Marketing Intermediate 17 min

Campaign analysis — reading ad performance and finding the actual lever

The problem

ROAS is 1.8 and you need 3. You lower bids. Impressions collapse, ROAS improves slightly, sales fall by 60%.

The workflow
1Compute break-even
2Read impressions
3Read CTR
4Read page conversion
5Find the first break
6Change one thing
7Wait for data
Re-measure

What you need

Price ₹1,299. Contribution margin before ads: 34%.

The tool

SMEMinds Advertising AI

The prompt

Subscribers. The full prompt is part of the SMEMinds AI Playbook. See plans.

What comes back

1. BREAK-EVEN — Your contribution margin is 34%, so break-even ACOS is 34% and break-even ROAS is 2.94.

Verify before you use it

Human review required. Check every line below before this leaves your screen.
  • The CTR benchmark is explicitly flagged as unreliable. Get your own historical CTR for the same product before treating 1.3% as low.
  • Verify the 34% margin is contribution before advertising, not gross margin. Using the wrong margin makes the entire break-even calculation wrong.
  • Confirm the landing page conversion figure comes from your analytics and covers the same period as the ad data. Mismatched periods are common and invalidate the comparison.
  • The 3.2% conversion projection is arithmetic on an assumption, not a forecast. Treat it as illustrating the leverage, not as a target.