DTC1023: Min ROAS, Meta CASC Update

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

1️⃣ Unlocking New-Seller Savings to build your business
2️⃣ How this Meta bid strategy helped one brand improve ROAS by 120%
3️⃣ The Perfume Spot is seeing 8-figure GMV year over year on this platform
4️⃣ We cover all the important new changes in Meta Ads Manager
5️⃣ If you’re using Claude, you need to know this

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Fairfield Cheese, Bedhead Hats, and Cycling Frog. 👋

‍💰 Selling On Walmart Marketplace Is One Of This Year's Smartest Investments

For ecommerce brands looking to diversify their sales and expand their footprint, there’s no better time to join Walmart Marketplace.

👉 Walmart is one of the world's most recognizable brands with customers and members shopping at Walmart online and in-store around the world each week.

💵 Sign up now to unlock up to $75K in New-Seller Savings to build your business on Walmart Marketplace.*

*Conditions apply. Offer subject to eligibility criteria, promotional savings will vary by seller. See full terms and conditions for offer details.

‍💰 The Meta Bid Strategy That Boosted ROAS by 120%

Is your default Meta bid strategy quietly capping your returns?

Most brands set up a Meta sales campaign, leave it on Lowest Cost, and wonder why their ROAS is all over the place. It's not entirely their fault.  Lowest Cost is the default.

But it’s not always the ideal bid strategy.

For a wellness brand doing $10M annual revenue and selling a high-AOV product line, that was becoming a real problem. So the team made a switch to Min ROAS bidding.

The results were immediate.

Here’s how Pilothouse changed the ad account’s campaign structure to get a 120% boost in ROAS:

• 1 campaign, 1 ad set
  • Used minimum exclusions (only excluding past purchasers.)
• 5 top-performing ads:
  • Selected by spend and ROAS over the last 30 days (Pilothouse recommends 5–10 creatives for this structure)

At the Campaign level, the team is using “ROAS goal” as the bid strategy:

• Attribution: 7-day click
  • Tested 1-day click on the same account and 7-day outperformed
• ROAS goal: 1.5
  • Set based on the account's average ROAS over the prior 30 days, cross-referenced against the same period from the previous year.

👉 Remember your ROAS goal shouldn't be aspirational. It should be anchored in what the account has actually demonstrated it can do.

These were the results over the following 30 days:

Spend went up but cost per purchase dropped by over a third.

And ROAS more than doubled. 😮

According to the team, results started showing up on Day 1.

They tripled spend within the first week and exited the learning phase within 7 days.

The takeaway?

Take a closer look at your bid strategy and see if Min ROAS makes more sense for your brand.

This tactic works best for brands who are spending around $10K a month, sell a high AOV product and want immediate revenue growth.

‍💵 The Perfume Spot Sees High-Tier Success Selling Low-Cost Perfumes On Walmart Marketplace

When The Perfume Spot entered the perfume business as a small ecommerce seller in 1999, it had no idea how big it was going to become.  

Now, 7 years later on Walmart Marketplace, The Perfume Spot is seeing 8-figure GMV year over year.  

“Walmart Marketplace has been a key partner in helping us fuel our growth," says Jessica Mullevey, Director of Product Development, The Perfume Spot

With Walmart Marketplace, The Perfume Spot had a platform that:

• 🤝 Opens the door to millions of loyal customers  
• 💲 Charges no monthly or setup fees, just a competitive referral fee  
• 🔧 Has the tools and scale to help them grow

Ready to sell on the same platform The Perfume Spot uses to fuel its growth? Sign up for Walmart Marketplace. It takes just a few steps to start selling.

Sign up today.  

*Conditions apply.

‍Meta Andromeda: 3 New Tools To Improve DTC Performance

Meta is rolling out some serious changes.

Jacob, Head of Meta at Pilothouse, breaks down what’s actually happening inside Ads Manager right now: Combined Awareness + Sales Campaigns (CASC), Meta’s new AI Business Assistant, creative testing at the ad level, and attribution changes that could finally address over-reporting complaints.

Here’s what we get into:

• What CASC actually does and why it’s Meta’s answer to siloed funnel strategies
• Why most scaling brands are now 70% video (and when static still wins)
• How to use the new ad-level Creative Testing tool to test 5 hooks without cluttering campaigns
• A sneaky way to use Creative Testing to split-test landing pages while keeping social proof
• What Meta’s AI Business Assistant can and can’t do
• Why attribution changes around “engaged views” matter more than most people think

▶️ Watch on YouTube | 🎧 Listen on Spotify

‍Meta Advertisers Sound Off on Automated Account Bans

A user on X shares Meta banned his ad account after he connected Anthropic’s Claude via an MCP server to pull ad data and optimize campaigns.

Meta likely flagged it as an unauthorized integration, triggering an automated ban, despite the user spending over $1.5M+ on ads over the past 16 years.

Other advertisers report similar issues with AI tools and unexplained account flags.

Learn more here.

‍🛍️ Selling on Walmart Marketplace is one of this year's smartest investments. Sign up now to unlock up to $75K in New-Seller Savings to build your business on Walmart Marketplace. ^Conditions apply. *

🆕 X tests a new ad format. The platform experiments with adding product recommendation links under relevant posts.

🛍️ OpenAI axes Instant Checkout. Instead of checking out directly on ChatGPT, customers will be directed to retailer apps.

⭐ How checkout experiences earn trust. Route’s survey reveals 97% of customers review a brand’s return policy before purchasing.

‍📥 Got a B2B Biz?

Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.