How to check your Meta ads agency's ROAS report when half your orders are cash on delivery

If you sell on cash on delivery in India, the ROAS in your Meta ads agency's report is not your return. It counts orders placed. It does not know which ones were refused at the door. Here is how to check the number before you renew.

We run Meta ads for D2C brands, so we have an interest in this. Read the checks below as questions you can put to any agency, us included. How we answer them is on our Meta ads agency page, and the question of when to hire at all is in this post.

Ask for orders delivered, not orders placed

Meta reports a purchase when the order is placed. On a COD order, the customer can refuse the parcel and the ad still gets credit. Ask the agency to take last month's Meta purchases and match them to your courier report. The gap between placed and delivered is your real denominator.

Work out break-even ROAS before you look at ROAS

Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your margin after product cost, shipping, payment fees and returns. If you keep 35 paise of every rupee after those costs, break-even is about 2.9. A report that says 3.5 sounds good and is barely profitable. A report that says 2.5 is a loss. Ask the agency what your number is. If they cannot say it, they are optimising for the platform and not for you.

Check that the Pixel and the Conversions API agree

The Pixel runs in the browser and misses events when the browser blocks it. The Conversions API sends the same event from your server. PeakPilots, a Meta agency in Ahmedabad, writes that Pixel-only tracking misses 30 to 40 percent of purchase events (their own page, read 17 October 2026). We have not measured that figure ourselves. What you can check yourself: open Events Manager and see whether both sources are connected and whether Meta shows the events as deduplicated.

Ask who the new customers are

A retargeting campaign shows your ad to people who already visited your site. They would often have bought anyway, and the report gives the ad full credit. Ask for new-customer share of purchases. If most of the revenue comes from the warm audience, the headline ROAS is flattering the cold campaigns that should be doing the work.

Keep the ad account and the numbers in your name

Ask for admin access to the ad account and the Pixel, and for a monthly export of spend and purchases that you can open without the agency. If the agency refuses, you will not be able to audit any of the above.

What this means for you

Put one page in front of your agency every month: spend, purchases placed, purchases delivered, break-even ROAS, actual ROAS. If they cannot fill it, you do not have a ROAS number, you have a platform number. If you want us to fill it for your account, that is one call.