Stop running your products like an eleven-striker squad

A manager who sends out a team of eleven attackers loses the match. Everyone knows this. Yet most retail catalogues, viewed through the lens of where paid media budget actually flows, look exactly like that.

Bestsellers get the spend – they convert, they drive ROAS andthe numbers stay green. Every other product in the catalogue is doing a job yet to be defined, and the platform doesn’t care, because the platform just wants to be tapping in goals, optimising to whatever value signal you’re feeding it. The result, six months in, is a P&L that doesn’t quite match the dashboard story – evenue is flat and ROAS are the same, all while your margin is getting squeezed. 

This isn’t a paid media problem, it’s a portfolio problem packaged as a paid media problem.  

Every product in your catalogue is doing a commercial job, and each job needs a different treatment. Most marketing teams haven’t named the jobs, which means they can’t measure them, which means they can’t bid for them, so the same logic gets applied to everything and the squad plays out of position. With the World Cup in full swing, the team analogy is the easiest way to fix this.  

The team

You’ve got five positions. Most retailers can name one of them and treat the rest the same. 

Strikers

Strikers are your bestsellers. They score the goals, take the headlines, get the budget. The job here is to defend, not chase, protect efficiency and impression share on what’s already converting, don’t pour more budget at diminishing returns hoping for growth that isn’t coming. A team of strikers wins you a few matches and loses you the season, because nobody else is carrying any weight. 

Playmakers

Playmakers are your gateway products. They don’t score themselves; they create the next move. First-purchase SKUs that bring customers in so the rest of the squad has someone to play for. Bid to acquire, measure on what comes after. Judged correctly on the assist, judged incorrectly on first-order ROAS, which kills them quietly because the platform never sees the second purchase. 

Defenders

Defenders are your margin generators. Quiet andunglamorous, they’re rarely on the highlight reel, but the result falls apart without them. High contribution per unit, lower volume, often invisible to a media team optimising for revenue. Bid to margin, not revenue and that almost certainly means keeping some manual control in play, because the algorithm physically cannot see margin. Ask your team to name your top defender SKU. Most can’t. 

Utility players

Utility players are your halo and trade-up products. Squad members who fill multiple roles pull customers up the price ladder, making the rest of the system function. They don’t have one clean metric, so most teams either over-bid them (treating them like strikers) or under-bid them (judging them on standalone ROAS). The right treatment is to bid them in concert with the rest of the squad, not in isolation. 

Loan signings

Loan signings are your inventory-pressured stock. Short-term, on the books with a clock running, need to perform now or they’re gone. Bid to clear, accepting margin loss against the cost of carrying that’s not the mistake. The mistake is leaving the campaign live after the stock cleared and bleeding margin into a permanent setting nobody owns. 

What goes wrong

It’s always been the case that platform algorithms reward aggregate ROAS. Whatever value signal you send Google, it optimises toward and most retailers send revenue. So, the algorithm spends on whatever sells most, which means it concentrates on strikers, starves defenders, and miscategorises playmakers as failures because their first-order economics look weak.  

Six months of this and the squad is unbalanced. You’re winning matches against weaker opposition and losing to anyone serious. Your bestsellers list looks the same as it did 18 months ago. Your long tail is dying and your finance team’s quarterly numbers stop matching your media dashboard, and nobody can quite explain why. 

The fix isn’t more bid optimisation, you need to match the bidding to the position. The same player is receiving the wrong instructions, which is causing the wrong outcome. Right now, every player in your squad is getting the same instructions. 

The diagnostic

If your team can’t answer these three questions clearly, then your problem isn’t with media, it’s with your squad selection. 

1. Are your bestsellers being bid to defend, or are you still pushing budget at them looking for growth that isn’t coming? Most accounts default to the second answer because the dashboard rewards spend on what’s converting, regardless of whether more spend is producing more growth or just more cost. 
2. Are your gateway products being judged on first-order ROAS or on what the customer’s worth six months later? If the answer is the first one, you’re switching off your acquisition layer every time it underperforms a metric it was never meant to hit. If the answer is the second one, follow up with: how is that LTV signal getting back into the bidding? 
3. Is anyone in your account bidding to margin, or is everything optimising to revenue by default? 

Almost every retail account answers the second one. Almost none have a clear plan to fix it.