Omer Shai on Why Conversion Rate is a Stupid Metric

Conversion Rate Is a Vanity Metric for People Who Can't Do Math

Omer Shai thinks optimizing for conversion rate is stupid. After 18 years as CMO at Wix and now running marketing for Base44 at a $100 million annual run rate, he's earned the right to say it out loud. "Think how stupid it is to go after conversion rate," he says. "10% conversion rate, is it good or bad? Depends on how many people are in the funnel." If you're not paying for the next million users and their conversion rate is just 1% compared to the 10% you had before, is that bad? "It's amazing," he insists, "because you didn't pay for them and they cost you nothing."

The logic is simple but radical: Shai doesn't care about overall conversion. He cares about the return on investment for each traffic source. Users searching for "website builder" in New York? He wants those to convert better every day. But free brand traffic from a Super Bowl ad? He'll take all of it, even if it dilutes the top-line conversion number. This is the mindset of someone who thinks in portfolios, not channels. And it explains why he's built one of the most resilient marketing engines in SaaS.

The same philosophy applies to traffic diversification. When Shai took over marketing at Base44 after Wix acquired the company in mid-June 2024, nearly all traffic came from social—LinkedIn posts, community efforts, the founder's brand. By the time he sat down for this conversation, he'd scaled the marketing team to more than 50 people and was running product marketing, community, PR, education partnerships with universities, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, search, and SEO. The marketing budget? North of $100 million. It took him six or seven years to hit that scale at Wix. He did it in two months at Base44.

Time-ROI Is the Only Metric That Matters

Shai has never used lifetime value. Not once. "I hated this term," he says. "How do you know what is the lifetime value? What is the lifetime value? How many years?" The question sounds rhetorical, but he means it. In a world where Anthropic's Opus 4.5 can change the game overnight and Claude Code cannibalizes Cursor's business in days, betting on multi-year cohorts is delusional. So instead, Shai measures time to return on investment—TROI.

He runs four cohorts: 1-day, 7-day, 14-day, and 28-day. Each one gives him a real-time signal on when his ROI will hit 1. At Wix, the company is comfortable with an 11- or 12-month TROI. At Base44, the same. "If I'm keeping the ROI at 11 months, I have unlimited budgets," Shai explains. That's not hyperbole. As long as retention holds, upgrades happen, and churn stays manageable, he can spend as much as he wants on any channel that delivers that payback window.

The methodology was born in 2012, before Wix's IPO. Facebook had just launched page ads, and Shai saw the results and 5x'd spend in a single day. Avishai Abrahami, Wix's co-founder and CEO, told him to slow down—not because the ROI was bad, but because the company didn't have enough cash to fund four months of float. "He went and purchased Facebook stocks," Shai says, still annoyed. "But he didn't tell me and he didn't buy me some. He's not a friend."

I believe in building the shortest cohorts for me to move as fast as I can to impact the result of the company. Lifetime value is much slower than the metrics that I currently have.

— Omer Shai

Buy Ten Lottery Tickets, Not One

Shai's diversification obsession isn't about hedging—it's about arithmetic. "When you are doing one thing and you are doing it tremendously well, there is only one thing that you can be successful in. When you are doing 10 things, you can be amazingly well in 3 things. Another 3, you are going to be okay. And in 4, you're going to fail. In the math that I know, 3 is bigger than 1."

It's a portfolio theory applied to marketing channels. If you go all-in on X (formerly Twitter), you're talking to a specific audience with specific intent and behavior. What about everyone else? And what happens when that channel gets saturated or a competitor outbids you? Shai would rather have three channels firing at full strength and three more performing decently than one perfect channel and nine untested ideas.

This is why he pushed Base44 into SEO, education, YouTube, and paid social even though Mayor Rubin's founder-led content was already working. "I talk with someone and I shared with them that we are doing a Super Bowl spot for Base," Shai recalls. "And he told me, why are you doing that? Are you afraid? And I looked at him, man, I'm not afraid of anything. I have opportunity and I'm trying to optimize any opportunity that I have in order to build a sustainable business."

I would like to have as many traffic sources that I can have in order to build a business for the long term. I would like to find the arbitrage of tomorrow.

— Omer Shai

Super Bowl Ads Are Investment, Not Spend

On July 2, 2024—12 days after Wix announced the Base44 acquisition—Shai texted his media buyer, Mark Zaminer, and asked how much a Super Bowl spot would cost. He'd already bought five for Wix over the years. Now he wanted one for a company most people had never heard of. The decision took less than two weeks. "I saw some amazing indication from community, from people who love the product, how they're using the product, their intent, user behavior, the acquisition that we can have," he says.

The first Wix Super Bowl spot cost $4.8 million for airtime, with an $8 million max spend commitment to the network. The latest price? "More than that, but it's worth it." Shai won't say exactly, but the calculus is clear: he's not buying brand awareness for its own sake. He's buying the only day of the year when people actually talk about the commercials. "The day after the Oscar, everyone is talking about who dressed what," he says. "And the only day that people are focusing on commercials is around the Super Bowl."

But the real arbitrage happens in the two weeks before the game. PR, teasers, creative drops, social campaigns—all of it compounds the value of the 30- or 60-second spot. And Shai measures it the same way he measures everything else: traffic spikes, relevant users hitting the site, product usage, conversions. "Marketing is investment," he says. "And for us, return on investment is users who are coming to our site, users who are using the product, and eventually convert and telling others how amazing our product is."

The way that I'm thinking on brand activities is that it's not an empty. It's not only brand. When I'm doing brand marketing, I'm thinking the balance between brand and acquisition. And when I'm doing acquisition, I'm thinking about the balance between acquisition and brand.

— Omer Shai

For 2025, Wix is running two Super Bowl spots—one for the core platform, one for Base44. The Wix spot won't feature celebrities or big production stunts. It's a direct-response creative disguised as a brand play. "The product is going to be in the central," Shai says. "We are going to have our product and you are going to see how other people are using the product. It's almost like a direct response spot that we bought on the Super Bowl." That's the Shai doctrine in one sentence: every dollar is an investment, every channel is measurable, and brand is just another traffic source.

Fifty Marketers for a Company Younger Than Most Series A Startups

Base44 is one of the youngest companies ever to run a Super Bowl ad. It's also one of the youngest to field a 50-person marketing team. That's not a typo. Shai staffed up product marketing, community, PR, education, content, performance, and creative in a matter of weeks. The education team alone is working to embed Base44 in university curriculums globally. The content team is pumping out YouTube videos, user stories, and social proof. The performance team is testing TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and search.

Why? Because Shai believes in doing everything at once and seeing what works. "When you're doing 10 things, you can be amazingly well in 3 things. Another 3, you are going to be okay. And in 4, you're going to fail." Most early-stage founders would balk at that inefficiency. Shai sees it as the only way to find signal fast. And when you're running a $100 million marketing budget, you can afford to fail in four places as long as you win in three.

We need to go back to the root of bringing people with zero knowledge about marketing. I paid half a million dollars for the voiceover. It was a fucking stupid idea that I had.

— Omer Shai

The admission is telling. Shai has made expensive mistakes—voiceovers that bombed, channels that didn't convert, bets that went nowhere. But he's still standing because he never put all his chips on one number. The portfolio approach insulates him from catastrophic failure. And when a channel does work—like Facebook page ads in 2012 or founder-led content in 2024—he has the budget and the team to 10x it overnight.

The Anti-LTV Playbook for a World That Changes Every Six Months

Shai's refusal to use lifetime value isn't just contrarian—it's adaptive. In a market where AI models rewrite the rules every quarter, betting on three-year payback windows is career suicide. Time-ROI forces you to think in weeks, not years. It rewards speed, punishes complacency, and gives you permission to spend as long as the math works.

The risk, of course, is short-termism. If you're only measuring 28-day cohorts, how do you know you're not borrowing from the future? Shai's answer: you don't optimize for overall conversion. You optimize for the ROI of each cohort, each channel, each audience. Users from New York searching for "website builder"? Improve their experience every day. Free brand traffic from a Super Bowl ad? Take it all, even if it dilutes the average. The blended TROI tells you if the portfolio is working. The individual TROIs tell you where to double down.

It's a system built for volatility. And in a world where Cursor can lose half its users to Claude Code in a week, volatility is the only constant. Shai isn't afraid of competition. He's afraid of standing still. That's why he bought a Super Bowl spot 12 days after an acquisition. That's why he runs 50 marketers at a startup. And that's why he'll never, ever care about your conversion rate.

I don't really care about the overall conversion of the company. I care about the ROI of the company. I optimize the ROI of the company.

— Omer Shai