Running e-commerce campaigns isn’t a linear task – it’s a constant, high-stakes balancing act. Profit goals pull in one direction. Revenue targets for your new summer collection, especially critical now in late May as consumers anticipate the holidays, pull in another. Some products in your catalog exist to scale volume and capture market share; others are there to protect precious margin. Marketing wants maximum visibility. Finance demands a solid return. Meanwhile, the ad platform's algorithm diligently optimizes for what it sees – and often completely misses the underlying business logic and your multi-faceted strategy.
Welcome to the daily reality of modern e-commerce campaign management: juggling multiple KPIs, often managing conflicting ad KPIs, and navigating strategic goals that shift with seasons and market dynamics – all in real time. The good news? With the right systems and campaign logic for multi-goal marketing in place, you don’t have to choose between these critical performance metrics. You can optimize for them all, strategically. And a platform like Expanly makes this sophisticated balancing act possible by embedding your nuanced objectives directly into your product feed.
The Challenge: Managing Conflicting Ad KPIs in E-commerce
E-commerce teams rarely operate with the luxury of a single, clean performance metric. Instead, you’re constantly tasked with a multitude of objectives:
Hitting ambitious revenue targets for key SKUs or categories, especially for seasonal pushes like current summer collections.
Maintaining (or improving) a minimum POAS (Profit on Ad Spend) to ensure sustainable growth.
Successfully launching and pushing strategic new products, even if their short-term performance metrics are still ramping up.
Reducing exposure on high-return items or products with low stock levels to protect customer experience and profitability.
Promoting bundles or specific lead-in products designed to drive higher Average Order Value (AOV).
This inevitably leads to managing conflicting ad KPIs. A product might drive impressive revenue but yield minimal profit. Another might boast a perfect margin but struggle for visibility and volume. Without a sophisticated feed structure and intelligent automation to guide ad platforms, your campaigns can easily end up biased towards the wrong goal for the wrong products at the wrong time.
Balancing POAS and Revenue Goals: Why It’s So Hard (Without the Right System)
The tension between POAS and revenue is a classic e-commerce dilemma. POAS tells you what activities actually make you money. Revenue often indicates market penetration and scale. Optimizing for only one inevitably leads to imbalances:
Pure POAS Focus: Often deprioritizes investment in scaling promising products or crucial new customer acquisition efforts, potentially missing growth opportunities.
Revenue-Only Focus: Risks burning cash on low-margin "vanity" performance, where top-line numbers look good, but the bottom line suffers.
The real challenge in balancing POAS and revenue goals simultaneously is building an operational logic that accounts for both margin contribution and sales volume potential in tandem for different product segments. This is a nuanced logic you can’t simply hard-code into standard ad platform settings. That’s where your product feed, supercharged by Expanly, becomes the strategic control center.
Campaign Logic for Multi-Goal Marketing
Expanly is designed to solve this multi-goal dilemma at its root. We enable you to move beyond single-metric optimization by analyzing your comprehensive business data and product catalog to apply a dynamic, multi-metric scoring model. This model ranks and categorizes your products based on a holistic view of their value:
Profitability: Actual margins after COGS, returns, and other variable costs.
Revenue Potential: Historical sales velocity and real-time demand signals.
Strategic Role: Is it a new launch needing visibility, a clearance item, a customer acquisition magnet, or a core "hero" SKU?
Inventory Availability: Real-time stock levels to push what's available and pull back on what's not.
Seasonality or Promotional Relevance: Ensuring products are prioritized according to current seasonal demand (e.g., summer gear now, not leftover winter stock).
Each product receives a live, dynamic score – creating a clear hierarchy that reflects your true business goals, not just what looks good on a standard ad platform dashboard. This is how Expanly enables sophisticated campaign logic for multi-goal marketing – and automates its execution through your supplemental scoring feed.
Feed Rules for Complex Strategies
Instead of forcing your campaign structure to serve a single, often compromised, objective, Expanly empowers you to implement feed rules for complex strategies that cater to diverse goals:
Segment products dynamically by combinations like profit tier AND sales velocity, or strategic importance AND stock level.
Automatically surface strategic items that deserve visibility (e.g., new high-potential summer products) even if they have limited historical conversion data.
Systematically suppress or deprioritize products with poor margins, high return rates, or limited stock, protecting your profitability and customer experience.
Dynamically re-score and re-segment products as your underlying business data (stock, pricing, costs, sales performance) shifts.
The result? Your ad campaigns receive clearer, more intelligent signals from your feed. They stop guessing what matters most for each product segment. And you regain granular control over what the algorithm promotes – without laboriously rebuilding campaigns or hacking together manual, error-prone structures.
E-commerce Strategy Alignment Across Your Entire Team
Often, Marketing desires reach and brand presence. Finance is focused on profit and return on investment. Merchandising is concerned with inventory turnover and sell-through. With Expanly, you achieve true e-commerce strategy alignment. Every product's promotion level within your ad campaigns reflects clearly defined, data-backed business priorities, not just isolated platform metrics.
Your performance marketing ceases to be a siloed execution layer and becomes a direct function of your overarching business strategy. Examples of aligned actions include:
Automatically pushing margin-heavy products more aggressively when overall profit targets need a boost.
Ramping up volume drivers during peak season (like the current run-up to summer holidays) while still monitoring pre-defined profitability thresholds.
Prioritizing new product launches or seasonal collections to gain market traction, even if they are not yet algorithm favorites based on past data.
Instantly protecting your bottom line by reducing exposure when stock levels for key items drop unexpectedly or return rates for a product spike.
No more being forced to choose between conflicting goals for your entire catalog. Now, you can define and enforce nuanced objectives for different product segments – dynamically and at scale.
Conclusion: Stop Choosing. Start Balancing.
The smartest e-commerce advertisers in today's competitive global market don’t chase one metric at a time, hoping the others will follow. They build intelligent systems and processes that strategically balance competing objectives – keeping their campaigns perfectly aligned with ever-evolving business needs and market realities.
With Expanly, you stop reactively managing the algorithm’s outputs. You proactively teach it what matters to your business. Our sophisticated scoring model, automated feed rules for complex strategies, and continuous data updates transform potential campaign chaos into structured, multi-metric performance.
