Contribution margin after cost of goods, discounts and returns is the column campaigns are ranked in.

Margin after refunds, not checkout ROAS

Revenue recorded at checkout is matched against refunds, chargebacks, discounts and product cost drawn from your finance and commerce systems. Campaigns are ranked on what is left. Realvertising reads those definitions and spends against them rather than inventing a margin model of its own.

The return window is respected before scaling

A category with a high return rate is not treated as sold on the day the order is placed. You set a maturity window per product group, and the budget engine holds scaling decisions until orders inside that window have settled, so budget is not chased into revenue that comes back.

Creative fatigue caught before cost per order drifts

Frequency, click-through decay and first-week against fourth-week cost per order are tracked for every asset in rotation. Crossing the fatigue threshold you set queues a replacement drawn from your brand asset system, and whether that replacement goes live automatically or waits for a person is a line in your Campaign Constitution.

The networks keep running their auctions

Performance Max, Advantage and Smart+ stay in charge of placement, bid and inventory decisions inside their own systems, because that is where the auction data lives. What is decided one level above is how much budget each gets, which margin-based outcome each is optimising toward, and which product sets and buyer segments are excluded.