This week was about ROI and figuring out if the money I'm spending on Google Ads is actually doing anything for me. The formula itself is pretty simple you take your revenue, subtract your costs, and divide by your costs. The part that took me a minute was realizing you can't even get to that number until you're tracking conversions on your site. Without that, you're just guessing.
For chooseamovie.app my real conversion is the $4.99 Lifetime Pass, and I have it firing on the success page after Stripe redirects. But here's what clicked for me. I have zero of those sales from cold traffic so far, so optimizing toward a purchase gives Google almost nothing to learn from. That's why I made start_rating my main signal instead, since it happens way earlier in the funnel. Now the campaign actually has data to work with.
The big takeaway is you optimize toward what you can measure, and measurement has to come first. Once thats solid you can shift budget toward whats working and cut what's not.