One placement was eating 35% of spend at 0.4x ROAS

One placement was eating 35% of spend at 0.4x ROAS

My campaign-level ROAS was 1.9x and fine. The placement breakdown was a horror show.

— The setup: Facebook automatic placements, lead-gen offer, $130/day, ROAS holding around 1.9x.
— The move: I pulled the placement report — feed, stories, reels, audience network, etc. — and read ROAS per placement.
— The numbers: Audience Network was 35% of my spend at 0.4x ROAS — burning roughly $45/day for $18 back. Feed and Reels were 2.8x and carrying the whole campaign. The 1.9x average was Feed and Reels dragging a corpse. Excluded Audience Network. Before: $130/day, $247 revenue, 1.9x. After: $85/day effective, $238 revenue, 2.8x. Nearly the same revenue at two-thirds the spend.

— The lesson: 'automatic placements' means the platform spends your money where it's easiest to spend, not where it converts. Junk placements hide behind a healthy-looking blended number.

What I'd do differently: Audit placements after the first $300, not after $1,000. The audience-network leak ran a week — about $315 spent for ~$125 back. Numbers illustrative; the junk-placement drain is in almost every auto-placement campaign I've ever opened.