TL;DR
The Meta ads ROAS advice on Reddit is a mix of hard-won truth and dangerous myth. Here's what to trust, what to ignore, and the context the threads always leave out.
→ See how this applies to your business (free 30-min call)If you've gone down the Reddit rabbit hole looking for what a "good" Meta ads ROAS is, you've seen the whole range — people bragging about 8× on a subreddit thread, others insisting anything under 3× means you're failing, and a hundred contradictory takes in between. Some of it is genuinely valuable, hard-won operator wisdom. Some of it will lead you straight off a cliff. Let me sort it out, because the threads almost never give you the context that makes the numbers mean anything.
Why Reddit ROAS Numbers Are Basically Useless Out of Context
Here's the thing every "I get 6× ROAS" post leaves out: their margins, their price point, their attribution setup, and their business model. Without those, the number is noise.
A 6× ROAS on a 90%-margin digital product is a totally different reality from a 6× ROAS on a physical product with 30% margins. The first is printing money; the second might be barely profitable after cost of goods, shipping, and returns. When someone posts a ROAS on Reddit without their margins, they're not giving you a benchmark — they're giving you a decontextualized brag.
A ROAS number without margins, price point, and attribution attached is a rumor, not a benchmark. Reddit is full of rumors.
So the first thing Reddit gets wrong: presenting ROAS as a universal scoreboard. There is no universal "good" ROAS. There's only *your* breakeven ROAS — the ratio where ad spend covers your full cost — and whether you're above it.
What Reddit Gets Right
Credit where it's due. The good threads consistently land on truths that matter:
Creative is the biggest lever. The experienced voices agree: in Meta ads today, your creative (the hook, the first three seconds, the offer in the ad) drives results more than your targeting. This is correct. Meta's algorithm handles targeting better than you can; your job is to feed it a volume of strong creative.
Attribution is broken and your reported ROAS is inflated. The sharper posters know that Meta's in-platform ROAS over-credits itself, especially post-iOS-privacy-changes. They push people to check real revenue against reported. This is exactly right and criminally underappreciated by beginners.
You need creative volume, not one perfect ad. The winning approach is testing many creatives and letting the losers die fast. Reddit's better operators repeat this constantly, and they're correct.
Broad targeting often beats narrow. Modern Meta rewards giving the algorithm room. The old "stack 12 interests" approach is largely dead, and the experienced crowd knows it.
If you filter for the detailed, specific posts from people clearly running real budgets, this advice is gold.
What Reddit Gets Dangerously Wrong
Now the traps:
"Anything under X ROAS is bad." No. This ignores margins entirely. A 2.2× ROAS can be very profitable for one business and a disaster for another. Never let a stranger's arbitrary threshold decide whether *your* campaign is working.
Chasing the highest possible ROAS. Counterintuitively, maxing ROAS often means you're *under-spending* — running only to your warmest, cheapest audience and leaving volume on the table. A lower ROAS at much higher spend and higher total profit is usually the better business. Reddit's ROAS-bragging culture pushes people toward small, "efficient," and small.
Ignoring what happens after the click. This is the biggest blind spot in almost every thread. People obsess over ad-level ROAS and completely ignore that the same ads produce radically different *real* returns depending on how fast and how well the resulting leads get handled. For a service business, this is where most of the ROAS actually lives.
Survivorship bias. The person posting 9× ROAS is posting *because* it's exceptional. You're not seeing the thousands running 1.8× who stayed quiet. Reddit's visible results skew wildly optimistic.
The Context Every Thread Leaves Out: Post-Click Reality
Here's the piece that separates operators who actually make money from forum warriors comparing dashboard screenshots. For a lead-generation business — which is most Meta advertisers who aren't pure e-commerce — your ROAS is decided as much by your *follow-up* as by your ads.
Run the numbers. Two businesses run the identical Meta campaign and get identical cost-per-lead. Business A responds to each lead in 90 seconds, qualifies them, and books the good ones. Business B lets leads sit for four hours and follows up once. Business A will book several times more of the same leads. Same ad spend, same clicks, dramatically different real ROAS — and *none* of that shows up in the Meta ads manager the Reddit threads are staring at.
This is why "what's a good Meta ROAS" is partly the wrong question. A better one is: "am I converting the maximum possible revenue from the leads these ads generate?" Fix your speed-to-lead and follow-up, and your real ROAS climbs on the exact same ad account — a lever most of Reddit never mentions because it's not sexy and it's not inside the ad platform.
How to Actually Use Reddit for Meta Ads
Do this: mine Reddit for *tactics* (creative angles, testing frameworks, structural advice from detailed posters) and ignore it for *benchmarks* (ROAS numbers stripped of context). Then do the two things the threads under-emphasize — track your real revenue vs. reported, and fix what happens after the click.
That second part is where we spend most of our energy at Thinxster. We tie Meta ad spend to closed revenue through a GoHighLevel pipeline and make sure every ad-generated lead gets an instant, qualifying response — so the ROAS is real and as high as your traffic can support, not just a flattering number in the ad manager.
If your Meta ROAS looks fine on Reddit's terms but your revenue doesn't match, the gap is almost always post-click. [Book a free strategy call](/book) and we'll find it.
Free Weekly Briefing
One AI Marketing Tactic.
Every Tuesday. Free.
What's actually working across our client accounts right now — ROAS moves, follow-up sequences, creative angles. The stuff that isn't in any blog post yet.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. 1,200+ business owners already in.