How a DTC skincare brand found $2.4M in misallocated budget

The Situation

A mid-market DTC skincare brand — $45M in annual revenue, approximately $8M in digital ad spend — engaged Roblec to inform a board-level budget review. The board wanted to see marketing efficiency improve by 15% or face across-the-board cuts.

The brand’s internal attribution system, built on last-click with a 7-day lookback window, indicated Meta was responsible for 62% of conversions, Google for 28%, and the remaining 10% spread across TikTok, CTV, and affiliate channels. The marketing team had been optimizing against these numbers for over a year.

The Approach

Roblec provided an independent, channel-level estimate of the brand’s advertising spend distribution across Meta, Google, TikTok, CTV, and programmatic display. This external view offered the brand a third-party reference point to compare against its internal attribution data.

Roblec also mapped competitor brands in the same skincare category by channel-level spend, producing channel concentration ratios that showed where category peers were investing and in what proportions. This gave the brand context for how its own channel mix compared to the broader market.

The Finding

Roblec’s channel-level estimates showed the brand’s spend was heavily concentrated in Meta relative to category peers. Competitors of similar size allocated a meaningfully larger share of budget to CTV and TikTok, while the brand’s investment in those channels was minimal.

When the brand compared Roblec’s independent spend estimates against its internal attribution data, a significant discrepancy emerged: the internal model’s 62% credit to Meta was inconsistent with the channel-level patterns Roblec observed across the category. This prompted the brand to investigate its attribution methodology, ultimately revealing that Meta was over-credited due to last-click bias — upper-funnel channels like CTV and TikTok were initiating customer journeys that Meta was converting and claiming full credit for.

The $2.4M figure represents the spend the brand determined it had been over-allocating to Meta retargeting based on the inflated attribution, informed by Roblec’s independent channel-level view.

The Outcome

The brand presented Roblec’s independent channel data alongside their internal attribution at the board review. Rather than the expected budget cuts, the board approved a reallocation: shifting spend from Meta retargeting toward CTV and TikTok, channels where category competitors were investing more heavily.

Over the following quarter, the brand reported a 17% improvement in blended customer acquisition cost. The improvement came not from spending less, but from rebalancing the channel mix — informed by Roblec’s independent view of where category spend was actually flowing.

The CFO’s assessment: this was the first time the marketing team had presented data from an independent third-party source that finance could evaluate separately from the platforms’ own reporting.