There’s a particular kind of stuck CMOs face that’s hard to diagnose because on the surface everything still looks fine. Campaigns are running. The dashboard’s green. ROAS is holding steady – maybe even nudging up a little. And yet, quarter after quarter, growth just… doesn’t come.

It can happen slowly enough that you don’t really question it at first. You explain it away. Seasonality. A competitor doing something odd. Creative fatigue. You tweak things, give it a bit of time, and nothing much changes.

Eventually someone says it, usually in a slightly reluctant way: we’ve hit a ceiling.

When I spoke to Liam Patterson, CEO of Bidnamic, for the latest episode of the Flipping the Playbook podcast, that phrase came up almost immediately.

“They’ve been at that same spend, driving that same profit – how do they get to that next level?” Liam said.

It’s a familiar question. What’s less obvious is that most teams are looking in the wrong place for the answer.

The problem usually isn’t where you think it is

When growth stalls, the instinct is to fix the machinery. Restructure campaigns. Change bidding strategy. Swap agencies. Push creative harder.

This is all reasonable. Some of it might move things slightly. But it rarely shifts the underlying trajectory, because the constraint isn’t sitting inside the ad account. It’s sitting underneath it.

In how performance is being measured, and what that measurement is quietly encouraging you to do.

ROAS has become the default because it’s simple. It gives you a clean number you can track, compare, report. The problem is that it strips out the context that actually determines whether your marketing is working: Profit.

The part of the catalogue you don’t see

There’s another dynamic at play that’s less visible, but just as limiting. Every brand has its hero products. The ones that convert easily. The ones that carry the numbers.

Google leans into those.

“Google will favour those products that sell… it will show that hero product again and again,” Liam said.

Which makes sense. Google is optimising for certainty. But it comes at a cost.

“They can be totally overlooked… miss out on impressions… miss out on revenue,” Liam said.

Large parts of the catalogue never really get exposure. Not because they can’t perform, but because they haven’t yet. From a reporting perspective, this is almost invisible. You see what’s working. You don’t see what’s being suppressed. That creates a very specific kind of constraint: growth that’s overly dependent on a narrow set of products.

This is where performance stops being “performance”

Once you start looking at this properly, the conversation changes.

You’re no longer just asking how to improve campaign efficiency. You’re asking:

  • Which products should we actually be scaling?
  • Where are we making money versus just generating revenue?
  • What are we over-investing in because the metric tells us to?

That requires a level of integration between marketing, merchandising, pricing that most teams don’t fully have. Even the inputs matter more than people expect.

“Sometimes… it’s actually the product data,” Liam said.

Missing attributes. Weak product titles. Incomplete feeds. It’s not glamorous work. It doesn’t usually show up in strategy decks. But it directly affects what gets seen and what doesn’t. At scale, those small gaps compound.

On AI: useful, but not yet decisive

AI inevitably comes into the conversation. Most CMOs are already being asked what their strategy is. Liam’s view is more measured than most.

“It’s a huge evolution… we shouldn’t underestimate it,” he said, but added, “It’s kind of single digit percentage… a tiny amount of clicks, let alone revenue.”

That tension matters.

Because the risk right now isn’t ignoring AI. It’s over-rotating towards it; pulling budget or focus away from channels that are already delivering scale.

“You could probably scale one per cent more of Meta or Google… more than what you could get through some of these AI channels right now,” Liam said.

It’s not an argument against experimentation. It’s just a reminder that volume still sits elsewhere.

The metrics are starting to shift

There’s another change happening that’s easier to miss. User behaviour is becoming more fragmented. More research happens off-platform, in AI tools, in social, in places you can’t fully track. Which means by the time someone clicks, they’re often further along than they used to be.

“You could get far less traffic, but it could be way higher converting,” Liam said.

So, traffic declines. Conversion improves. And depending on how you’re measuring success, that can look like a problem. This is where some of the older metrics start to feel less reliable (or at least less complete).

What this really comes down to

After all of this, the question isn’t really about Google Shopping tactics. Or AI. Or even ROAS on its own. It’s whether your marketing is aligned to how the business actually makes money.

Or whether you’re still optimising inside a system of platform metrics that only tell part of the story.

That gap is where most growth stalls. And increasingly, it’s where the advantage sits for the teams willing to look at it directly.

There’s plenty more in the discussion

Liam and I covered a lot more in ground than ROAS in our conversation. We also chatted about:

  • Google vs Meta. Liam draws a sharp distinction between the two that most marketing teams instinctively feel but rarely articulate (and it changes how you think about where demand actually comes from).
  • The universal product catalogue is coming, and most brands aren’t ready for it. Shopify, Google, ChatGPT… they’re converging on something that could quietly reshape how products get discovered. Liam explains what it is and what to do about it now.
  • The metric CMOs should actually be questioning instead of ROAS. There’s a point in the conversation where the discussion shifts from what to measure to what to stop measuring, and it’s more specific, and more uncomfortable, than you’d expect!

Watch the full conversation with Liam Patterson on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.