How DECKED found with Prescient their worst-reported tactic was actually their best
DECKED builds truck-bed storage and cargo systems for people who treat their trucks as tools. The products are durable, premium, and high consideration: customers research, compare, watch how-it-works content, and come back weeks later to buy. That long, considered path is exactly the kind of journey that breaks last-touch measurement. DECKED's growth team is direct-response native and holds a strict efficiency target, so every dollar has to defend itself.
The Challenge
DECKED is a high AOV brand. That makes it harder to measure the ROAS of each tactic, more so when running a full mix of channels and tactics. The native platform dashboards were confident about which ones worked. Bottom-funnel tactics like retargeting reported some of the highest returns in the account, upper-funnel was the opposite. The awareness tactic looked like a hole in the budget.
Demand capture only works if something is creating the demand. DECKED suspected their awareness was doing more than the platforms gave it credit for. But as long as the only scoreboard was platform-reported ROAS, it was not possible to measure.
So they set out to prove one hypothesis: for a high AOV brand, awareness was creating far more demand than the dashboards credited it with.
The Solution
DECKED turned to Prescient's Marketing Mix Model, which reads the brand holistically: how spend compounds and customers convert over a long lifecycle, not just the last click. For a high AOV brand, that lifecycle view tells you more than the granular ROAS of any single tactic.
Prescient separated each tactic's real contribution from the revenue that would have happened anyway, splitting base revenue, the demand a channel captures, from halo revenue, the downstream and cross-channel lift it creates. That gave DECKED a data-driven reason to trust their hunch. The native dashboards and Prescient's view told two different stories.
The Results
Awareness was their best tactic
DECKED's awareness tactic sat at the bottom of their labeled tactics on the dashboard, and at the top once Prescient measured what it actually drove. The dashboards were capturing only about a third of its real value. Modeled out, it returned roughly three times the credit its platforms gave it, and ran about 4 times more efficient than retargeting.
The tactic the dashboard loved was mostly taking credit
On the dashboard, retargeting looked like one of their best-performing tactics. Prescient showed what it really drove: under 3% of that reported return. It was largely harvesting demand that already existed, then claiming the sale. It was not creating much that would not have happened anyway.
The awareness channel proved the mechanism
The channel view explained why. DECKED's video channel reported almost exactly what Prescient modeled, within about 1%, yet roughly 95% of that value was halo: the lift that lands later and on other channels.
A last-touch view sees the magnitude but never the mechanism. That is why upper funnel always looked unconvincing: the channel carrying the most real efficiency was the one a dashboard could never fully credit. A heavily-used search channel told the opposite story, holding only about 6% of its reported return once modeled. Seeing it all in one place gave DECKED the confidence to act on a mix they had only suspected was right.
Key takeaways: What this means for you
- Platform-reported ROAS can be directionally wrong, not just imprecise. For DECKED, the tactic the dashboards ranked worst was actually their best, and a dashboard favorite held under 3% of its reported value once modeled. Steering budget on dashboard signal alone can quietly feed your weakest tactics and starve your strongest.
- Halo is where the hidden value lives. About 95% of the video channel's real contribution was halo, the downstream lift no last-touch dashboard can attribute. For high-AOV brands, the converting click is rarely the cause. Any portfolio that mixes upper and lower funnel has to treat the halo question as a portfolio-level question.
- A strict efficiency target is only reachable against an accurate scoreboard. Every dollar steered by a wrong number is a dollar of efficiency lost. The first win is not a budget move, it is seeing clearly.
We were proud of how efficiently we ran our media, but we always had a nagging feeling our awareness work was doing more than our reporting could show. Prescient finally put a real number on it. Seeing that the tactic our dashboards ranked last was actually our most efficient once you measured true contribution changed how we think about every budget decision.
