At Tailor Brands, I managed several million a month in paid spend. One quarter, we were missing our ROAS target. The directive was simple: cut the budget and hit the number.
Search was the easy cut. An affiliate deal was already catching the same intent. Two channels, one job. Cut search, lose nothing. The demand just walks through a different door.
But it wasn't enough. The obvious next move was social — the biggest line in the account. That's where I stopped.
Here is the hidden trap with social: it creates the demand. Someone sees your ad, does nothing, then searches your brand two weeks later and buys. That brand search looks like a search win. It isn't.
Cut social to hit this quarter's ROAS and you aren't trimming waste. You are spending down next quarter's demand to make this one's number.
I knew because I'd watched it happen. Last time we cut social hard, the quarter looked great. Then brand search dropped. Scaling back up cost more than we saved.
That lag is the trap. Nobody links a weak quarter to the cut before it. So I reverse-engineered a floor from our historical data. Around 35% of the budget.
It wasn't a precise optimum. It was a rough estimate grounded in reality. But that's what made it hold in the room.
"It'll hurt us later" gets overruled every time. "Below this line, brand demand decays and we don't win it back for two quarters — here is the data from last time" does not.
A rough estimate grounded in what already happened beats a precise number nobody can defend.
Originally published in The Growth System newsletter on LinkedIn.