Blind Spending Is Killing Your ROAS – Here’s the Fix

Christian C Thomas, Sam Bonin

• 2 min read
Blind Spending Is Killing Your ROAS – Here’s the Fix

You cannot measure what you cannot see. Cost aggregation is the core of Gamesight’s Marketing Intelligence Hub and is critical for measurement, along with attribution and incrementality.

It gives you the financial clarity needed to make smart decisions across the entire game lifecycle. From early awareness campaigns to launch, and even 5 years into post-launch support, cost aggregation shows exactly what you spent, where you spent it, and when.

❌ Without Cost Aggregation:

  • Spend data is scattered across platforms and formats
  • Key metrics like CPI and ROAS are harder to calculate or less precise
  • Attribution and incrementality insights may be based on incomplete spend visibility

✅ With Cost Aggregation:

  • All spend is centralized into a clean, structured dataset across channels
  • Campaign metrics are easier to track and compare in real time
  • Budget decisions are informed by a full financial picture
  • Attribution can be paired with precise cost inputs for a clearer view of performance
  • Incrementality testing is grounded in comprehensive spend data for deeper insight

Cost aggregation is not just a backend process. It is the starting point for every smart, scalable, and measurable growth strategy in the games industry.

How Cost Aggregation benefits each stage of your game:

🛠️Pre-Launch

Challenge

  • Difficulty reporting on key engagement metrics for early awareness campaigns, trailer drops, and wishlist/pre-order pushes across ad networks and platforms.
  • Fragmented reports lack a consistent structure and language.

Solution

  • Gamesight’s Cost Aggregation can accept reports from any platform and flexibly map them into a standard format.
  • Standardize dimensions (e.g., campaign name, geography, creative type) and unify cost schemas across partners.

Outcome

  • Easily generate spend and conversion analysis across all media and gaming platforms, side-by-side, in a single report.
  • More consistent pre-launch reporting enables better media planning for launch.
  • Creates cleaner, more reliable cost accounting for your critical awareness efforts without duplication of effort.

🚀 Launch

Challenge

  • Ad spend spikes across multiple networks and agencies, but reporting is inconsistent, late, or double-counted.
  • Siloed cost data makes CPI and ROAS difficult to calculate or inaccurate.
  • It takes too much time to aggregate all your reporting across platforms, limiting how often you can review the current status of your campaigns.

Solution

  • Centralize all marketing spend into a single, standardized dashboard (including programmatic, influencer, social, search, CTV and more).
  • With cost and conversion measurement, Gamesight can automatically calculate metrics like CPI and ROAS for you.
  • Gamesight keeps up-to-date with all your spend through APIs and automated email ingestion, giving you precise, updated reporting through our dashboard or Reporting API.

Outcome

  • Get access to rich reporting across all platforms at the most critical moment of your game’s lifecycle.
  • Delivers the true cost of acquisition, enabling conversion measurement to be properly contextualized.
  • Give confident and accurate answers to executives on the holistic state of your marketing.

🔁 Expand & Retain

Challenge

  • Ongoing campaign, retention, and experimentation costs pile up across a growing number of networks, but are not tracked equally or consistently.
  • LTV and retention metrics are disconnected from the cost to sustain them.
  • Long-term modeling and projection is impossible without consistent cost accounting.

Solution

  • Gamesight is constantly expanding API support across 100+ networks with automated email support to close the gap with less capable ad networks.
  • Automatically calculated efficiency metrics neatly contextualize long-term performance metrics
  • Consistently tie spend and conversions to specific time windows, segments, or cohorts.

Outcome

  • You can confidently expand and experiment with new networks knowing that it will be supported by Gamesight.
  • Enables long-term performance analysis, like LTV, to be grounded in cost-efficiency metrics like CPI or cost-per-reactivation.
  • Unlocks the possibility of sophisticated financial modeling and performance analysis with confidence.