Performance Marketing with Fexingo: Paid Ads, ROAS, and Direct Response Conversations
Performance marketing lives and dies by the numbers: cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, lifetime value, and the incremental lift that separates a winning campaign from a money-losing one. Lucas and Luna sit at a three-monitor ops desk every episode to dissect the paid-ads tactics and direct-response strategies that actually move revenue — not the hype. They walk through real campaigns from brands like Warby Parker, Allbirds, and HelloFresh, pulling apart audience targeting, creative testing, bid management, and attribution models. Lucas brings a journalist's instinct for questioning the assumptions baked into a dashboard — is that ROAS real or cannibalized? — while Luna pushes for the operational trade-offs: how much scale do you sacrifice for efficiency? The show is built for marketing managers, agency strategists, and founders who manage their own ad spend — people who need to defend budgets, optimize funnels, and explain performance to stakeholders without buzzwords.
Episodes
The Amazon PPC Negative Keyword Harvest You Are Missing
Lucas and Luna explore why most advertisers' negative keyword lists on Amazon are dangerously thin. They walk through a real example: an electronics accessory seller who drained $14,000 on irrelevant traffic because they only excluded obvious terms. The hosts explain how to run a search term report with specific filters, how to identify 'false positives' that look relevant but convert at sub-5 per
The Google Ads Broad Match ROAS Trap You Need to Avoid
In this episode, Lucas and Luna dissect Google Ads' push toward broad match keywords and the hidden ROAS erosion it causes. Lucas explains how broad match's expanded targeting inflates impression share and click-through rates while diluting conversion quality, using a specific example of a mid-market DTC brand that saw its cost per acquisition jump 40 percent after switching from phrase match. Lun
The Amazon PPC Bid Stacking Mistake That Kills Your ROAS
Lucas and Luna dive into a little-known Amazon PPC pitfall: bid stacking. When you layer a bid adjustment, a placement multiplier, and a dynamic bid strategy on the same keyword, the math doesn't always work in your favor. Lucas walks through a concrete example: a $1.00 base bid with a 50% top-of-search multiplier and a dynamic bid 'up only' setting can result in a $3.00 effective bid — and that's
The Amazon PPC Creative Split Test You Are Not Running
Episode 45 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into a costly blind spot in Amazon PPC: nearly every seller tests keywords and bids, but almost no one systematically split-tests ad creative within Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. Lucas and Luna walk through a concrete example — a Bluetooth speaker brand that ran identical campaigns with two different headline images and saw a 34 perc
The Amazon PPC ROAS Floor That Saves Your Margins
Lucas and Luna dive into a critical but often overlooked metric in Amazon PPC: the ROAS floor. Most advertisers chase high ROAS without knowing the minimum return they need to break even or hit profit targets. Using a concrete example of a $15 product with 30% margin, Lucas explains how to calculate your personal ROAS floor based on COGS, Amazon fees, and ad spend. They discuss why a 4.0 ROAS migh
The Amazon PPC Bid Adjustment You Are Not Using on Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day is coming, and most sellers are doing the same thing: cranking up bids and hoping for the best. But there is a bid adjustment strategy hiding in plain sight that almost nobody uses—the placement multiplier for Sponsored Brands. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into why the default top-of-search multiplier is a blunt instrument and how a tiered placement strategy can improve ROA
Why Your Amazon PPC Top of Search ROAS Is a Mirage
Lucas and Luna unpack a dangerous illusion in Amazon PPC: the Top of Search placement premium. Many advertisers see a high ROAS on first-page placements and pour more budget there, but they're missing the hidden cannibalization of organic sales and the inflated contribution from brand defenders. Lucas walks through a real campaign where a pet-supply brand saw a 4.5x ROAS on Top of Search, yet tota
The Creative ROAS Divide Why Amazon and Meta Ads Need Different Assets
Episode 41 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo tackles a costly but overlooked mistake: running the same ad creative on Amazon and Meta. Lucas and Luna break down why an asset that crushes on Facebook can tank ROAS on Amazon, and vice versa. Using a real case from a DTC supplement brand that spent $40k on identical video creatives across both platforms, they trace how platform behavior — scroll
The TikTok Ad ROAS Lift You Are Leaving on the Table
Episode 40 digs into a specific performance-marketing blind spot: the incremental ROAS lift most advertisers miss when they treat TikTok as a brand channel instead of a direct-response engine. Lucas and Luna walk through actual campaign data from a mid-six-figure DTC brand — 3.2x blended ROAS, but 1.1x on TikTok. The fix? A three-variable test structure that separates platform effect from creative
The Amazon PPC DST Bug Costing You 15 Percent ROAS
Lucas and Luna uncover a silent ROAS killer inside Amazon PPC: the campaign-level dynamic bidding setting that Amazon quietly defaults to 'down only' on certain new campaigns. Lucas explains how Amazon's 'dynamic bids down only' logic actually over-adjusts on high-converting placements, leaving advertisers paying more for traffic that would have converted anyway. Luna brings data showing a 15-year
How Bidding on Your Competitors Brand Names Wastes Ad Budget
Episode 38 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into the costly trap of competitor brand bidding. Lucas and Luna reveal how bidding on rival brand terms often drains ROAS, citing a DTC skincare case where the tactic generated a 2.1 ROAS versus 6.8 on branded terms. They walk through the data: high click-through rates but abysmal conversion rates, inflated cost-per-click, and the hidden prob
Your Amazon PPC TACoS Is Higher Than You Think
Episode 37 dives into Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS) on Amazon—a metric most sellers misunderstand. Lucas explains why a 'good' ACOS can hide a dangerous TACoS, using the example of a seller who spends $50,000 on ads to drive $200,000 in sales but sees organic revenue flatline. Luna shares data from an agency client whose TACoS jumped from 12% to 18% over six months despite stable ACOS. Th
The Amazon PPC Brand Defense Bid That Actually Works
Lucas and Luna break down why defending your brand terms on Amazon PPC is harder than it looks, and how one mid-market CPG brand reduced cost-per-click by 22% while holding 94% impression share against competitors. They explain the difference between brand defense and brand conquesting, why your own brand terms are an auction you can't afford to ignore, and a simple script to check if your campaig
The Amazon PPC Bidding War You Are Losing to Retail Giants
Episode 35 unpacks a quiet but costly dynamic in Amazon advertising: the structural advantage large retailers and brand owners have in Amazon's real-time bidding auction. Lucas and Luna walk through how a brand with deeper pockets can bid higher on the same keyword, push smaller sellers into inefficient ad placements, and inflate ACoS across the category. They explain Amazon's 'second-price auctio
The ROAS Leak in Your Amazon PPC Sponsored Brands Campaign
Episode 34 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna uncover a hidden ROAS drain in Amazon PPC Sponsored Brands campaigns. They walk through a specific case: a kitchen-gadget brand spending $120,000 a month on Sponsored Brands, only to find 31% of that budget was going to existing customers — thanks to Amazon's default 'any audience' setting. They explain how to audit the 'new-to-brand
Your Amazon PPC Ad Placement Multiplier Is Overpaying
Lucas and Luna dig into a silent ROAS killer on Amazon: the ad placement multiplier. Most sellers set a flat percentage for top-of-search or product page bids, but Lucas explains why Amazon's algorithm dynamically adjusts those multipliers based on placement-level conversion rates. He walks through a concrete example showing how a 50% top-of-search modifier can actually cost you 80% more per click
Your Amazon PPC Bids Are Overpaying on Dayparting Blind Spots
Lucas and Luna uncover a silent ROAS killer in Amazon PPC: ignoring dayparting. Using real data from a kitchen gadget seller, they show how blanket ad schedules waste up to 30% of spend during low-conversion hours. Lucas breaks down the math of adjusting bids by time-of-day using Amazon's portfolio bid adjustments, and Luna shares a counterintuitive finding from a pet brand that saw higher ROAS at
Why Your Amazon PPC Bid Is Getting Outbid by Algorithmic Buyers
Episode 31 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into the hidden force quietly eating your Amazon PPC budget: algorithmic third-party buyers using repricing software and aggressive bid strategies to win the top of search. Lucas and Luna break down how a $4.50 bid on 'wireless earbuds' can lose to a reseller bidding $6.00 because they're playing a different game — margin on volume vs. margin
Your Amazon PPC ROAS is Lying Inside the Search Query Report
Lucas and Luna expose the silent ROAS killer hiding in plain sight on Amazon: the 'other' search term row in your Search Query Report. Most sellers optimize only the top 100 search terms and ignore the long tail — a bucket that can represent 60% of total spend with a ROAS 40% below account average. Lucas walks through a real client example where a pet-supply brand was bleeding $14,000 a month on 1
The ROAS Blind Spot in Your Google Ads Brand Bidding
Most performance marketers assume brand bidding is a waste — you'd convert anyway, right? But new data from a 2025 Google Ads study across 1,200 e-commerce accounts shows that pausing brand campaigns can actually cost you 12-18% of total revenue. Lucas and Luna break down when brand bidding defends against competitor conquesting, how the 'free clicks' assumption breaks in competitive verticals, an
Why Your Facebook Ad ROAS Plummets After iOS 14.5
Episode 28 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo tackles the elephant in the room: Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and how it shattered Facebook ad performance after iOS 14.5. Lucas and Luna break down why traditional pixel-based optimization broke, how the 'Aggregated Event Measurement' model capped conversions at 8 per campaign, and why ROAS on iOS traffic dropped 30-40% for ma
Why Your Amazon PPC Bids Spike in Q4 and How to Fix It
Episode 27 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo tackles a seasonal problem that burns millions in ad spend: Amazon PPC bid inflation during Q4. Lucas and Luna break down the specific mechanics — how increased competitor demand drives up bids, why your ACOS can double overnight, and a concrete pre-season strategy using dynamic bidding and negative keywords to protect ROAS. They walk through real b
The ROAS Blind Spot in Your Amazon Brand Analytics
Episode 26 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into a specific, overlooked data set inside Amazon Brand Analytics that most advertisers ignore: the 'Repeat Purchase Behaviour' and 'Item Comparison' reports. Lucas and Luna break down how these two reports reveal the true long-term value of your ad spend, beyond the last-click attribution window. Using a concrete example of a mid-tier kitche
Your Google Ads Broad Match Is a Budget Black Hole
Lucas and Luna dig into the hidden cost of broad match keywords in Google Ads. By mid-2026, advertisers are seeing 30%+ of budgets eaten by irrelevant queries that pass the Quality Score check. They break down why the old 'broad match plus modified' workaround is gone, how phrase match now acts like broad, and the one search query report filter that reveals the real waste. Lucas shares a case from
Why Your Amazon DSP Bid Is Wasting Ad Spend
Lucas and Luna dig into Amazon DSP bids and why most advertisers are overpaying by as much as 30 percent. They break down the difference between open auction and Amazon's private marketplace, explain why your bid multiplier on 'in-market' audiences is a leak, and walk through a real example from a mid-six-figure brand that cut its cost per click by 22 percent just by adjusting bid strategy by time
The Attribution Window Trap in Performance Marketing
Lucas and Luna dig into a hidden ROAS killer: the attribution window. Most advertisers use a default seven-day click-through, one-day view-through window set by platforms. But that window can be wildly wrong for different purchase cycles. Lucas walks through a hardware DTC brand that saw a 40 percent ROAS lift just by switching to a fourteen-day click-through window, because their customers resear
The Hidden ROAS Drain in Your YouTube Ad Frequency
Lucas and Luna dig into a specific performance marketing blind spot: how YouTube ad frequency is silently destroying your ROAS even when view-through rates look healthy. Using a case study from a DTC skincare brand that ran a $500k YouTube campaign, they break down the math behind frequency caps, the difference between linear TV and digital frequency psychology, and why YouTube's own reporting too
Why Amazon Bid Adjustments Are Costing You Sales
Lucas and Luna dig into Amazon's bid adjustment feature for placements, devices, and audiences. Lucas reveals how a DTC skincare brand lost 22% of its ROAS by letting default bid adjustments run unchecked on Amazon Sponsored Products. They walk through three specific adjustment traps: over-bidding on 'top of search' placements, ignoring the 'rest of search' conversion delta, and blanket device adj
Why Your Facebook Ads CBO Is Stealing Your Budget
Campaign Budget Optimization — CBO — was supposed to be Meta's gift to advertisers. Let the algorithm shift spend toward the winning ad sets automatically. But in practice, CBO often does the opposite: it funnels budget into high-spend, high-frequency ad sets that have already peaked in performance, starving newer creative or audiences that could actually convert. In this episode, Lucas walks thro
Why Your Search Term Reports Are Hiding Waste
Most advertisers think search term reports tell them exactly what keywords triggered their ads. Lucas and Luna uncover how Google and Microsoft Ads actually group search queries into aggregates, hiding the real terms burning budget. They walk through the case of an outdoor gear brand that found 22 percent of spend went to irrelevant long-tail queries that looked relevant in the report. You'll lear
Why Your Google Ads Smart Bidding Is Leaving Money on the Table
Episode 18 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo challenges the assumption that Google Ads Smart Bidding always optimizes for the best ROAS. Lucas and Luna dissect a real example of a mid-market e-commerce brand spending $80,000 per month on Google Shopping. They reveal how Smart Bidding's target ROAS strategy can get stuck in local maxima, leaving ad budget unspent and missing incremental convers
Why Your Instagram Reels ROAS Is Lower Than Feed Ads
Lucas and Luna dive into a specific performance marketing blind spot: Instagram Reels ads underperforming feed ads on ROAS, even though Reels get more reach. They break down the data from a real DTC brand that ran a controlled split test over Q1 2026—Reels had a 40 percent lower ROAS than feed despite costing 30 percent less CPM. The hosts explain the structural reasons: Reels compete for attentio
Why Your Google Ads Bid Strategy Is Overpaying
Most performance marketers assume Google's automated bidding is optimizing for ROAS—but the algorithms are actually optimizing for Google's revenue. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack the structural conflict hidden inside Smart Bidding: how target CPA and target ROAS strategies inflate bids when competition is high, why Google's machine learning rewards high-spend accounts, and what you can do
Why Your Ad Creative Is the Real ROAS Lever
Episode 15 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna break down why most advertisers focus on bidding and audiences when the real ROAS lever is creative. They walk through a 2025 case study from a direct-to-consumer brand that tested five creative concepts, kept targeting and budget identical, and saw a 340 percent swing in return on ad spend between the best and worst performers. Luca
Why Your Landing Page CRO Is Wasting Ad Spend
In this episode of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna tackle a common yet costly blind spot: conversion rate optimization (CRO) tunnel vision. They dissect a real e-commerce case where a brand obsessed with button color tests and form fields actually lost 23% of revenue per visitor because they ignored the bigger picture. Using data from a mid-market DTC brand that spent $1.2 milli
The Math Behind YouTube Influencer ROAS That Actually Works
Lucas and Luna break down why most brand deals with YouTubers fail to deliver a positive ROAS — and how a DTC mattress company fixed it. Using a real example from Q1 2026, they walk through the three-step framework: discount-code attribution, survey-based lift measurement, and cohort tracking over 90 days. They explain why vanity metrics like views and likes are worthless, and why the real signal
Why Your TikTok Ad ROAS Drops After Scale
Episode 12 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into a pattern plaguing DTC brands: TikTok ads that crush it at $500/day but collapse at $5,000/day. Lucas and Luna unpack the real culprit — not the algorithm, but ad fatigue across TikTok's unique creative burn rate. They walk through actual data from a skincare brand that hit 4.5x ROAS at small spend, then watched it crater to 1.2x after sc
Why Your Google Ads Quality Score Is Lying to You
Episode 11 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dive into Google Ads Quality Score and why it's not the metric you think it is. Lucas reveals how a simple test on a client's campaign showed a high Quality Score but terrible conversion rates, and explains why the score measures ad relevance to the keyword, not actual user experience. They discuss how optimizing for Quality Score al
Why Your Retargeting Budget Is Burning Cash
Lucas and Luna dive into the hidden inefficiencies of retargeting campaigns. They unpack the 'dormant customer trap' using a real-world case from a $50 million DTC brand that was wasting 30 percent of its ad spend on users who would never convert again. They break down recency-based segmentation, frequency fatigue, and why the old '30-day cookie window' is a relic. If you run performance marketing
Why Your CPM Is Rising Without More Conversions
Lucas and Luna dig into the CPM creep that's silently eating performance marketing budgets in mid-2026. They break down why auction dynamics—not algorithm changes—are driving up costs, using the case of a DTC brand that saw CPMs jump 40% while conversion rates stayed flat. Lucas explains how platform consolidation and the rise of AI-generated content are inflating impression supply, and shares a c
Why Your Amazon PPC Is Overpaying for Clicks
Lucas and Luna break down a hidden inefficiency in Amazon PPC: the search term isolation problem. Using the example of a mid-size supplement brand spending $40k/month on Sponsored Products, they explain how keyword match types bleed budget into branded queries you'd convert organically. Luna brings data showing that up to 30% of Amazon ad spend goes to terms that would rank top-3 organically. Luca
Why Your Facebook Ads Are Getting Less Efficient
Lucas and Luna break down the recent decline in Facebook ad efficiency for many direct-to-consumer brands, focusing on the shift in user behavior and Meta's evolving auction dynamics. They examine how rising CPMs and lower conversion rates are squeezing ROAS, and offer tactical countermeasures: tightening audience targeting, refreshing creative more frequently, and testing Advantage+ shopping camp
Why Your Display Ads Need a Frequency Cap
Episode 6 tackles one of the most overlooked levers in performance marketing: frequency capping on display and video campaigns. Lucas and Luna unpack a specific case from a mid-market DTC brand that saw its click-through rate drop 60% after the fifth impression and its cost per acquisition spike 3x. They break down the neuroscience behind ad fatigue, the difference between cookie-based and device-
The Hidden Leak in Your Google Shopping Campaigns
In this episode of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna uncover a hidden leak that silently drains ad budgets in Google Shopping campaigns: the product feed mismatch. Lucas breaks down a shocking example: a mid-size outdoor gear retailer that wasted $47,000 over six months because their feed sent 'Tent, 4-person' to Google but the landing page sold a 3-person model. They explore how
Why Your Facebook Ad Frequency Is Killing ROAS
In this episode of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna tackle one of the most overlooked levers in paid social: ad frequency. Using a real case from a DTC brand that saw ROAS drop by 40% after hitting a frequency of 6.2, they explain why frequency burns audiences faster than ever — especially after Meta's algorithm changes. They break down the math: why a frequency above 3 often sig
Why Your ROAS Dropped After Meta s Algorithm Change
In episode 3 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dig into Meta's July 2025 algorithm update that shifted the auction from click-based to value-based optimization. Lucas explains why many DTC brands saw ROAS drop 15-30% overnight, and how one brand — a small supplement company called WellFuel — actually improved performance by switching to a blended attribution model and retrainin
How Attribution Models Are Wasting Your Ad Budget
Lucas and Luna dive into the hidden inefficiencies of performance marketing attribution. Using the real-world example of a DTC brand that spent $2 million on Facebook ads in Q1 2026, they reveal why last-click attribution overvalues bottom-funnel tactics and undervalues awareness-driving channels. Lucas explains how multi-touch attribution (MTA) and media mix modeling (MMM) can correct for this, c
The $80 Billion Mistake in Performance Marketing
In the first episode of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna unpack the single metric that misled a generation of digital marketers: last-click attribution. Using the example of a DTC mattress startup that spent $80 million on Facebook ads only to plateau, they trace how the industry moved from vanity metrics to incrementality testing. Lucas breaks down why ROAS can be a dangerous nu
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