ROAS calculator.
Calculate your return on ad spend, break-even ROAS, and the minimum ROAS your campaigns need to hit to actually be profitable. Works for any paid channel: Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, programmatic, anything.
What is ROAS? ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) is revenue divided by ad spend. If you spent $1,000 on ads and produced $4,000 in revenue, your ROAS is 4.0 (or 400%). ROAS is the most-used efficiency metric in paid media, but it does not tell you whether the campaign is actually profitable. Break-even ROAS does: it factors in your margin so you know the minimum return your campaigns must generate before they start contributing to profit, not just revenue.
Your numbers
Results
Enter your numbers to see your ROAS analysis.
How to use this calculator.
- Ad spend: total spend across the channels you want to evaluate. You can run this for a single campaign, a single channel, or your full paid-media program.
- Revenue: revenue generated by those ads, attributed however you currently measure attribution (last-click, data-driven, model of choice).
- Gross profit margin: the percentage of revenue you keep after the cost of delivering the product or service, but before marketing and overhead. For e-commerce, this is gross margin after COGS. For services, it is the percentage of revenue left after labor and direct service costs.
- Average order value (optional): use this to back into a target CPA. If you know your AOV, the calculator shows the maximum cost per conversion you can pay and still break even.
What ROAS misses.
ROAS is useful but limited. The blind spots:
- Attribution lag. Some categories have buyer journeys that span weeks or months. Last-click ROAS in week 1 dramatically understates the true return that shows up by month 3.
- Lifetime value. A new customer acquired today generates revenue across their full lifecycle, not just the first purchase. ROAS calculated on first-purchase revenue undervalues channels that bring in repeat customers.
- Brand effect. Some ad spend (especially upper-funnel) builds brand familiarity that drives organic traffic and direct visits months later. Last-click ROAS misses this entirely.
- Channel mix dynamics. Pausing a "low-ROAS" upper-funnel channel often drops the ROAS of the lower-funnel channel that was harvesting the demand the upper-funnel channel created.
Treat ROAS as one of several efficiency metrics, not the single number that determines whether a channel is working. Margin-adjusted ROAS, CAC payback period, and customer LTV all belong in the same conversation.
Related reading.
- Google Ads management — how we approach paid search audits, account architecture, and weekly optimization.
- Marketing acronyms reference — CPA, CPL, CAC, LTV, ROAS, and the rest, defined.
- SEO glossary — adjacent terminology for organic-search work.
Want a paid media audit?
If you ran the numbers here and your ROAS picture is not what it should be, we can audit the account and tell you what is structurally off.