π Online Marketing ROI Calculator
Every campaign answers one question: what did the money do?
Return on marketing investment
Estimates for planning only, not financial advice.
Spend $5,000 on ads, attribute $22,000 of revenue, and incur $8,000 of product and fulfillment costs: the campaign profit is $9,000, ROI is 180 percent, and ROAS is 4.4x. ROAS flatters because it ignores costs; ROI tells the truth because it subtracts them. Run both numbers on every campaign, every month.
How to Use This Calculator
Enter ad spend, attributed revenue, and the cost of goods/fulfillment for those sales. The calculator returns true ROI, ROAS, break-even ROAS, and a plain-English verdict.
Enter spend and revenue from the same attribution window. Consistency beats precision.
Add COGS and fulfillment so ROI reflects profit, not just revenue.
Compare ROAS to break-even ROAS. For pricing power behind the numbers, our margin calculator helps.
Marketing ROI vs ROAS Formula
ROAS is the ad platform's favorite metric because it always looks better: 4.4x sounds great even when margins make it a loss. ROI subtracts what the sales actually cost. Break-even ROAS ties them together: at 50 percent gross margin you need 2.0x ROAS just to break even on profit.
Worked Example
$5,000 spend, $22,000 revenue, $8,000 COGS/fulfillment. Profit: 22,000 - 8,000 - 5,000 = $9,000. ROI: 9,000/5,000 = 180 percent. ROAS: 22,000/5,000 = 4.4x. Gross margin: 14,000/22,000 = 63.6 percent, so break-even ROAS = 1/0.636 = 1.57x. The campaign clears break-even nearly three times over: scale it.
Reading Your Result
A profitable campaign is not automatically a scalable one: doubling spend rarely doubles revenue at the same ROAS, because audiences saturate and marginal costs rise. Scale in steps, watching marginal ROI, not average ROI. And attribution is the eternal caveat: last-click undercredits brand building, while platform-reported ROAS overcredits itself.
My rule: make ROI the decision metric and ROAS the diagnostic. If ROI is positive and stable across two full buying cycles, increase budget 20 to 30 percent and re-measure; if ROAS is high but ROI is thin, the problem is margins or attribution, not the ads. Track incrementality with holdout tests once spend is serious: platforms take credit for sales that would have happened anyway, and only experiments reveal the truth. Kill fast, scale slow, measure everything. For lifetime value against acquisition cost, pair this with CAC payback thinking.
The attribution wars never end, but one discipline cuts through: holdout tests. Pause ads in matched regions, measure the sales gap, and you learn what the ads truly caused versus what would have happened anyway. Platforms take credit for the harvest; holdouts measure the seed. Run one proper incrementality test before scaling any budget past its first winning month.
Estimates for planning only, not financial advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you calculate marketing ROI?
(Revenue - cost of goods - ad spend) / ad spend x 100. With $22K revenue, $8K costs, $5K spend: ($22K-$8K-$5K)/$5K = 180% ROI. Subtract real costs; revenue-only math lies. Include refunds and chargebacks in revenue: gross sales flatter ROI dishonestly.
What is the difference between ROI and ROAS?
ROAS = revenue / ad spend (4.4x in the example). ROI subtracts costs first (180%). ROAS always looks better and is the platform's preferred metric; ROI is the business's metric. A 4.4x ROAS at 20% margins loses money: ROAS without margin context is decoration.
What is a good ROAS?
It depends entirely on margins: break-even ROAS = 1 / gross margin. At 50% margin you need 2x to break even; at 80% margin, 1.25x. There is no universal 'good' number without the margin context. Subscription margins near 80% make 1.5x ROAS wildly profitable: context is everything.
What is a good marketing ROI?
Positive and stable across full buying cycles. 100%+ ROI (doubling spend in profit) is strong for paid acquisition; mature programs often run 30-80%. Compare against your cost of capital and alternative uses of the money. Compare ROI to your hurdle rate: marketing must beat the next-best use of capital.
How should I attribute revenue to campaigns?
Pick one consistent method: last-click is simple but undervalues upper-funnel; multi-touch is fairer but complex. Consistency across periods matters more than perfection, and platform numbers need independent verification. Server-side tracking (Conversions API) recovers attribution that ad blockers kill, restoring visibility you already paid for.
What is incrementality in marketing?
The sales that happened because of the ads, excluding sales that would have occurred anyway. Holdout tests (showing ads to one group, not another) measure it. Most reported ROAS overstates incrementality. Geo-holdouts are the gold standard: pause ads in matched regions and measure the gap.
Should I include agency fees in ROI?
Yes. True ROI includes all marketing costs: ad spend, agency fees, creative production, and tools. Excluding them flatters ROI and leads to over-scaling. Creative costs amortize across campaigns: allocate them honestly across ad sets or ROI lies about winners and losers alike.
How fast should I scale a winning campaign?
In steps of 20-30% with re-measurement, because marginal returns diminish as audiences saturate. Doubling overnight usually degrades ROAS; the algorithm needs time to find new pockets of buyers. Broad targeting often scales better than hyper-segmentation: let the algorithm find buyers.
What is CAC payback and how does it relate?
CAC payback = acquisition cost / monthly gross profit per customer: how many months to recover the spend. ROI measures campaign profit; payback measures cash timing. Subscription businesses live by payback. A 6-month payback is excellent for SaaS; 18 months demands venture-scale funding.
When should I kill a campaign?
After sufficient data (usually 2-4 weeks or 100+ conversions) with ROI negative and no improving trend, or when marginal ROI on extra spend turns negative. Set kill criteria before launching, not after emotions attach. Sunk spend is sunk: kill by forward ROI, not by cumulative losses.