When a brand comes to us and says "our ads aren't working," the first thing we do is check whether the ads are actually the problem. More often than not, they're not — the ads are fine, it's everything else. The Last Ape's story is the clearest version of this we've worked: a reported 0.8x ROAS that made the founder panic, and three layers of real problems underneath it, none of which were the creative.
The diagnosis: bad data, not bad ads
The Last Ape's Meta campaigns had a reported ROAS of 0.8x — the kind of number that makes founders panic and fire their media buyer. Before touching a single campaign, we ran a tracking audit first, exactly the sanity check we recommend in our guide to diagnosing broken Shopify tracking.
What we found: the Shopify pixel was firing a "Purchase" event on both the order confirmation page view and the checkout-initiation step — meaning every person who clicked into checkout was being double- or triple-counted as a buyer. Real ROAS, on corrected data, was actually around 2.1x — still not great, but a fundamentally different number from the panic-inducing 0.8x that had everyone ready to pull the plug on paid entirely.
The mobile problem no one had flagged
While fixing tracking, we ran a mobile UX audit and found something uglier: on an average Android device over 4G, the store took over 7 seconds to load. The add-to-cart button sat below the fold on an iPhone SE. Checkout ran 5 steps.
This was a streetwear brand with the large majority of its traffic on mobile. Every potential buyer was fighting the store to give it money — the ads were sending the right people, and the store was losing them on arrival, before a single creative variable could even matter.
The drop commerce infrastructure gap
The brand's model is drop-based — limited releases built to create urgency and demand. But the store had none of the infrastructure drop commerce actually requires: no countdown timers, no sold-out state management, no waitlist.
When a drop hit Instagram, thousands saw it and a meaningful share clicked through — landing on a product page that said "available now" with no urgency, no queue, no sense of scarcity. Just a standard Shopify product page doing none of the emotional work the drop format depends on. Conversion on drop day sat at 1.3%. After the rebuild, the same drop format converts at 4.8% — nearly 4x, with zero change to the product or the ad creative itself.
FAQs
Was the creative actually the problem here? No — this is exactly the point. Three layers of real, fixable problems (tracking, mobile speed, drop infrastructure) were masquerading as an "ads problem," and no amount of new creative would have fixed any of them.
How common is double-counted purchase tracking? More common than most founders assume — see our guide to why Shopify tracking is probably wrong for the full diagnostic process we ran here.
Why does drop commerce need different infrastructure than a standard store? The urgency and scarcity that make a drop work have to be visible on the page itself — countdown timers, stock counters, waitlists — or the emotional driver behind the purchase decision simply isn't there when the customer lands.
Our take
The instinct to blame the ads is usually wrong, and it's an expensive instinct to act on — pausing or replacing creative that was never the actual problem wastes the one lever (fixing tracking, speed, or infrastructure) that would have solved it. Before touching campaigns, run the audit first. For the drop-specific infrastructure this brand needed, see our guide to drop commerce on Shopify, for the streetwear category's broader considerations see our Footwear & Streetwear industry page, and for the full story behind the numbers above see the The Last Ape case study. If your reported ROAS doesn't match your gut sense of the business, talk to us — we'll find out which of these three layers is actually broken.
If any of this sounds like your situation, talk to us. We'll tell you exactly where your revenue is leaking and what it would take to fix it. Explore Strategy & Consulting →