There’s a mindset in performance marketing that sounds completely reasonable on the surface: make every campaign better. Improve the ROAS. Lower the CPA. Tighten the targeting. Squeeze more efficiency out of every dollar. It makes sense, until it doesn’t. I’ve seen this play out. Teams chase increasingly impressive efficiency numbers and the campaigns do look better on paper. But meanwhile, volume is capped. Numbers plateau. Everyone’s confused because the metrics were improving. The problem is over-optimization. It’s the quiet throttle that happens when you keep pushing toward better without stopping to ask whether better is actually what the business needs right now. ## When a 10x ROAS is worse than a 7x Take this scenario, for example. A brand is running paid campaigns at a 7x ROAS. That’s profitable. Leadership is happy. But then someone asks, “Can we do better? Can we get to 10x?” The team starts optimizing.…