Stop mistaking wins for reach
🎯 Profit can rise while your market coverage stays tiny, and more!
Hey Readers 🥰
Welcome to today’s edition, bringing the latest growth stories fresh to your inbox.
And just a quick heads-up! If you stumbled upon us through a friend, make sure to subscribe below! That way, you’ll never miss out on the trending stories.
🎯Stop mistaking wins for reach
ROAS is a scoreboard. It tells a brand who bought. It does not tell a brand whether the market is being covered.
That gap is exactly why teams get stuck in the same loop. They see decent creative, decent CTR, decent conversion rate, but growth plateaus. Then they start swapping ads, swapping offers, swapping landing pages, when the real issue is simpler. The brand is not showing up enough to the people who actually matter.
Penetration is a coverage metric. It answers a different question than ROAS.
Not “did we win today.”
But “how much of the right market have we realistically reached, repeatedly, so buying becomes inevitable later?”
What penetration actually means
Penetration is the share of the ideal audience that has seen the brand enough times to remember it.
Not once. Not twice. Enough times that recognition turns into familiarity, and familiarity turns into lower resistance.
This is why the penetration KPI is brutally useful in B2B, and quietly powerful in DTC too. In both cases, buying is rarely a single-touch event. It is a memory event. A timing event. A trust event.
The simple way to use it without fancy tooling
A brand does not need complex attribution to track penetration. It needs a defined audience and two numbers.
- How many of those people were reached in a time window?
- How often were they reached.
The point is not to chase infinite frequency. The point is to stop being forgettable. Low frequency makes even great ads look weak because the prospect forgets between touches, then “discovers” a competitor, and the sale gets credited elsewhere.
Where ROAS lies by omission
ROAS can look strong while a brand is only harvesting the hottest few percent. That feels profitable, but it is fragile, because the pool is small. It can also look weak while penetration is rising, because the brand is investing in reaching the right people who are not ready yet.
Penetration tells the truth about whether the brand is building a base or just scraping demand.
How teams should apply it
Penetration is a way to measure whether the brand is consistently present inside the highest-intent pockets, like specific product-aware groups, repeat customer lookalikes, or category power users.
If those pockets are not being covered with enough repetition, performance swings become inevitable because the brand is always reintroducing itself from scratch.
Penetration turns paid media into market control instead of constant guessing. When enough of the right people have seen the brand enough times, clicks become less important because the decision is already half-made. ROAS tells a brand what happened.
Penetration tells a brand what is about to happen.
Partnership with Wing
Get back 20+ hours/week for high-priority tasks with Wing
Overloaded by tasks that eat up the time you need for high-priority work? Need help organizing your calendar, inbox, outreach, or any other process?
Wing Assistant pairs founders, SMB owners, and team leads with high-performing, trained human virtual assistants who step in to lighten your burden, so you can focus on strategy, customers, and your actual goals.
You can get an Executive/General Assistant from Wing to improve admin, scheduling, inbox, and CRM.
Trusted by 10K+ customers, it also offers an end-to-end wide service range: sales support, marketing, content, research, bookkeeping, reporting, design, ops, customer support, and more.
Your assistant handles follow-ups, reports & coordination with care and consistency, giving you back 20+ hours a week for more important tasks.
Book a call to find an assistant that fits your needs today!
🗝️ Tweet of the Day
Advertise with Us
70% of email clicks are bots but not with The Playbook. Reach real human buyers with verified clicks and only pay for actual engagement.
We'd love to hear your feedback on today's issue! Simply reply to this email and share your thoughts on how we can improve our content and format. 😍