Field notes from inside sporting goods & recreation brands.

How sporting goods
brands actually grow.

We have managed tens of millions in spend across sporting goods, outdoor games, recreation, and pro sports brands. After enough accounts, the same patterns emerge. The same mistakes. The same math nobody ran until it was too late. This is what we know, and what any brand in this category should understand before spending another dollar on growth.

$4.7M
Four product launches. One summer.
36×
Peak ROAS. Marketing spend cut from 18% to 4%.
14.53×
Avg ROAS after a structural rebuild. Same ads.
$0
Sitewide discounts across four record months.
01
The Scoreboard
You're probably measuring the wrong things. In the wrong order.

ROAS is a platform metric. It tells you what Meta thinks happened. It doesn't tell you if you're building a business. Here's what to look at instead, and why the order matters.

The framework

We use a four-level hierarchy for every account we manage. The order isn't arbitrary, each metric is downstream of the one above it.

1. Cash contribution per order, What's left after product cost, shipping, fulfillment, payment fees, and discounts. Before a single dollar of marketing. This is the ceiling on everything. If it's $11, no ad strategy fixes it.

2. MER + Marketing % of Revenue, Total revenue divided by total marketing spend, across all channels. Cuts through attribution noise. Meta, Google, and Klaviyo are all claiming the same sale. MER does not care who gets credit.

3. New Customer CAC, Not blended. New customer CAC specifically. Blended looks healthy when you're running retargeting into people who were already going to buy.

4. Platform ROAS, Last. Useful for comparing creative direction. Dangerous as a north star.

"We've taken over accounts where the founder could name their ROAS in seconds. Couldn't tell us their contribution margin. Couldn't tell us what percentage of revenue was going to marketing. They had one number, and it was the least useful one."
From the field

One account. 5× ROAS on Meta. Strong by any platform benchmark. When we pulled total revenue against total marketing spend, across Meta, Klaviyo, the agency fee, Shopify apps, everything, the blended efficiency was 2.8×. Gross margin was thin. Discounts were running constantly. Shipping was eating the rest.

The platform said go. The P&L said stop. Nobody had looked at both at the same time.

02
Contribution Margin
Contribution margin is the ceiling on everything. Almost nobody knows theirs.

Before we talk about scaling anything, spend, inventory, team, we need one number: what's left after you pay for the product, ship it, process the payment, fulfill it, and apply whatever discount got the order.

The framework

The equation: AOV × Gross Margin % − Shipping − Discounts − Payment Fees − Fulfillment = Contribution per order.

Under $20/order: you have a math problem, not a marketing problem. Scaling spend makes it worse. Under $60: workable, but CAC has to stay well below it. Above $60: real room to invest in acquisition.

Most founders know their ROAS. Almost none have run this number. The gap between those two data points is where businesses bleed quietly for months.

From the field

Brand comes to us scaling aggressively. Dashboard looks healthy. Five, six times ROAS. We map every variable cost: product cost, shipping subsidy, payment processing, fulfillment center fees, the average discount per order.

What's left before a single dollar of marketing: $11. They'd been trying to grow a business on $11 per order. You cannot ad-spend your way out of broken unit economics.

03
MER Composition
MER tells you the ratio. Composition tells you if the ratio means anything.

A 5.0 MER can represent a healthy business or a completely broken one, depending on where the money is going. Same number. Completely different health.

The framework

MER = Total Revenue ÷ Total Marketing Spend. Marketing % of Revenue is the same coin flipped. A 5.0 MER means 20 cents of every dollar goes to marketing.

But MER doesn't tell you where that 20 cents went. Red flags: Agency fees above 35% of total marketing budget, spending more on managing money than deploying it. Paid media below 35%, primary demand engine is underfunded. Creative below 5%, you'll hit a ceiling fast.

"We've seen accounts where the MER looked fine and 70% of the marketing budget was agency fees and Shopify apps. Eight percent was actual ad spend. The ratio looked efficient. The allocation was a disaster."
From the field

Two brands. Same MER. Brand A: $8K in ads, $56K in fees and tools. Brand B: $48K in ads, $16K in fees. Same blended efficiency number. Brand A is spending more on managing money than deploying it. Brand B is actually in the market.

Before you spend a dollar
Is paid acquisition even the right move right now?
Most brands start running ads before they know if the math works. Plug in your numbers, we will tell you if you are in the danger zone, opportunity zone, or somewhere in between. And how aggressively you can spend.
14.53×
Average ROAS after rebuilding account structure. No new creative. Just a clean architecture that stopped Meta's learning phase from constantly resetting.
7.9%
Add-to-cart rate after repositioning creative. Up from 2.94%. Same product. Different signal to the algorithm. Different buyer found.
4 mos
Consecutive record revenue months. Every one at full price. No sitewide discounts. The constraint forced better marketing.
04
Demand Creation vs. Capture
Strong ROAS and flat revenue happen at the same time. Here's why.

Blended CAC looks healthy when you're running retargeting into people who were already going to buy. That's not growth. That's recycling. And the dashboard gives you zero warning when the pool runs dry.

The framework

Every brand has a demand pool, the existing audience that already knows them. Retargeting that pool is efficient. It feels like growth. But it has a ceiling. When you hit it: revenue plateaus, ROAS holds steady, and the dashboard gives no signal that anything is wrong.

New customer CAC, tracked separately from blended, is the leading indicator. If it's rising while revenue is flat, you've hit the ceiling.

"We pull the new customer percentage. It's 15%. They've been selling to the same people over and over, getting slightly better at it, and calling it growth. The demand pool had a ceiling. They hit it. And the dashboard gave them zero warning."
From the field

A brand we inherited: ROAS at 4×, holding steady. Total revenue flat for eight months. New customer percentage: 18%. Almost all spend was retargeting and branded search.

When we shifted budget toward prospecting, cold audiences, new contexts, top of funnel, ROAS dropped temporarily. New customer acquisition started climbing. Total revenue started moving. A bad read of the dashboard would have kept them stuck.

05
Creative Strategy
In modern Meta, your creative decisions are your audience decisions.

Meta reads the entire creative, image, copy, setting, context, and uses it to decide who to show it to. Two ads that look different to a human can register as nearly identical to the algorithm. One gets suppressed before it ever runs.

The framework

Micro-variations are not tests. The same product on a white background with five different headlines is one test with noise. Meta evaluates the whole creative holistically, swapping a headline barely registers.

Concept-level testing generates real signal. A tailgate scene, a lake house setup, an athlete using the product, those are three genuinely different signals the algorithm can learn from.

The smoke test: Plain static with bold call-out. Watch CPM and hook rate. If there's signal, invest in production. Stop burning creative budgets on concepts that were never going to work.

"The creative was outdoorsy and rustic, national parks energy. The customer was buying a $400 outdoor game for their lake house. The creative was telling Meta to find the wrong person."
From the field, Elakai Outdoor

Premium outdoor game brand. $400+ product for high-end homes. Ads felt rustic and outdoorsy, didn't match the actual buyer hosting lakefront dinner parties.

We repositioned to premium lifestyle. Rebuilt the visual world around where the product actually lives. Brought in brand partnerships that matched the buyer. Add-to-cart went from 2.94% to 7.9%. CTR from 1% to 3.4%. Best campaign: 13.1× ROAS. Same product. Different signal.

06
Account Structure
The structure of your account might be fighting your ads before anyone sees them.

When we inherit a troubled account, the first thing we pull is audience overlap. Almost always it's 25–40%. Meta's learning phase is constantly resetting. The ads aren't the problem. The architecture is.

The framework

Three clean tiers. Prospecting, Mid-Funnel, Retargeting. Each with a distinct audience, distinct objective, judged on the right metric for what it's trying to do.

Before touching any creative, run Facebook's Audience Overlap tool on every active ad set. Anything above 20% means campaigns are competing against each other. Fix the architecture first.

From the field

Account we took over: average ROAS 4.09 across all campaigns. Audience overlap between 25–40% everywhere. Meta's learning phase was constantly resetting.

We rebuilt into three clean tiers. Merged the redundant lookalikes. Did not touch a single creative. Average ROAS went to 14.53. BOF hit 21–36×. Same ads. The structure had been the problem the entire time.

07
Discounting
A discount is a loan from your future self. The interest rate is your brand.

Once buyers know you discount regularly, full-price conversion drops, and it doesn't come back when the sale ends. We've watched brands get into a cycle where they need the discount to hit the weekly number, which trains more customers to wait.

The framework

A discount should have a reason, a launch, a genuine seasonal moment, a clearance situation. A random 20% off email because the week was slow is a permanent tax on brand equity.

The alternative: build creative and positioning strong enough that you do not need to. Better athlete partnerships. Stronger context. More compelling reasons to buy at full price now. The constraint forces better marketing.

"Every Beastmaster record month happened at full price. No sitewide sales, ever. The constraint forced better creative and better positioning, which turned out to be far more profitable than the shortcut."
From the field, Beastmaster Rodeo

Rodeo gear brand. Every time they pushed volume, margin collapsed. They'd been running promos to prop up conversion rate, training their customer base to wait for deals.

We stopped all sitewide discounting. Built creative around athlete credibility instead of price. Every campaign ran through a profitability floor before launching. Four consecutive record months. All at full price. Marketing spend fell from 12–18% of revenue to 4–8%. Peak ROAS: 36×.

Few agencies understand sports, outdoor recreation, games, and enthusiast-driven commerce the way we do. Our team has worked alongside, and been recruited from, organizations like the NFL, CAA, Barstool Sports, and some of the most recognized names in sports and consumer marketing. That experience shapes how we think about brand, audience, and what it actually takes to move product in these categories.
NFL Barstool Sports CAA NFL Flag ACHA
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