The Wednesday Windup Vol. 18: Exclusive Holiday Collab, How to Get 2 Courses for $11.98, and Why ROAS Is Not a KPI

This Wednesday, I’m excited to unveil a new holiday campaign!!!

It’s gifting season, so naturally, I’m here with a campaign that’s either brilliant or slightly unhinged—your call.

Here’s the short version: I’m giving you two of our $199 courses, a $5 Amazon gift card, and early access to a new course. All for $11.95.

Why? Because I wrote a book. And no, it’s not an ad book or a business book. It’s a middle-grade novel. Georgie Summers and the Scribes of Scatterplot.

Four years of writing. One year of rewriting. Two years of publishers saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Until finally, someone said yes.

Now it’s available for pre-order, and I want to make this launch something special. So, I thought, “What if I turned this into the most ridiculous win-win deal ever?”

Here’s how it works:

Preorder the book here: 👉 https://a.co/d/b0k7U0e
Forward your confirmation to training@adventureppc.com.
Within 12 hours, you’ll get:
- Any $199 AdVenture Academy course—FREE.
- A $5 Amazon gift card.
- Early access to ‘Unlock Your Inner Storyteller,’ my new course launching in two weeks (if you’re one of the first 500).

This whole thing is worth $403. You’re getting it for $11.98.

Now, let’s talk about the why.

This book is personal.

We’ve all had childhood dreams—big, wild, borderline impossible ones. And as we grow up, life has a way of telling us to be practical, responsible, realistic. Dreams get boxed up and shelved.

Writing this book reminded me that they don’t have to be. That inner Disney-loving, hero-believing kid? They’re still in there. And they deserve a shot.

So here’s my ask: This holiday, give the gift of this book. To your kid, your niece, your nephew, or maybe even your own inner child.

And, as a thank-you, you’ll walk away with two top-notch digital advertising courses—for the bargain price of $11.98.

Your support means the world to me. It makes this launch possible. It proves to my wife that the years of late nights and questionable spending were worth it (and keeps me off the couch).

So grab the book. Get the courses. Support a dream. And make this season even more magical!

Click here to learn more. Let’s make some magic happen.

Preorder the book here: 👉 https://a.co/d/b0k7U0e

Thanks for your support!

Now, let's move on to the rest of our Wednesday pick-me-up.

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them."

— Walt Disney

Cannonball

A story from inside the agency...

I’m sitting in the lobby at the Thompson Hotel in Nashville, getting some emails out of the way before our client meeting—just a few city blocks away, at the city’s largest employer.

We had an incredible dinner with the CEO last night. We spoke about careers, life, kids, culture—and how important their relationship is to us. It was sincere.

Do any of us know what we’re doing? Where we’re going? Doesn’t seem like it.

Being in a state of not-knowing may, in certain cases, be a sort of empty bovine contentment.

But often, it’s a state of anticipation, optimism, and hope.

Back when AdVenture was just Patrick, Dovi, Danny, Ari, and me (and Eli? Jack?), we’d spend afternoons at Patrick’s parents’ house in Levittown. Never on Wednesdays, of course—Wednesdays were beach days in West Hampton.

I remember sitting poolside by the Gilbert’s, trying frantically to hobble together a proposal for the first client we ever quoted above $10k/mo. It was a huge milestone. They were spending a ton of money. They had been with “real” agencies in the past, and we had to come off as professional and polished. Our proposal decks, back then, were neither.

“CANNONBALL!” Patrick shouts and launches himself off the extremely steep roof of his pool house and into the deep end. Ari wasn’t told that Patrick liked to role-play SeaWorld, and failed to move his MacBook far enough away from the pool.

Now Ari’s freaking out about his MacBook, which would never turn on again, and I’m still looking for software logos I liked the colors of to throw into the proposal.

At some point, Patrick, Dovi, and Danny huddle around and we all take stabs writing the legal paragraphs. Somewhere in the termination clause, I think I pasted in “in vino veritas” and “carpe diem.”

Sounded legalish to me.

Finally, I send the proposal. My heart was racing. I climb onto Gilbert’s pool house roof and jump off.

The client signed a few days later. Patrick, Ari, Danny, and Dovi all gathered around my desk when I ran their company credit card through Chargify. There was a long, harrowing moment of silence as the page buffered; no one breathed.

The confirmation popped up. Charge successful. We all exhaled, had shots of whiskey, hugs all around. Patrick put on some Irish drinking song on YouTube. I don’t remember which one it was, but I promise you he does.

This client became one of our most important clients over the next two to three years. Our work for them was incredibly successful, and the relationship turned into multiple additional pieces of business.

No one knows what they’re doing.

But that’s okay.

In vino veritas.

Live Q&A’s happen every Friday in the CPC Survivors Society—complete with prizes and giveaways!

Thanks to everyone who’s been joining the live Q&A sessions—they’ve genuinely become the highlight of my week. Your questions are sharp, your energy is contagious, and I can’t thank you enough for showing up.

It's been really fun getting to know everyone!

If you’ve missed any sessions, no worries. The recordings are available in the CPC Survivors Society, so you can catch up anytime.

We've been stepping it up with giveaways and prizes—and this week is a really good one! You're gonna want to be there!

If you haven’t joined yet, this is your chance to get real-time answers to the campaign questions that have been keeping you up at night.

Mark your calendar—every Friday at 11:30 AM EST. I’ll see you there.

Join the CPC Survivor's Society and RSVP now. We’ll save you a seat. (But not literally. It’s virtual. You get it.)

ROAS Isn’t a KPI—It’s a Story You Tell Yourself

Let’s not kid ourselves. ROAS and CPA feel like the safe metrics, the grown-up way to track success in advertising. But if we’re being honest, they’re crutches—comforting but misleading, like checking your bank account and pretending all your bills are paid.

Let me break this down for you.

The Metrics That Pretend to Know Everything

CPA has a simple pitch: “Spend less than this amount per customer, and you win.” It’s clean. It’s clear. And it’s wrong.

Take a lead-gen example:

You’re running ads for a tutoring service.
Each new customer brings in $200 in revenue.
“We’ll pay $50 per lead,” you decide, “because we close one in four.”

Sounds logical until you realize you forgot:

The actual cost of delivering the service.
The real value of a customer over time.
The specific costs that make one lead better than another.

Suddenly, that $50 lead doesn’t look so great when it costs $180 to tutor them, and your ideal customer spends $500 more over three years. The result? You’re optimizing for short-term wins and missing the whole picture.

Then there’s ROAS.

It’s better, right? After all, it ties ad spend to revenue.

But ROAS doesn’t care if you’re profitable. It just cares that you’re spending money and making it look good.

Allow me to explain...

You sell two products—cheap, low-margin dog food and premium, high-margin pet cages. ROAS says, “Focus on the dog food! Look at all the revenue it’s generating!”

But while your competitors are scooping up your market share in the cage business, you’re chasing low-margin volume that’s barely covering costs.

Congrats. Your ROAS is up, and your profits are flatlining.

What to Do Instead

Metrics shouldn’t just make your dashboards look pretty; they should make your business smarter.

Here’s what to focus on:

Profit Over Ad Spend (POAS): This tells you what actually makes money. Feed your profit margins into Google Ads, and let the AI optimize for what matters: profit, not revenue.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER): Total revenue ÷ total marketing spend. This isn’t about attribution; it’s about the big picture. If you’re profitable overall, who cares which channel gets the credit?

Leading Indicator Models (Bridging Complex Buyer Journeys): For lead-generation businesses, Leading Indicator Models help track the actions that are most likely to lead to sales. Instead of treating all actions equally, these models assign value based on their conversion likelihood.
- For example, a business might find:
  - - 35% of appointments convert to sales
    - 10% of phone calls convert
    - 5% of “Get Directions” clicks convert
- With this data, they can focus campaigns on driving higher-value actions like appointments. Regular updates keep the model relevant as customer behavior evolves.

The takeaway? Stop relying on metrics that feel safe but don’t actually drive growth. ROAS and CPA are fine for measuring efficiency, but if you’re not focused on profit and long-term value, you’re just running in circles with a clipboard.

For a comprehensive approach to running profitable digital advertising campaigns, I highly recommend you check out the Ultimate Digital Advertising Library. Just saying.

Isaac Rudansky

Founder, AdVenture Academy
training@adventureppc.com

P.S.

If you’re up for a wild ride through the joys and chaos of creative writing, subscribe to The Scatterplot Chronicles, my LinkedIn series where I spill the beans on my writing and publishing adventures. Check out all the nitty gritty details here.
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