Good ROAS for Meta (Facebook) Ads: Last Touch vs First Touch

On adtribute attribution, the median DTC brand in our panel earned 1.15 in gross revenue per euro of Meta Ads spend on last touch and 1.88 on first touch in August 2026. The middle half of brands sits between 0.65 and 1.77 on last touch and between 1.30 and 2.68 on first touch. By industry, the last-touch median ranges from 0.80 in beauty & personal care to 1.65 in home & living. Meta's own reporting shows a median ROAS of 2.27 for the same brands. A good ROAS is one above your break-even ROAS on the model you trust, with room left for fixed costs.

On independent attribution, 4 is above the top quartile on last touch (1.77) for Meta Ads, and above the first-touch median of 1.88 too. In Ads Manager, where the platform credits itself, ROAS runs higher (median 2.27), so a 4 there is good but not exceptional. Always compare ROAS figures from the same attribution source.

A ROAS of 2 is above the top quartile on last touch (1.77). Whether it makes money depends on margin: at a 50 percent gross margin, 2.0 is exactly break-even on the order, at 60 percent it leaves about 17 percent of revenue after ad cost. For prospecting a lower last-touch ROAS can still be worth it when first-touch ROAS is strong, because the channel is starting journeys others close.

On last touch the median moved from 1.09 a year earlier to 1.15 in August 2026, on first touch from 1.75 to 1.88. Month-to-month moves are noisy, so judge your own ROAS against the same month a year earlier and on the same attribution model.

Meta attributes within its own walls, with view-through and modeled conversions, and claims orders that other channels also touched. adtribute credits every order exactly once across all channels from first-party tracking and real shop orders. For the same brands Meta reports a median 2.27, against 1.15 on adtribute last touch. Both are useful, but only one of them adds up across channels.

Last touch credits the channel that closed the sale, first touch the channel that started the journey. Meta's first-touch median (1.88) is about 1.6 times its last-touch median (1.15), because Meta mostly introduces customers whom search, email or direct visits convert later. Judging Meta on last touch alone undervalues it.

It is aggregated from a subset of adtribute customers, all direct-to-consumer brands with adtribute tracking live for the whole window and continuous Meta spend, so the lines move because performance moved, not because the panel changed. Both models are applied identically to every brand. Only medians and quartile bands are published, never a single brand's value, and the series updates every month.