't working well. Wasting dollars is extremely painful, and the pain may be magnified 10 fold if you've gone from $100 to $1,000 in a 3 month period.

I've developed this template from personal experience managing paid social media spend for Factor Meals (CMO) and for The Axle Workout (CRO). In both cases, I was managing spend upwards of $3,000 per day. When you're burning cash at this rate, you generally can't afford to wait until the end of the month to assess progress.

In this template, I'll share Google Sheet templates for:

• The importance of a coherent weekly summary

• Keeping an up-to-date experiment log

• Details of a Daily Spend Checkin Doc

• Tracking results weekly and monthly

I built this template from scratch, because any time I was evaluating results in the moment, I always wanted to know a few things, like:

• How do results over the past 7 days compare to the past 14, and 30 days?

• How am I doing compared to 30 days ago?

• What are my 7-day and 30-day moving averages?

In my experience working with 20+ growth-minded startups in the last 7 years, there are no done-for-you dashboards that compile the information you need in one place, to truly OWN your numbers. These dashboards require a daily, 15-30 minute session to update.

The result? Full grasp of your cash burn at the hands of your media spend.