How to fix your creator ROI
Opinion
Most brands work with creators, and yet many under-invest proportionally in Creator Ads. Meta’s Pete Buckley offers three fixes for turning creators into a high-performance growth engine.
We’re obsessed with the “power of creators,” yet there is a fundamental disconnect between how brands use them and their actual impact on the bottom line.
Recent high-profile research by the IPA found that creators deliver one of the highest long-term ROIs (1.51) of any channel, reaffirming their effectiveness in the modern mix.
However, there is a vital distinction often overlooked: the research isn’t measuring “creators” in the organic sense; it’s measuring Creator Ads.
While almost all brands work with creators, in my experience, nearly all under-invest proportionally in Creator Ads (known as Partnership Ads at Meta).
The difference isn’t just about “more reach”; it’s about having the control to target specific audiences and optimise for hard business goals. At Meta, we’ve found that when campaigns include 30% or more of their assets as Partnership Ads, they drive an average 45% lower cost per incremental conversion.
The potential is massive, yet the message isn’t getting through.
Most advertisers are still significantly under-investing. Here are three fixes to closing that gap and turning creators into a high-performance growth engine for your brand:
Measurement: The missing 80% ROI
One reason for under-investment is inaccurate measurement. According to WARC, “engagement” (likes) is still the most common metric used by brands and agencies to measure creator activity.
This isn’t good enough. With only 24% of brands measuring incremental sales, most marketers have no clear view of the true value of their investment.
Recent research by Charlie Oscar found that 80% of the ROI from Creator Ads is invisible if judged by last-click metrics.
For every £1 in click-attributed revenue, creators deliver an additional £4 in untracked returns.
Why? It’s because Creator Ads are high-attention video assets that often convert later through direct search or physical retail. If you only look at the click, you’re ignoring 80% of the actual sales generated. That isn’t just a measurement miss; it’s a strategic failure.
UK retailer Very demonstrated this shift in action, achieving a 45% higher return on ad spend (ROAS), a 11% lower cost per acquisition, and a 54% increase in incremental search traffic by integrating creator-led Partnership Ads into its performance mix. The results prove that when you start measuring conversions, creators become one of the most efficient drivers of the bottom line.
Fix 1: Shift measurement from engagement and clicks to incremental impact on business results.
Creative: The high cost of poor branding
Analysis by CreativeX found that up to 45% of Meta creator ad spend is wasted because assets fail to follow best practices in early branding and optimal content length. Furthermore, Kantar found that only 27% of creator content is strongly linked back to the sponsoring brand.
Branding is the bridge to growth. A System1 study found that well-branded creator ads are the ticket to scale, with exceptional early branding driving 2.3x more brand awareness and 3x more brand image lift. To reduce the waste, creator content must be built for the format it lives in.
Fix 2: Demand that every Creator Ad you run is branded early, distinctively, and built for the platform.
Distribution: Decoupling content from following
The final hurdle to ROI is the “celebrity trap”—the belief that a creator’s value is tied to their organic reach.
By shifting focus to creator-led ads (called Partnership Ads on Meta), you decouple content quality from audience size. This allows brands to move away from expensive macro-influencers and lean into micro and nano-creators, who often deliver more authentic, “peer-to-peer” recommendations.
Because smaller creators are more affordable to scale, they allow for greater creative diversification and faster testing.
This approach turns creator content into a high-performance asset rather than a one-off shoutout. To stop wasting budget, creators shouldn’t just be a “bolt-on” for brand awareness; they must be integrated into your promotional media mix to drive scalable, bottom-line growth.
Fix 3: Test using Partnership Ads to scale high-performance content from micro-creators, rather than focusing solely on often expensive celebs.
The creator paradox
The “Creator Paradox” is that we value the influence but ignore the infrastructure. By fixing your measurement, refining your creative best practices, and shifting your distribution toward a diversified, creator-led ad strategy, you stop treating creators as a “bolt-on” and start using them as the high-performance growth engine they are.
Pete Buckley is the connection planning director for Meta