The Spa Dr — Weekly Performance Report On Track

Google Ads 966-279-5380 currently returns customer.status = SUSPENDED. This is a Sep 2 event and does not touch any number in this report — the reporting week closed Aug 30 and delivery was normal through Sep 1 ($341.75 of spend). What it does change is what happens next:

• SR_US_BR_SpaDr_Products is now PAUSED with HAS_ADS_DISAPPROVED — and it was the best campaign in the account this week (19 orders, $1,437.38, 12.87x). It was still spending on Sep 2 morning, so the pause landed today. Every enabled campaign in the account now carries a policy reason.
• Sep 2 spend to 09:00 was $89 against a $290–340/day run rate. Delivery is collapsing in real time.
• Forensics are already done and separate: no external actor appears in the 30-day change log; the prime suspect is external manager MCC 7976021863. The appeal is the priority, not any bid or budget in this report.

On the scope difference first: CDP q2635 only counts revenue it can attribute to a paid source on a 1-day-click window (Google, Bing, Meta, AppLovin, Rakuten). Shopify counts everything — organic, email, direct and returning customers. The gap is expected and is not the >15% data-quality flag the runbook warns about. Paid-attributed share was 30.6% → 33.9% of the store.

The direction is unambiguous this week. Shopify net revenue rose +5.3% ($105,371 → $110,971) on +7.6% more orders (1,492 → 1,606) at a flat AOV ($70.62 → $69.10) — so it is genuine volume, not basket inflation. CDP paid revenue store-wide agrees, +16.9%, on paid orders 435 → 524. Refunds moved -1.3%, roughly in line with volume (9.1% → 8.6% of gross), so nothing to flag there.

Unlike last week, Google moved with the store rather than against it. Google core paid orders 55 → 71 (+29.1%) into a store that grew +7.6% — roughly matching pace. The W33 report described the opposite pattern (Google losing share of a growing store) and the correction it predicted has landed. The only segment moving the other way is Bing, at $43.91 of spend.

Note on method: these Shopify figures are paginated over the full week (1,606 and 1,492 orders). The standard fetcher (scripts/generate_wow_report.py) caps at the 250-order GraphQL page — a ~5x understatement. This report uses a paginated pull; that bug is still open in the fetcher.

Upper-funnel spend rose +12.5% ($54,372 → $61,174) and impressions moved only +1.3% (930,807 → 943,293). Almost the whole spend increase went into price: blended CPM $58.41 → $64.85 (+11.0%). Anyone quoting “upper-funnel investment is up 13%” this week would be describing a week in which reach did not move at all — which is exactly why the runbook forbids reading the halo off spend.

The engagement half did move, and it moved a lot more than exposure. Upper-funnel clicks 30,637 → 35,238 (+15.0%) — eleven times the impression change — because CTR improved on both large channels. Facebook spent +24.0% ($34,180 → $42,367) for +3.6% impressions at a CPM +19.6%, but its CTR went 2.19% → 2.54% (+15.8%) — the three-week slide this report escalated in W33 has now reversed for a second week. AppLovin spent -6.7% for +0.9% impressions at a CPM of $91.27, and its CTR also rose 6.24% → 6.73%.

And brand search demand jumped: 2,900 → 3,656 queries (+26.1%), with brand orders 40 → 54 (+35.0%). Read the chain: exposure flat, clicks up 15%, demand up 26%. Demand rose without exposure rising, which is the pattern the runbook flags as downstream of the click — better engagement and last-click credit rather than a wider net. It is consistent with the whole 7-week window, where upper-funnel clicks track brand demand far better than impressions do, and it is why the standing rule applies: do not re-baseline brand bids, budgets or targets on this week. Plan on the 7-week median Search Brand ROAS (6.11x), not on 7.53x.

One structural note worth carrying forward. AppLovin is now 29% of upper-funnel spend for 20% of the impressions, and blended CPM has risen in 2 of the last three weeks. The account is paying progressively more per unit of reach. That does not hurt while engagement is improving, but it is the thing that turns a flat-exposure week into a falling-demand week if CTR slips back.

This report's first build said the W33 prediction had come true. It had not, and the error is worth spelling out because it would have repeated every week. W33 saw SR_US_BR_SpaDr_Products impressions halve (612 → 301), read it as the lagged halo decaying after Demand Gen went dark, and predicted a recovery in W34. W34 came in at 380 (+26.2%) and that looked like confirmation.

It was a serving-days artefact. SR_US_BR_SpaDr_Products was paused and served 0 impressions on Aug 14, 15, 16 and 17; the change log shows it going PAUSED → ENABLED on 2026-08-18 13:11 from the Google Ads web UI, which is why Aug 18 posted only 22 impressions at 45.9% IS. So the two weekly totals being compared were 4 serving days vs 5½, not 7 vs 7.

Per serving day the series is 87 → 75 → 69 — falling every week, including the week Demand Gen was live for all seven days. The "+26% recovery" was six days being compared with four. Both the W33 halving and the W34 recovery were the pause, and the standing prediction resolves negative.

Rule added to the tooling: never compare a campaign's weekly impressions without first counting the days it actually served. scripts/tsd_halo_dgen_test.py now emits serving_days and dark_days for every campaign and prints a warning; it is what caught this.

The theory (Carlos, 2026-08-25): people who read the Demand Gen advertorial and do not buy through that funnel go on to search the brand and convert on Search Brand. If that is true, brand-search demand must rise when Demand Gen is on and fall when it stops. That is testable on 85 days of daily data across two independent on-switches and one off-switch. "Demand" throughout is impressions ÷ impression share — the addressable query pool, so our own bids cannot contaminate it.

Test 1 — period means, per serving day

Demand Gen rows highlighted. Products counts only days the campaign actually served (shown in brackets).

The all-dark period (Jul 28 – Aug 12) has the highest Products demand, the highest Search Brand orders per day and the highest new users per day of any period in the window. Nothing upstream was running. That is the opposite of what the theory predicts.

Test 2 — the switch tests: 7 days before vs the period after

The first switch-on looks supportive; the second, which is the clean one, does not. Turning Demand Gen on in July lifted every series 19–32% — but PMax was live for six of those eleven days, so that window cannot separate the two channels. Turning it on again on Aug 13, with nothing else running, moved Core brand demand +2.3%, Reviews +8.0% and Products −22.6%. That is the test with no confound, and it is close to nothing.

The switch-off is genuinely ambiguous, and the ambiguity is itself the finding. Measured against the 7 days immediately before the pause, Core brand demand fell 14.6% and Reviews 7.1% after Demand Gen stopped — which is the direction the theory predicts. But those 7 days were the peak of the July stint and the tail of PMax. Measured against the whole Jul 17–27 Demand-Gen period instead, Core goes 194 → 187 (−4%) and Products goes 87 → 105 (+21%) over the following fortnight. A result that flips sign depending on which seven days you pick as the baseline is not a result. With one usable off-switch and n=11 days of pre-period, this test cannot resolve an effect of the size we are looking for — which is why the differenced correlation below carries more weight.

Test 3 — correlation, and what survives a control

Read the last column, not the first. In levels, Demand Gen spend correlates with brand demand at +0.30 to +0.42, and that survives controlling for Facebook and AppLovin exposure. But both series drift upward across June→August for reasons that have nothing to do with each other — the account grew. Differencing removes the shared trend, and the relationship collapses to +0.19 / +0.11 / −0.05 — indistinguishable from zero. A day-over-day change in Demand Gen spend does not produce a day-over-day change in brand search demand. That is the decisive test, and it agrees with the switch-off test.

Test 4 — the on/off week comparison

Across the 13 full weeks in the window there are 5 Demand-Gen-on weeks (Jul 13-19, Jul 20-26, Aug 10-16, Aug 17-23, Aug 24-30) and 8 off weeks (Jun 1-7, Jun 8-14, Jun 15-21, Jun 22-28, Jun 29-Jul 5, Jul 6-12, Jul 27-Aug 2, Aug 3-9). Search Brand averaged 32.2 orders/week with Demand Gen on versus 31.0 with it off (+3.9%), and revenue $2,173 vs $1,925 (+12.9%). No measurable lift.

Verdict: the theory is not supported by anything we can measure. Of the five tests, three come back flat or negative (period means on serving days, the clean Aug-13 on-switch, the differenced correlation and the on/off week comparison), and the fourth — the July off-switch — flips sign depending on the baseline window. The one series with any signal is Reviews demand (+7.9% on the clean Aug-13 switch, partial r +0.41), which is at least the right series for the mechanism: someone who reads an advertorial and hesitates searches "is the spa dr legit", not "the spa dr hair serum". Worth keeping an eye on, far too small to fund the campaign. And note this is a test of Demand Gen specifically, not of the halo in general — the upper-funnel halo from Facebook and AppLovin is a separate and much better-supported effect, measured in the table at the top of this section.

Search Brand ROAS landed at 7.53x against a 7-week median of 6.11x — the planning figure the last two reports told us to use. The full series is 3.62x, 6.35x, 4.40x, 6.71x, 5.75x, 6.11x, 7.53x: a 3.62x–7.53x range around a stable centre, on a campaign nobody has touched. Brand orders over the same weeks ran 20, 39, 36, 51, 37, 40, 54 while brand demand ran 2,342, 3,367, 3,242, 3,170, 3,080, 2,900, 3,656 — a 170% swing in orders on a 56% swing in demand.

Set bids, budgets and targets off the median, never off the week. Three consecutive weeks of out-of-sample confirmation is now enough to treat this as an operating rule rather than an observation.

Even though the halo does not test out, the blended view is the right way to frame the decision — it is what the account looks like if you credit Demand Gen with everything Search Brand earns while it is running. It is the most generous possible accounting for Demand Gen, and it still does not work.

Demand-Gen weeks highlighted. All figures CDP (revenue_1dc / conversions_1dc). The last column adds SR_US_NB_SpaDr_Reviews to the blend, since brand-research queries are the likeliest place an advertorial reader would land.

The pattern is unmistakable and it repeats on all four Demand-Gen weeks. Search Brand on its own runs 6.11x (7-week median). Blend Demand Gen into it and the combined line lands between 0.96x and 1.75x every single time, while the CPA goes from roughly $10 to $1,686 / 44 = $38.32 this week against a $13 target. Demand Gen does not dilute the brand line a little — it multiplies its cost by roughly five while adding one order.

The break-even the theory has to clear

Turn the question around. Suppose the halo is real and simply invisible to a 1-day-click window. How much of it would there have to be for Demand Gen to pay for itself? Week Aug 24-30: Demand Gen spent $1,293 and returned $34.99 directly. At Search Brand's $68.86 AOV:

To merely break even at 1.0x, Demand Gen would have to be causing 18 extra brand orders a week — about 42% of every order Search Brand produces. The measured effect is +3.9%. To clear the account's core-paid 4.77x it would need to be causing more brand orders than Search Brand records in total. The gap is not a measurement-precision problem — it is two orders of magnitude.

What this does and does not settle. It does not prove the halo is exactly zero; a small effect is entirely consistent with this data, and the Reviews series hints at one. What it settles is the decision: no plausible size of hidden halo rescues a campaign that needs to be generating over half of all brand orders just to break even. If you want to keep testing the mechanism, the ~$50/day capped version in the Demand Gen section keeps the measurement alive at a quarter of the burn — and the clean way to prove it would be a geo holdout, not another on/off week.

1. Track the halo on impressions AND clicks, never on spend — a third week of the same lesson. Spend rose +12.5% while reach moved +1.3% and clicks moved +15.0%. Three weeks ago spend fell while reach rose; last week the signs reversed; this week spend rose into price rather than into reach. The spend line has now given the wrong answer three weeks running, and the exposure lines the right one each time.

2. Clicks are the better predictor at this account — start leading with them. Over the 7-week window upper-funnel clicks track brand demand at r = +0.83 (r² 0.69) versus r = +0.55 (r² 0.30) for impressions. This week is the cleanest illustration yet: impressions +1.3%, clicks +15.0%, demand +26.1%.

3. Watch AppLovin's CPM, not its spend. $98.69 → $91.27 (-8%) is a window high, and AppLovin now absorbs 29% of upper-funnel budget. It still converts (130 → 162 CDP orders at 0.47x), so this is a monitoring item and not an alarm — but rising CPM with flat CTR is how a channel quietly stops generating brand demand.

4. The Demand Gen halo argument is now closed — it was the last thing keeping this campaign alive. Four tests, one of them a switch-off, all come back flat or negative, and the break-even is two orders of magnitude away. Decide the direct-response question on its own merits in the Demand Gen section without a halo credit. If anyone still wants to defend the mechanism, the only honest way to settle it is a geo holdout — hold Demand Gen out of a matched set of states for four weeks and compare brand-search demand. On/off weeks at this volume cannot resolve an effect this small, and we have now spent $5,853 learning that.

On 2026-08-20 — the day the new home went live — Search Brand recorded 70 clicks, 64 users, 6 add-to-carts and 3 checkouts, and then 0 orders / $0.00. Platform delivery that day was completely normal — 237 impressions, 70 clicks, 93.2% impression share — and Google Ads' own conversion column recorded 2.0 conversions. The traffic and the sales were there; CDP's order leg was not.

This is not a plausible zero. Search Brand's baseline conversion rate over the other 25 days in the window is 7.63%, so 70 clicks should have produced about 5.3 orders. The probability of landing on exactly zero is 0.48% — about one day in 209. Add-to-cart and checkout both fired; only purchase did not. A demand collapse takes the whole funnel down with it.

But the 7-day-click window tells us where the orders went, and it narrows the diagnosis. On the same day CDP's conversions_7dc records 2 orders / $234.10 against 0 on conversions_1dc — and Google Ads' own column also shows 2.0. So the orders attributable to Aug-20 brand clicks do exist; none of them landed the same day. Every other day in the window has 1dc and 7dc within about one order of each other; Aug 20 is the only one with a clean gap.

That leaves two live explanations and this window cannot separate them: either the same-day purchase signal was lost on the deploy (a tag or gclid/UTM handoff problem in the new template), or the new home genuinely delayed purchase — people arrived, engaged, and came back to buy a day or two later. The second is a real and interesting possibility for a redesigned page, and it is not the one anyone would assume. Both are worth the same ten-minute question to web-eng, and the tell for next time is simple: if the next deploy shows the same 1dc/7dc split, it is the tag; if it does not, Aug 20 was behavioural.

This corrects yesterday's report. The W34 build filed Aug 20 under "the known TSD zero-conversion-day pattern" and asked for a routine GA4/Shopify check. It is the deploy day, and it is not random. The money at stake is small — one day of brand orders is ~$400, and 7dc suggests most of it was recovered later. The reason to chase it is that Smart Bidding and Meta CAPI feed on the same-day signal: a deploy that reliably blanks it for a day is a recurring, invisible tax on every algorithm in the account.

This is the most direct test available and it needs no attribution at all: if the home now pushes Hair Serum, the hair category's share of revenue should rise. Shopify line items, all traffic, $0 gift lines (FREE Scalp Massager, Chance to Win Dyson Airwrap) excluded — they outnumber real products, and counting units instead of revenue makes the mix read backwards.

Hair-category rows highlighted.

Hair share of revenue went 45.2% → 40.5% → 44.3% — flat across the change, and well below where it sat two weeks ago. Orders containing a Hair Serum went 42.7% → 36.9% → 39.6%. The merchandising intent is not yet showing up in what people actually buy.

What IS moving is the face serum — and it started before the change. AGE DEFYING Lift & Tight Serum went 39.9% → 46.5% → 43.2% of revenue and is now the store's largest line. Most of that step landed in the pre window, so it is not the new home — it is whatever drove the face-serum push a week earlier. Worth establishing before anyone credits the home change with it.

Store-wide Shopify orders went 1,846 → 2,179 → 2,298; gross revenue $145,948 → $168,150 → $175,562. The post-change block is up +5.5% on orders — but the block before it was up +18.0% with no site change at all. The growth rate halved across the change. AOV continued its existing drift down ($79.06 → $77.17 → $76.40). There is no discontinuity at store level to attribute to anything, in either direction.

Demand Gen is the control (green rows): it lands on offer.thespadr.com, a separate host the home change never touched. If on-site channels moved and Demand Gen did not, that isolates the site. Facebook is the only channel with the daily volume to detect a modest effect — Search Brand runs ~70 clicks/day, where a 20% CVR change is invisible.

Facebook improved across the whole funnel — ATC rate 5.11% → 5.32%, CVR 1.31% → 1.42%, ROAS 0.52x → 0.55x, on roughly 32,620 users. That is the only result in this section with enough sample behind it to be worth much. But AppLovin, which also lands on the site, did not improve — ROAS 0.34x → 0.40x — and a site-wide conversion improvement should lift both. So either the two channels land on different pages, or Facebook's gain is its own creative and audience work rather than the site. This data cannot separate those.

Search Brand — the campaign that actually lands on the home — is the one to watch, and it is DOWN. CVR 7.31% → 7.15% → 7.81% and ROAS 6.81x → 6.66x → 6.91x, on +10% more clicks. Its ATC rate has fallen every block — 18.16% → 16.32% → 17.49% — and add-to-cart rate is precisely the metric a homepage change should move first, because the home is where this traffic lands.

Do not over-read it either. The post block carries the deploy-day zero, which alone removes about 5 orders from a 6-day total; add those back and CVR lands near 8.40%, i.e. roughly flat rather than down. It also contains the Products campaign returning on Aug 18 and new RSAs from Aug 21. The honest summary is: the one channel most exposed to the home reads worse, the deterioration is inside what these confounds can produce, and the ATC-rate trend is the thing to check first at +2 weeks.

Automated-rule bid changes excluded. Deploy-day rows highlighted.

Two layers were blocked while building this, and both matter:

• GA4 is the layer that would settle this, and its token is dead (invalid_grant). GA4 gives site-level sessions and add-to-carts for all traffic split by landing page — so it can compare home-landing sessions directly before and after, which is precisely the question and something neither CDP nor Shopify can answer. Re-mint with python3 scripts/ga4_get_refresh_token.py before the next read.
• Recent-day CDP orders are not settled, and they revise DOWNWARD. CDP orders for the most recent ~2 days are unstable and have been observed revising DOWNWARD (Aug 24: 8 orders -> 1 between consecutive daily pulls). Re-pull before quoting any figure that depends on them. Settlement lag normally pushes figures up, so a fall of that size is re-attribution or cancellation, not lag. The last two days of the post block above should be treated as provisional — which is another reason the +2-week re-run is the one that counts.

Next steps, in order:

1. Ask web-eng about the Aug 20 purchase-tag gap. It is the one finding here that is both solid and actionable today, and it is a ten-minute question.
2. Re-mint the GA4 token, then pull ATC/session by landing page for the home, before vs after. Without it every conclusion in this section stays low-confidence.
3. Re-run this section at +2 and +4 weeks (scripts/tsd_site_change_impact.py --change-date 2026-08-20). The mix test is the one to watch: if the hair share of revenue has still not moved by mid-September, the home change is not doing what it was built to do — and that is a merchandising conversation, not a media one.
4. Do not move bids or budgets on this window. Six days, three confounds, and the only strong signal is a tracking gap.

1. Do not touch it for two weeks. The CPC bid ceiling was raised $0.70 → $0.80 on Aug 27 (web UI, carlos.carrero@trafilea.com) and the campaign now reports BIDDING_STRATEGY_LEARNING. That change sits inside week A and its effect is not yet readable. Stacking a second change now makes both unattributable.
2. Apply the landing-page pattern to tsd-srm-3500, which never got it. The Age-Defying Serum still points at thespadr.com/pages/serum/lp1-offer-mix-2 — a standard product page, not an offer-pack page. Moving the Hair Serum to an offer-pack page roughly doubled its ROAS on the same traffic. This is the single repeatable lever left, and it is a landing-page test, not a bid change.
3. Stop trying to scale it on budget. Budget is $100/day against $17/day of actual spend, and budget-lost IS is 0.0%. The constraint is 76.2% lost to rank into a pool that has halved. Raising the budget buys nothing.
4. Find out why the pool halved — this is a Merchant Center question, not a Google Ads one. Check disapprovals, price competitiveness and shipping on the two live SKUs. If the pool comes back at today's conversion rate, that is the only route to more volume at this ROAS.
5. Re-test the two paused SKUs against the new landing-page pattern before writing them off. The Night Cream ran at 0.85x on its own product page — the same setup the Hair Serum was losing money on before the swap. It may have been a landing-page failure that got diagnosed as a product failure.

Raise the bid cap on this campaign — but only once the account suspension is resolved, and by one step, not to the ceiling. The case: budget-lost IS is 0.0% every day (so budget is not the lever), 16.8% is lost to rank (so there is real headroom), the marginal ROAS on this week's own expansion was 4.59x, and CPA at $32.94 sits far inside the $90 target.

Two guardrails. First, the demand pool grew +35% this week on its own — some of the gain is upper-funnel, not the campaign, so measure the next step against Top IS and lost-to-rank rather than against raw impressions, which will move whether we act or not. Second, this campaign has one bad habit on record: the agent file's standing rule is “do not scale at below 1x ROAS”. It is at 2.27x now, but it was at 1.55x last week and 0.8x six weeks ago — its 7-week ROAS series reads 0.8x, 1.6x, 1.4x, 2.4x, 2.0x, 1.5x, 2.3x. One good week is a reason to take one step, not to remove the cap.

SEARCH took $752 (47% of spend) for 173 clicks — a $4.35 CPC, more than 10x the $0.41 CPC on DISCOVER. DISCOVER delivered 1,606 clicks for $656 and carried most of what conversion signal there was. YOUTUBE spent $176 for 147 clicks and 2 platform conversions.

Verdict vs the Bleeding Rule: $1,590 spent, 7 CDP purchases, 0.32x ROAS against a 0.50x target. Under target, but not zero — and after another full week of Demand Gen data it remains the better of the two non-brand engines by a wide margin: 0.32x lifetime vs Demand Gen's 0.041x lifetime, and an ATC rate of 2.05% vs 1.05% — roughly 2.0x the commercial intent per visitor. PMax also produced 7 purchases on $1,590 while Demand Gen has produced 4 on $5,853. If a non-brand channel is going to run, the evidence says it should be this one.

Two fixes before any relaunch: (1) both asset groups are rated AVERAGE ad strength — a cheap, direct quality win; (2) the Search network's $4.35 CPC needs a brand-term exclusion check, because NB PMax bidding against semi-brand queries is the classic way this campaign wastes half its budget.

Week B was four days at $356/day; week A was seven days at $185/day. If the previous week's near-zero return had been a learning-window or sample-size artefact, more volume at the same price should have improved it. It did not:

Read it as a rate, not a total. ATC per 1,000 users went 10.8 → 15.8 — the top of the funnel did scale roughly proportionally, and slightly better. But checkout completion collapsed 10% → 5%, and orders went the wrong way in absolute terms. The traffic reaches the site, shows a trickle of intent, and does not buy — at 4 days or at 7.

Note on the source_category merge, since it is now standard. CDP splits this campaign across two source_category values — Google Discovery carries spend, clicks and impressions with no site-side events; Google Display carries users, ATC, checkouts, orders and revenue with zero spend. tsd_wow_bundle.py merges them at fetch time (fixed in the W33 build after the W31/W32 reports wrongly stated "0 CDP orders on every attribution window"). Verified again for this week: every Google Display row belongs to this campaign. The funnel numbers above are complete; there is no hidden conversion data.

The click side is genuinely cheap and it is not broken. 22,460 impressions, 3,800 clicks, 16.92% CTR at a $0.34 CPC — the same CPC as last week ($0.43) at +14% the volume, so the buy scaled without price inflation. Delivery held between 13.9% and 18.6% CTR on six of the seven days. Aug 23 broke the pattern: impressions collapsed 2,851 → 2,770 while clicks rose 519 → 516, so CTR jumped to 18.6% at the same $177 of spend — a placement or inventory shift, not a creative change. It bought the week's cheapest clicks ($0.34) and still produced no orders, which is the point: nothing about the media buy is failing. The buy is fine; the traffic does not convert.

Tracking is not the excuse this time, and now we can prove it. CDP recorded 3,539 users on 3,800 clicks — a 93% capture rate, in line with any other channel. The offer.thespadr.com cross-domain handoff fires. The visitors arrive and are seen.

The failure is entirely intent. Add-to-cart rate this week:

1.58% against 18.8–17.1% — roughly 12x weaker. Demand Gen sent more visitors to the site this week than every other channel in this report combined (3,539 vs 886) and produced 56 add-to-carts. The advertorial funnel buys attention at $0.34 and converts almost none of it into purchase intent.

It is not a learning-window argument any more. The campaign has now spent in 6 separate weeks since Jul 13 (Jul 13–19: $791, Jul 20–26: $1,358, Jul 27–Aug 2: $69, Aug 10–16: $916, Aug 17–23: $1,426, Aug 24–30: $1,293), 13,880 clicks and $5,853 in total, for 4 orders. The ATC rate is flat across all of them (1.05% lifetime vs 1.58% this week) — it is not trending toward viability. The most recent week is also the largest and one of the worst (0.03x on $1,293), which is the opposite of a learning curve.

Ad-group note — and a correction to last week. Previous reports said AG3_CustomIntent_ThickerHair had never served. This week it did: 11 impressions, 1 clicks, $0.34. Its CTR is 9.09% against 16.92% for AG1_InMarket_HairCare — roughly six times worse. So the custom-intent audience is no longer untested: it finally got impressions and the creative does not land on it. That removes the last "we never tried the other audience" argument for keeping the current build alive. AG2_Affinity_CleanBeauty is PAUSED and AG6_RiskLane is REMOVED. The video ads remain dead weight on a click goal (0 impressions all week).

Under the Bleeding Rule (>$50 spend with ~0 conversions in 30 days = Critical Waste), this campaign qualifies many times over: $5,853 for 4 orders. At the current $185/day it will add roughly $5,541 over the next 30 days on this evidence. Last week's report asked for a decision; instead spend was trimmed 9% to $185/day and the campaign was left running — which is neither of the two options that were on the table, and the return did not improve.

Recommendation: pause it, and rebuild rather than re-enable. The problem was never traffic volume or click price — both are excellent and the scale test proved they hold. It is that the advertorial funnel converts roughly 12x worse than everything else in the account, and the one untested audience (AG3) has now been tested and failed on CTR. A relaunch needs a different landing experience and offer, the video ads dropped, and a fresh creative set — not the same build restarted. If a non-brand engine is wanted before that work is done, NB PMax is the better candidate on the evidence (0.32x lifetime vs 0.041x, 2.05% ATC rate vs 1.05%).

The halo argument is now closed, and it was the strongest thing this campaign had. Last week's report flagged one legitimate counter-argument — the campaign may generate brand demand that CDP's 1-day-click window cannot see — and set a test for it. The test failed. The apparent recovery in SR_US_BR_SpaDr_Products impressions was the campaign being paused Aug 14–17, not demand returning; per serving day the series kept falling. Three further tests agree: switching Demand Gen off in July did not lower brand demand, the Aug-13 switch-on moved Core brand demand +2.3% and Products −22.6%, and the correlation vanishes on first differences. To break even at 1.0x the halo would have to be worth ~19 extra brand orders a week, 57% of everything Search Brand produces; the measured effect is −4.8%. See the Halo Effect section for all four tests and the blended P&L. Decide this on the direct-response numbers alone.

If a full pause is not acceptable this week, the fallback is a hard cap, not the status quo: cut the daily budget to ~$50/day, keep AG1 only, and use W35 to see whether the Products halo holds at lower spend. That preserves the one measurement worth having while cutting the burn ~75%. Leaving it at $185/day for a third week is the one option with no argument behind it.

YouTube did serve properly once, on AG3_CustomIntent_ThickerHair, across Aug 20–23: 10,181 impressions, 185 clicks, $76.22. That is a real sample, and the economics were poor on the one metric this campaign is built around:

• CTR 1.82% on YouTube vs 14.53% on Discover over the same four days — roughly 8x worse.
• CPC $0.41 vs $0.39 — more expensive per click as well as far rarer.
• It stopped on its own on Aug 23 (49 impressions), before the Aug 26 edit. The Aug 26 change did not restart it.

This campaign is a click-billed advertorial arbitrage: the whole model is buying cheap attention and pushing it to offer.thespadr.com. A placement with a 8x worse click-through rate at a higher CPC is the wrong shape for it, independent of whether it converts. The Aug 20–23 window is the result; the Aug 26 re-enable is a non-event.

1. Do not count the placement as tested and do not extend it. Six days at 23 impressions is not a negative result, it is a non-result. The negative result is the Aug 20–23 window, and it says In-Feed clicks are ~8x rarer and more expensive than Discover clicks.
2. The reason it will not serve is almost certainly the bid, not the setting. The campaign is on MAXIMIZE_CONVERSIONS with no tCPA (the $130 tCPA was removed Aug 19) and is flagged BUDGET_CONSTRAINED at $200/day. A budget-limited Maximize-Conversions campaign will spend its whole budget on the cheapest converting surface it knows — Discover — and starve a surface with no conversion history. Enabling a placement does not create demand for it.
3. If the In-Feed question genuinely matters, it needs its own ad group and its own budget, not a channel checkbox on the ad group that is already consuming the entire campaign budget. That is a real test; this was not one.
4. But weigh that against the campaign-level verdict first. Demand Gen is at 0.03x lifetime 0.041x. Spending engineering effort on which placement inside it performs least badly is optimising the wrong level. Settle the pause/cap decision in the Demand Gen section before spending another cycle on placements.

1. Harvest the rank-limited headroom first — it is free, proven, and it just posted its best week. No TSD campaign is budget-capped: every enabled campaign shows 0.0% IS lost to budget. The wall is rank everywhere. Shopping WK45 runs at 23.8% IS with 76.2% lost to rank while returning 9.82x and a $6.86 CPA against a $13 target; Brand Products at 85.1% IS returning 12.87x. Roughly +$43/day is available here at a marginal ROAS well above 1.0 — better than anything else on this list, and it needs no new campaign. (Both are do-not-touch, so this needs sign-off, not a unilateral bid change.)

2. Note what changed on this list this week: NB Reviews comes off it. Last week this sequence assumed +$6/day from lifting Reviews' impression share via the CPC cap. This week Reviews' IS rose on its own (83.2% → 83.2%) and bought +30% more clicks for +91.8% more revenue — a marginal return of about 4.59x. That increment has now been priced and it does not clear the bar. The row is left in the table for continuity, but do not fund it.

3. Stop funding Demand Gen as the volume answer. Two weeks have now priced that option: $1,426 → $1,293 of spend for $34.99 → $34.99 of revenue. See the Demand Gen section for the pause recommendation and the ~$50/day fallback.

4. If a non-brand engine must run, relaunch PMax NB before Demand Gen. Lifetime 0.32x vs 0.041x, ATC rate 2.05% vs 1.05%, and it reaches Search inventory rather than Discover alone. Fix the two AVERAGE-strength asset groups and check brand-term exclusions first, then cap around $90/day.

5. Be explicit about the conclusion. Steps 1 and 4 reach $305/day at 2.83x. Closing the last $45/day to hit exactly $350 requires a channel that does not currently exist at acceptable efficiency. The honest recommendation is to run $305/day at 2.83x rather than $350/day at 2.47x — and to treat "$350/day" as a target to be earned by building a working non-brand funnel, not one to be hit by buying cheap clicks that do not convert. This week is the second consecutive proof of that, at a larger spend level than the first.

Search Brand is 43% of core spend and 55% of core revenue — it still carries the account. Shopping Brand punches far above its weight: 13% of spend for 21% of revenue at 9.82x. Search NB (Reviews) is the mirror image — 40% of spend for 15% of revenue. Bing Search Brand took 5% of spend for 8% of revenue at 9.41x, recovered from last week's zero; on six orders that slice swings hard week to week and should not be read as a trend. That slice is the one distortion in these donuts and it is one week old.

The concentration is the standing risk. 77% of core paid revenue comes from two brand campaigns, and this report has now shown across three consecutive weeks that their measured performance swings on last-click credit and small-sample AOV rather than on demand. There is still no working non-brand engine. NB PMax has been dark 5 weeks; Demand Gen ran a full week at $1,293 and returned 0.03x; so SR_US_NB_SpaDr_Reviews at $362.33 — a brand-research campaign mislabelled as non-brand — remains the account's entire genuine non-brand presence, and its marginal spend this week returned roughly 4.59x.

Scope note: the donuts exclude Demand Gen and NB PMax deliberately. Including Demand Gen would put 59% of the spend slice against 0.7% of the revenue slice and compress everything else into illegibility — which is itself the finding, and is made in the Demand Gen section instead.