43% of Paid-Social ROAS Leaks Through Unmoderated Comments

43 % of Paid-Social ROAS Leaks Through Unmoderated Comments

Paid-social is supposed to be the fastest path to incremental revenue. So why do results plateau even when CPMs stay flat?
Superpower’s 2025 data study shows that forty-three percent of return on ad spend is lost when toxic comment threads stay visible. Below is how we uncovered that number, why it matters, and what you can do today.

How We Arrived at Forty-Three Percent

• Sample size: 1.2 million comments from 214 Instagram and Facebook ad accounts collected January through June 2025.
• Detection model: Superpower’s toxicity classifier with an F-score of 0.92 flagged spam, profanity, hate speech, and fraud bait.
• Attribution model: We compared conversion rates on ads with at least one toxic or unanswered thread to clean ads that matched for spend, creative, and audience.

Campaigns with any visible toxicity converted between thirty-eight and fifty-two percent worse, averaging a forty-three percent loss of ROAS.

Why Toxic Comments Kill Conversions

1. Social proof flips negative when prospects see unresolved complaints.
2. Meta’s quality filters silently reduce reach for ads with poor comment health.
3. Even one “This is a scam” post can spike bounce rate and cart abandonment.

Who Gets Hit Hardest

Beauty and personal care brands lose about fifty-one percent of ROAS.
DTC apparel loses forty-five percent.
Digital subscription products lose thirty-nine percent.
Brands with passionate communities feel the sting most because conversations snowball faster.

Current Fixes Fall Short

• Manual moderation is too slow; toxicity returns between shifts.
• Hiding every comment tanks engagement signals and looks suspicious.
• Turning comments off stops the bleeding but removes valuable social proof.

A Smarter Way Forward

1. Hide spam and hate in real time.
2. Draft on-brand replies to genuine questions.
3. Split-test clean versus toxic ads to quantify lift.

Many Superpower users reclaim up to twenty-nine percent ROAS in the first month by combining those three steps.

Plug Your Own Leak With a Free Audit

Not sure how much revenue you are losing?
Run a free paid-social comment audit and receive a custom report within twenty-four hours:
https://www.superpower.social/paid-social-ads-comment-audit

Prefer a walkthrough? Book a live demo and watch toxic threads disappear in real time:
https://www.superpower.social/demo

Stop letting negativity finance your competitors. Fix it today and your ROAS, your brand, and your social team will thank you. 🚀

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