Discounts aren’t a strategy.
They’re a tool.
Strategy makes people want to buy.
Discounts just push the already-interested over the line.
If your sales only move when you drop price you’re not building demand, you’re building waiters.
Use discounts to close. Not to convince
Most people think traffic = sales.
It not.
Out of 100 visitors, only 1–3 buy.
That’s 97–99% walking out empty-handed.
Not because your product is bad.
But because most people don’t buy on first visit.
So the real game isn’t traffic
It’s what you do after they land.
Sometimes optimization itself is a skill, and more often than not, it’s where advertisers quietly kill scale.
I’ve seen a lot of media buyers try to force spend toward specific ads by optimizing purely around ROAS at the ad level.
That approach is fundamentally flawed.
If an ad set is operating within your CPA target or close to your account average, you have very little reason to start aggressively turning ads off.
Not every ad’s job is to be your highest ROAS performer.
Some ads: Drive cheaper traffic, expand reach, feed new users into the funnel, and support overall account learning.
When you judge every ad strictly by short-term ROAS, you unintentionally remove the very creatives bringing new demand into the account.
Here’s where most people go wrong:
- They see one ad under the target, but taking all the spend,
- They turn it off,
- Spend shifts to other ads with small spend but high ROAS ads
- Top-of-funnel traffic drops.
- And initially, performance may even look better.
But weeks later?
CPAs rise, conversion rates decline, scaling stalls.
Why? Because you didn’t optimize, you killed your acquisition engine.
Optimization is not about forcing budget on high ROAS and low spending ads.
If your ad set is profitable overall, your job isn’t to manually micromanage what get spend or not.
Your job is to ask:
- Is the account acquiring customers at target cost?
- Is new traffic consistently entering the funnel?
- Is performance stable at scale?
If the answer is yes, constant ad-level optimisation often does more harm than good.
The best media buyers understand this: you don’t scale by eliminating everything below average.
You scale by allowing multiple creatives to play different roles inside the system while the account as a whole wins.
Sometimes, the real optimization move is knowing when not to optimize.
Let me know if you have any questions about this or if it makes sense to you.
Happy Sunday!