Mason Gogolinski

I feel like this is a bit misleading. Your CVR has a strong correlation to CPC. Let's say your baseline CVR is 5% and baseline CPC is $2.5. If all else stays the same and your baseline CPC moves to $2, you'll see CVR follow to 4%. Doesn't mean CAC/ROAS changes. Need a chart with CAC/ROAS trends to paint the right picture.

Certain people won’t like that I’m saying this, but a huge percentage of DTC SaaS darlings are UI wrappers around free APIs. The products aren't bad. The moat was always thin, and AI just made it easy for agencies and operators to build their own version on their own timeline, with the exact reports they want. Perfect example: Phil Kiel, our Director of Paid Social, recently put the finishing touches on our internal reporting tool for brands, Data Druid. It tracks CPMr and a few other diagnostics that actually help us figure out what's broken in a client account (hit me up for an invite code!). Anyway, the future of DTC SaaS will certainly be interesting, to say the least. Also, let me know if you want to see more on Data Druid!

If you're paying for Northbeam or Triple Whale, this is going to be an uncomfortable read. Signal loss is baked into how these tools work by design. Meta only sees what happens inside Meta. Someone sees your ad on Instagram, searches your brand on Google two days later, clicks a Reddit thread about your product, then buys direct three days after that. Meta claims the conversion. Northbeam tries to stitch things together with partial cookie data and best guesses about which touchpoint mattered. Triple Whale adds another layer of estimation and sells it as multi-touch attribution. None of them see the full picture because the full picture doesn't exist in trackable data anymore. You cannot optimize Meta's algorithm based on what Northbeam thinks happened. Meta doesn't read your attribution dashboard. It optimizes for the signals inside its own platform. So, you're paying thousands every month for data you literally cannot act on inside the channel you're trying to improve. That's why we deleted our entire attribution stack. We root everything in Shopify sales. What hit your bank account, not what a platform reported or a model estimated. Build the forecast off actual revenue, then work backward to set in-platform targets that connect to real business goals. The work is tying your ad account activity directly to P&L outcomes instead of reconciling three dashboards that contradict each other. If your agency sold you on their attribution stack, just know you're getting played. Book a call and I'll explain the whole system in 20 minutes without mentioning Northbeam once. Link’s in my bio.

I'm presently sitting in a cafe in my wife's hometown of Jeonju, South Korea drinking a latte and doing a bit of a gut check on Meta / Media Buying and the state of DTC in May of 2026. Right now it's brutal. There is no rhyme or reason as to why something is working / not working. I've got an inbox full of brands asking for audits and help. Historically post Mother's Day always tracks pretty low, but this year has been one for the record books. We will always say, is it economic issues, the media buyer, or is Meta (biggest share of wallet) just making massive updates? The reality, none of us truly know. Which makes things always that much harder to diagnose. I've been in advertising now for 18 years. The last calendar year has been the most I've ever been uprooted in my professional career. If 2021-2022 was the year of iOS14, 2025-2026 is the year of what I call "the AI guinea pig era." I'm not necessarily complaining, it was going to happen. But I just didn't realize how much all of this would impact sooooooo many brands. From AI slop to AI bots, AI has infiltrated every facet of your business for the good and bad. Even some of the most stable, highest spending accounts I have access to are seeing broad issues, mostly related to issues on Meta. I write this quickly to tell you once again, you're not alone. I think we can all find some peace in knowing this. That doesn't mean being complacent. There are plenty of things to try, test, and do in your businesses. However, for the remainder of May until Meta (again biggest share of wallet) launches their new AI pixel, new Meta workflow and slows down their "innovation" some I find it hard to spend MORE unless we absolutely see bright spots. Again, it's not all doom and gloom, some accounts are a bit unfazed because of strong organic signals, but for the majority it's rough. For most accounts we're seeing downward trends in the days pre-Mother's Day. The only thing that has helped stabilize has been reducing spend. That's it. Again your businesses are all different, but I'm not going to gaslight you in saying things are good, because the reality is, they aren't. Heads down though, figuring it out one ad at a time, one campaign at a time and one channel at a time. This shall too pass.