In partnership with
Build a Holiday Creator Affiliate Program in 90 Days
Holiday planning is already in full gear, and the pressure is on for ecommerce brands to generate demand.
Creator affiliate marketing can help by connecting more of your marketing spend to measurable performance. But creators are already locking in their holiday content calendars 90 days out, and brands who wait too long lose the runway they need to build momentum before the holidays.
The 90-Day Holiday Sprint is a practical guide from Levanta that breaks down building a creator affiliate program with checkpoints at Day 30, Day 60, and Day 90, so your program is live and capturing holiday demand instead of scrambling to catch up.
Inside, you’ll find how to:
Establish the right products and commission structure
Recruit and activate creator partners
Use early results to optimize the program
Scale proven partnerships during the holidays
24 months.
€37,500 in ad spend (190,617 lei).
€461,000 back (2,342,986 lei).
A 12.29x ROAS.
Post that on LinkedIn and people will ask you what you are doing differently.
Here is the question almost nobody asks next:
what did that actually leave behind?
The Meta ads account behind these numbers
A home & garden webshop. 100+ campaigns, 2,665 orders, twenty four months of scaling from zero.
24 months of Meta Ads
It started at €10 a day.
Across the two years the spend averaged about €51 a day, so this is not a big-budget account.
It is a small one that kept going.
Average order value of €173 (879 lei). Each order cost €14 to buy (71 lei).
This advertiser is already ahead of most people reading this.
I want to walk down their numbers one line at a time, because the walk is the lesson.
What ROAS actually measures in Meta ads
ROAS = purchase conversion value / ad spend
461,000 / 37,500 = 12.29.
That is the number everyone quotes, and it is doing exactly one job:
telling you how many euro came back for every euro out.
What it does not do is tell you how much you kept.
A ratio is not money. You cannot pay a supplier in 12.29x.
I wrote a whole issue on why this number misleads people, back in #010.
What POAS adds: profit after ad spend
POAS = profit after ad spend
On this account, 11.29.
The move from 12.29 to 11.29 is small on paper and important in your head.
ROAS counts the revenue that came in. POAS counts what is still there after the ad invoice is paid.
It is the first honest step, because ad spend is a cost you know exactly. It is on your card statement.
If POAS is new to you, #068 covers the difference properly.
Most advertisers stop here and think they are done. There are two more important metrics left.
Why VAT is hiding inside your ecommerce ROAS
Meta reports the checkout total. If you sell to consumers in Romania, that total carries 21% VAT.
You collect it and hand it to the state.
It passes through your bank account, it is not revenue.
€461,000 of reported revenue is €381,000 of actual revenue.
€80,000 belonged to the state.
Run the ladder again on the real top line:
Reported | Without VAT (21%) | |
|---|---|---|
ROAS | 12.29 | 10.16 |
POAS | 11.29 | 9.16 |
Average order value | €173 | €143 |
Same account, same two years, same performance. Nothing changed except that the tax came out first.
If you sell outside the EU, or B2B with VAT excluded at checkout, skip this line.
If you sell to consumers in Europe, it is your first deduction, before you touch anything else.
Where the Meta ads dashboard stops
Nothing here is wrong or hidden.
The columns say what they say, and this shop is in good shape.
The point is where the dashboard stops.
Ads Manager can only see the ad account.
It knows what you paid Meta and what came back through the pixel, and that is the end of its knowledge.
Every number in it is a starting point for your math, not the answer to it.
The last line: your gross profit margin
Your product cost. COGS, on your P&L.
Meta does not know what it costs you to make or buy the thing you just sold.
Not the packaging, not the shipping, not the payment fees.
That number lives in your accounting.
This shop runs at a 50% gross margin.
So the last step looks like this:
Net revenue x gross margin, minus ad spend.
€381,000 x 0.50 = €190,500 of gross profit.
Minus the €37,500 that went to Meta.
€153,000 left, over two years.
That is €57 per order.
Every euro that went to Meta produced 5.08 euro of gross profit, and 4.08 of that was still there after the ad invoice was paid.
Before overheads, but real money instead of a ratio.
So the whole ladder, one account, 24 months:
ROAS in Ads Manager | 12.29x |
POAS | 11.29x |
After VAT | 10.16x |
After COGS (product costs) | 5.08x |
After COGS & ad spend | 4.08x |
A 12.29x that is really 4.08x is not bad news.
This means: for every €1 you spent on Meta, you kept €4.08 after COGS and the ad bill.
It is a genuinely strong account, described honestly.
And one shortcut worth having before you do any of this:
Break-even ROAS = 1 / your gross margin
At a 50% margin that is 2.0x.
Under 2x after VAT this account loses money.
Over it, it makes money.
It ran at 10.16x.
That is five times the break-even line.
Every €1 that went to Meta came back as €5.08 of gross profit.
Same story from the other side:
the ads cost 9.8% of net revenue, €37,500 out of €381,000.
That is what it cost to run the whole account.
I took that formula apart in #124, and made the case for running the whole account on profit in #106.
The one truth about ROAS and profit
ROAS is a ratio. POAS is what is left once Meta is paid.
Neither one is profit.
The tax was never yours. The product was never free.
Both lines sit outside the ad account.
Do that math once and ROAS stops being something to brag about, and starts being something to use.
TLDR:
ROAS is revenue divided by spend. It tells you a ratio, never how much you kept.
POAS, profit after ad spend, is the first honest step, because ad cost is the one cost you know exactly.
Meta reports the checkout total, so VAT sits inside your revenue. On this account it took a 12.29x ROAS to 10.16x and the average order from €173 to €143.
The last line is your product cost, and it only exists in your accounting: net revenue x gross margin, minus ad spend.
At this shop's 50% margin the ladder runs 10.16x to 5.08x of gross profit, and 4.08x once Meta is paid, or €153,000 kept on €37,500 of ad spend across 24 months.
Quick check with one number you already have: break-even ROAS = 1 / your gross margin. At 50% that is 2x.
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