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Meta keeps stealing your budget for this
Jeff Sauer
September 04, 2025
Attribution isn't just broken. It's backwards.
Most marketers think they're buying new customers when they're actually just paying premium prices for people who were going to buy anyway.
Scott Desgrosseilliers from Wicked Reports just walked me through his Five Forces framework on the podcast. And honestly? It's the most practical attribution strategy I've seen in years.
Here's what hit me hardest:
The platforms are trained to lie to you.
Meta's algorithm will gladly show you a 4x ROAS while secretly spending 80% of your "new customer acquisition" budget on existing customers.
Because existing customers convert faster.
Because they make the numbers look good.
Because the platform gets paid either way.
Scott calls this the “intention” force - knowing exactly what you're trying to accomplish before you measure anything.
The zone system changes everything.
Instead of setting a single target (like $50 customer acquisition cost), Scott uses zones:
Scale zone: Below $45 = increase budget
Chill zone: $45-55 = maintain current spend
Kill zone: Above $55 = diagnose and fix
No more agonizing over whether $52 is good or bad. The decision is already made.
But here's the part that blew my mind:
Scott measures "new visitor percentage" on cold traffic campaigns. If you can't get above 40% genuinely new visitors, your pixel is basically just retargeting your existing audience at premium prices.
Think about that. You're paying cold traffic rates for warm traffic results.
The fix? Custom conversion events that signal to Meta: "I want ACTUALLY new customers, not just people who convert well."
Why this matters right now:
Attribution isn't getting easier. iOS updates, cookie deprecation, AI black boxes - the measurement landscape keeps shifting.
But Scott's framework works because it's built for the real world. Just practical decisions with imperfect data.
Worth noting: Scott's been doing attribution for 26,000+ hours across 13 years. The framework came from that expertise and his specificity is exactly what most attribution strategies lack.
We're doing a deeper dive on customer acquisition next episode together.
To Your Measured Success!
--Jeff Sauer
Co-Founder of MeasureU
P.S. Our MCPs and Server-Side Tracking training is happening TODAY - and we already have over 300 people registered. If you haven't signed up yet, you might want to grab your spot before we hit our attendee limit. When this many measurement professionals are interested in something, you probably don't want to be the one left out. Register here.
The Stape setup that shocked us