Life Beyond Ads Manager

I stepped foot into the Gymshark office on my first day back in 2017 excited for the challenge ahead: a brand that was growing rapidly and had a great appetite for Paid Media, knowing it would play a key role in driving growth.

As I got access to the ad accounts, I asked the obvious question:

“What’s our monthly budget then?”

“There isn’t a budget. As long as the CPA is good, keep spending.”

Brilliant – but that also opened a can of worms. 

Looking back, I firmly believe that agility, not being restricted by a set budget and Finance breathing over your shoulder, was one of the ingredients that helped drive strong growth for the business. But my 21-year-old brain, fresh from a London media agency, was struggling to get my head around it.

We were treating the Meta CPA in Ads Manager as the source of truth. It was working, but with limited insight into channel attribution and incrementality.

Almost nine years on, a lot has changed in the media landscape, and one thing is evident:

There is life outside of Ads Manager.

Marketing teams simply cannot rely on Ads Manager as their source of truth when running multi-channel, full-funnel marketing campaigns. The need for more sophisticated measurement is key to understanding the role each channel is playing, rather than relying on channel-by-channel reporting which inevitably may overstate results.

1. Attribution Windows

Attribution windows only show performance within the set timeframe, so what about the impact and results that happen beyond that window?

If accounts are using a 7-day conversion window, you may only be seeing half the story.

Is it even suitable for every channel to operate on the same attribution window? And even if they do, this still won’t reveal the role that other channels are playing in the conversion journey.

This also brings us to the topic of click vs view attribution. If you added all the revenue together from each ad account, chances are you would be looking at a bigger number than what is actually sitting in the bank.

2. Channel Bias

Channels will attribute as many sales as possible to themselves if they believe they played a role.

This often leads to inflated ROAS numbers, which can make you misjudge the true impact of different channels.

The consequence is that the budget gets deployed into places that look good on paper but aren’t actually driving incremental growth. Spend becomes misplaced, and overall investment becomes less effective.

3. Undervaluing Objectives

Understanding the true impact of upper-funnel, awareness investment can be a challenge when relying solely on ad platform reporting.

This often leads to:

• Budgets being heavily deployed into lower-funnel activity
  
• Or poorly allocated upper-funnel investment without real measures of success

Typically, lower-funnel objectives receive the bulk of spend because the return appears faster.

That quick fix is useful in the short term. But it’s spending today to drive tomorrow, not spending today to drive more efficient sales six months from now.

The real risk of relying solely on Ads Manager or platform-level data when optimising and measuring campaign performance is simple:

You never see the full picture.

And when that happens, you risk making decisions that scale the wrong areas, while overlooking the real opportunities for growth.

At Gymshark, a great example of this was TikTok.

We were seeing average performance in Ads Manager, yet we also knew it was a channel that presented a significant opportunity for growth.

The problem was that we simply weren’t seeing this reflected in the metrics on screen. Meanwhile, every other channel appeared to be flying.

As our budgets continued to scale, it became clear that we needed a more robust approach to measurement and a deeper understanding of the true incremental impact of marketing across channels.

The solution was Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM).

This approach brought a number of clear benefits.

1. New Customer Growth

MMM helps identify which areas of the current media strategy are driving new customer acquisition.

It reveals which channels are generating incremental sales from new customers and contributing meaningfully to broader business objectives.

2. Data Inputs

MMM considers a huge depth of data points when modelling results.

This includes factors such as:

• Competitor activity
• Organic base contribution
• Economic turbulence

This broader context allows for a far more holistic understanding of marketing performance.

3. Better Investment Decisions

By stepping outside of channel ecosystems, we remove channel bias.

MMM reports allow us to:

• Deploy budget into the most effective areas
• Avoid costly mistakes when allocating spend
• Identify points of diminishing returns
• Understand where there is headroom to scale

4. Brand Investment

MMM also helps us understand the role of upper-funnel investment and shape longer-term media strategy.

Upper-funnel activity has a longer payback period than lower-funnel spend.

MMM reporting helps highlight which activities are truly effective over time, insights that Ads Manager reporting alone would never reveal.

Moving from Ads Manager to MMM represents a significant shift in how marketing performance is measured.

MMM cannot be used to optimise campaigns weekly inside Ads Manager. It won’t tell you to switch off a particular ad set on Meta.

But what it does provide is something far more valuable:

Validation of your overall media strategy.

It ensures investment is being allocated to the areas that actually drive growth.

At Gymshark, we now use an MMM solution to guide investment decisions, alongside an MTA solution to implement those decisions and bring all channel views into one place.

And with that…

The days of checking Ads Manager as the primary source of truth feel like a distant memory.