Fewer campaigns is the least popular thing I say on a first call. Everyone would rather hear it was the creative, or the bid, or iOS.
So I pull one column. Optimization events, per campaign, per week.
In this US account, half the campaigns had never cleared 50 in a week. Those four produced 70 events between them, one campaign’s worth of signal spread across four.
8 US campaign months, Adjust cohort ROAS at day 28, April to June 2026. Under 50 events a week: 4 of 8 campaigns, $16,843, 23% of budget, 54% ROAS. 50 events a week or more: 4 of 8 campaigns, $58,012, 77% of budget, 80% ROAS. Averages are weighted by spend. The four campaigns under 50 all launched in the middle of May, so age and signal move together; holding the month constant, the split is 75% against 54%, so the gap survives after controlling for launch age.
Nobody sets out to do that. It happens one launch at a time: a campaign for the new platform, a campaign for the test, a campaign for the team, because the last one got messy and starting fresh felt cleaner.
None of it looks like a mistake while you are doing it. Fewer campaigns, same budget, everything clears the line. I apply the same rule on Google, where I cut app campaigns from six to two or three.
With that column pulled, this is the check I run on a first call:
- Mark every campaign that has never cleared 50 in a week. Fifty is a Meta number, not a law.
- Add up the weekly events of the marked campaigns, divide by 50 and round down. That is how many campaigns their signal can carry. Here, four campaigns carried signal for one.
- Before you trust a gap in ROAS, compare campaigns launched in the same month, so launch age cannot explain it.
- Consolidate campaigns that share an optimization event, platform and market, on the same budget, until every campaign clears the line.
One caveat on the numbers is that budget follows performance, so the campaigns that did well also got more spend and more events, and eight campaign months from one account cannot fully separate the two.