The creative that printed for 6 days then ate my margin
TikTok Spark Ads, one winning UGC video, and a slow-motion margin collapse nobody warns you about.
— The setup: e-com dropship product, $34 AOV, one creator video that went 4x ROAS out of the gate.
— The move: I scaled hard. $120/day to $600/day in five days because the ROAS held. Day six it started slipping and I told myself it was variance.
— The numbers: Days 1-5 averaged 3.4x ROAS on $1,800 spend. Days 6-9 dropped to 1.6x, then 1.1x, on $2,200 spend. Frequency on my core audience hit 4.7. The winner wasn't dead — it was saturated. Net across nine days: $4,000 spend, $5,180 revenue, +29%. But the back half alone was -8%.
— The lesson: a single creative has a half-life, and scaling stretches the curve flatter and longer until it inverts. ROAS decay is a frequency problem disguised as a creative problem.
What I'd do differently: Cap spend per creative at the frequency where ROAS first dips, and have creative #2 in rotation by day three. I had no backup. Numbers illustrative; the day-six cliff is brutally consistent.
Arb Files
@ArbFiles