The Case for Boring Media Buying: Why I Keep Coming Back to the Basics
By Daniel Kelly (DK)
Founder & Growth Strategist, Stoke Digital
Auckland, New Zealand
Why It Matters
Daniel Kelly (Stoke Digital) makes the case that sophisticated media buying doesn't replace the basics, it gets built on top of them. When he takes over a struggling ecommerce account, the biggest wins usually come from unanswered fundamentals, not advanced tactics.
His starting point is the business, not the ad account: pull 12 months of Shopify data first to understand seasonal rhythm, then overlay Meta and Google spend and behavior against those same periods.
A live example makes the core warning concrete: a brand's platform ROAS improved after pulling back ad spend and shifting budget toward warmer audiences, but new customer revenue and total Shopify sales tanked at the same time. Better ROAS can be a bad outcome if it comes from sacrificing growth.
On Google, brand overlap across multiple PMax campaigns is a recurring red flag: campaigns compete for the same branded demand and post great ROAS while capturing sales that would have happened anyway, rather than creating new ones.
He's loosened his stance on strict Meta funnel segmentation. Simple doesn't mean rigid; the goal isn't a clean funnel diagram, it's being able to explain why every dollar is where it is.
Four questions anchor his whole approach: What are we trying to achieve? What can we afford to pay for it? Are we creating demand or capturing it? And when we spend more, does the business actually grow?
Complexity should earn its place: advanced measurement and incrementality testing are valuable when they answer a real question, not as sophistication for its own sake.
Who This Is For
This is a grounding read for Foxwell Founders members managing accounts at any scale, especially those tempted to chase increasingly complex attribution and measurement setups before nailing the fundamentals. If you're a media buyer or account lead who's ever watched platform ROAS improve while the business quietly slowed down, Daniel's four-question framework offers a practical gut-check to run before adding another layer of sophistication.
The more time I spend around really sophisticated media buyers, the more I sometimes wonder whether my own approach is too basic. There are people doing incredible work around incrementality, attribution, marginal CAC and measurement. I learn a lot from them.
My world is a little different. I'm based in New Zealand, managing paid media for established ecommerce brands in a much smaller market. Most aren't trying to triple their spend every quarter.
But the longer I do this, the more I've realised that the basics aren't something you graduate from as accounts get bigger or media buying gets more sophisticated. When I take over an ecommerce account that's struggling, the biggest opportunities I find are usually pretty fundamental.
The brand doesn't really know what it can afford to pay for a new customer. Meta is spending too heavily on people who already know the brand. Google is getting too much credit for branded demand. Platform ROAS looks great while new customer growth is going backwards.
So I keep coming back to four questions:
What are we actually trying to achieve?
What can we afford to pay for it?
Are we creating demand or just capturing it?
And when we spend more, does the business actually grow?
That's basically how I approach media buying now.
Trusted by agency owners, brand founders, and marketers everywhere, this is where the fundamentals get sharpened.
Start with the business, not the ad account
When I take over an ecommerce account, I don't immediately start moving campaigns around.
I start in Shopify. I'll look at the last 12 months against the previous year. I want to understand the natural rhythm of the business. Which months are strong? Which are weak? What are the big promotional periods? Which product categories drive different times of the year? Then I go into Meta and Google and look at what was happening during those periods.
On Meta, I want to know how much we were spending and where it went. New audiences, engaged audiences or existing customers? How many campaigns were running? How much creative was going into market? What was happening with CPMs, reach, frequency and clicks? How much attributed revenue came from clicks versus views?
On Google, I want to understand spend, clicks, CPC, sales and ROAS, but importantly I separate campaigns that can capture branded searches from those that can't. Then I put that alongside Shopify gross sales, new customer revenue, returning customer revenue and customer numbers. And yes, I literally put a lot of this into a spreadsheet.
Pretty old school. But I want to see the trend. What changed? When did it change? And what happened to the business when it did?
A better ROAS can be a terrible result
I'm auditing an ecommerce account at the moment that illustrates this perfectly.
From January through April, the brand was growing around 10–20% year on year. Then May hit and sales fell off a cliff. Roughly 40% down year on year, with the decline continuing through June and July.
So I compared what had changed.
Ad spend had dropped from around $50,000 a month the previous year to $29,000. The percentage of Meta spend going towards new audiences had dropped from around 84% to 64%. Creative volume had roughly halved, and creative diversity had reduced as well.
There could have been a perfectly good explanation. Maybe they'd run out of stock. Maybe margins had changed. Maybe they'd intentionally decided to slow down.
So, of course, I asked. It turned out they'd lost confidence in their media buying after an account manager change. They weren't convinced additional revenue was turning into additional income, so they'd pulled back and focused on being more efficient.
And it worked.
Their platform ROAS improved. However, with that new customer sales and total Shopify revenue were tanking. This is where I think media buyers can get themselves into trouble. Improving ROAS is pretty easy if you're willing to sacrifice growth. Spend less. Target warmer people. Capture more branded search. Retarget customers who probably already know what they want.
The dashboard starts looking better.
The business might not. And that's a huge problem, because I still meet plenty of brand owners and internal teams who know enough to be sceptical of platform ROAS, but don't necessarily know what to use instead.
Platform ROAS needs context. When it's segmented by funnel stage, understood alongside attribution, and then compared with new customer revenue, total sales and other core business KPIs, it is still a useful signal. The danger is treating it as the outcome rather than one of the signals we use to understand the outcome.
Creating demand versus capturing it
Google is probably where I see the clearest version of this.
One of the first things I look for is brand overlap. This is hardly a new idea, and it's something that's been covered extensively within the Foxwell community. But that's also kind of the point. For all the discussion around it, I still regularly come across accounts where it's a major issue.
If an account has multiple PMax campaigns running and none of them have brand excluded, that's a massive red flag for me.
I've seen accounts where multiple PMax campaigns are all able to compete around the same branded demand. They all report lovely ROAS numbers, so everyone keeps feeding them money. Meanwhile, the customer may have discovered the brand somewhere else, searched for it by name and been ready to buy anyway.
Google gets the conversion.
The campaign looks amazing.
But did that spend actually create the sale? Sometimes when I see this stuff I actually get excited, because it's usually relatively easy to tidy up. Capture branded demand more efficiently, move some of that money into colder Google activity or Meta, and see whether we can generate more new customers rather than paying more to harvest the ones already coming.
That's the distinction I care about: Are we creating demand, or are we paying to capture demand that already exists?
There are exceptions. If retailers are bidding on your brand, undercutting your pricing and taking direct sales, protecting branded search becomes much more important. In those cases, you're not just paying Google to capture demand that would have come directly to you anyway. You're competing for that customer against retailers who might otherwise take the sale.
That might mean bidding more aggressively on brand, while giving customers a reason to buy direct through things like stronger reviews, loyalty benefits, gifts with purchase or simply reinforcing that they're buying from the official brand.
Context matters. Even something as seemingly simple as brand bidding isn't automatically good or bad. Which is also why I don't believe there's one perfect account structure.
The principle matters more than the tactic.
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Simple doesn't mean rigid
This is something I've changed my mind about with Meta. A few years ago, I was much more rigid about funnel segmentation. Top-of-funnel meant top-of-funnel. I'd aggressively exclude purchasers, website visitors and social engagers and try to keep everything clean.
It made sense on paper. But on smaller budgets, sometimes you're starving Meta of the signal it needs to perform. So I've loosened up.
I'll give Meta more room while still monitoring how much spend is actually reaching new audiences and what is happening to new customer performance. That's an important distinction for me. Simple doesn't mean rigid.
I don't care whether an account matches my perfect funnel diagram. I care whether I can explain why every dollar is there.
If there are six Meta campaigns, why six?
If 40% of spend is reaching existing customers, is that intentional?
If PMax is capturing brand, how much are we paying for it?
If we're spending another $20,000 this month, what are we expecting to happen to new customer revenue and total sales?
The structure is just a tool.
Complexity should earn its place
None of this is an argument against sophisticated media buying. I want better measurement. Like everyone, I want to understand incrementality. I want to get better at attribution and product economics. But I've become increasingly wary of sophistication for the sake of sophistication.
Complexity should earn its place.
If an advanced measurement framework helps us make a better decision, brilliant.
If a complicated campaign structure solves a specific problem, use it.
If a proper incrementality test can answer something we genuinely don't know, run it.
But none of that removes the need to answer the boring questions first.
What can we afford to pay for a new customer?
Are we acquiring new customers or mostly selling again to people who already know us?
Are we creating demand or capturing it?
Are we spending more because the economics tell us to, or because Ads Manager says the ROAS looks good?
When we spend more money, does the business actually grow?
Maybe my approach to media buying is basic. But, I'm becoming increasingly okay with that. Because the basics aren't something you graduate from. They're what you build the sophisticated stuff on top of.
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