On Monday, I took the stage at Ads Camp 2026 to talk about the State of German eCom. The main concept I talked about:

Your company isn't one business. It's dozens of small ones sharing one P&L.

Each with its own input vs. output correlation. You put something in, and aim to get more out.

The idea is simple. Applying it once your brand has real scale is not.

So today I want to go one layer deeper. What "focus on the inputs" actually means for how you analyze your business, and why it gets so much harder the bigger you get:

We all heard the saying. Focus on the inputs, not the outputs.

But what does that actually mean for how you run and analyze your eCom business?

An output is something like revenue, new customers or profit. You can't generate more of them by snapping your fingers. You have to put something in first. Capital, people, marketing, product. Those are the inputs.

Simple enough, until you look at what your business actually is.

It's not one machine with one input and one output. It's lots of small businesses stacked on top of each other. One per market, one per product, per channel. Each with its own input-output correlation.

When you're small, that's easy to follow. One or two channels, one product, one market, once ICP. You can see what's working.

Say you run 3 channels, target 3 ICPs with 4 different angles, and sell 2 products in 2 countries. That's already 144 combinations. All connected, all influencing each other.

Now you grow to 8 channels, 6 ICPs, 6 angles, 5 products and 5 markets.

That's 7,200 combinations.

Every new dimension makes this number grow exponentially. Which is why the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to understand what is actually working, how, and why.

At the same time, adding these dimensions is what is required to keep growing.

So the job is to figure out how these input-output correlations connect. And that only works with a measurement setup that can actually show them to you.

Let me give you two examples.

1. Countries

If you operate in different countries, the question is where you deploy your marketing budget and how you acquire customers in each one. In which region does the next euro generate how much additional revenue?

That's an input-to-output correlation in its simplest form.

And you'll usually see that in some countries it's a lot more effective for you to acquire new customers than in others.

One 9-figure brand on Klar runs Meta across 8 countries with €600k total monthly spend. Blended ROAS across countries looked fine, but when we analyzed each country individually, marginal ROAS ranged from 1.69 to 3.94.

Same channel, same brand. That cost them €167k every single month.

2. Creatives

On paid social, the creative mostly is the input.

Let's say you operate a supplement brand and your creatives communicate in three different angles: benefit-focused, pain-focused or medical-focused.

So you want to understand how each angle turns into output.

1. How much are you putting in? How many benefit-, pain- and medical-focused creatives are you actually putting into the machine?

2. What comes out? What share of your revenue does each type generate?

Often you'll already see an imbalance here. Only 10% of your creatives use medical communication, but they generate 20% of your revenue.

And the final step, and the one most brands skip: 3. Does more in mean more out?

Maybe you're at 10% for a reason, and once you scale past that, it doesn't yield any additional returns.

But if you find an imbalance between what you put into the machine and what it gives back, and you can see historically that more input yields more output, you have found an area of leverage.

A place in the machine where you can put more in and get more out. That's where you double down.

Now countries and creatives are just two dimensions. Your business has thousands of these correlations running at the same time.

You won't find them by looking at revenue and profit, as those are outputs. They only move when an input moves. You find them with a reporting & measurement setup that allows you to split the big business back into its small ones and helps you analyze them at scale.

Then you can make the right decisions about where the next euro, the next hire or the next creative goes.