ROAS Calculator

What is ROAS, and the two ways it is written

A ROAS of 4 and a ROAS of 400% are the same number: platforms differ on which they show, and confusing the two by a factor of a hundred is a mistake that gets made in real meetings. This calculator shows the multiple and the percentage together so the ambiguity never arises.

• ROAS from revenue and spend €18,000 on €2,000 is 9×, or 900%.
• Revenue from spend and a target ROAS €2,500 at a target of 3.2× needs €8,000 of revenue to clear.
• Spend from revenue and a target ROAS a €9,000 revenue target at 2.5× allows €3,600 of spend.

Break-even ROAS: the number that decides

A ROAS of 4 sounds good and may be a loss. What matters is your break-even ROAS, which is 1 ÷ gross margin. At a 25% margin, break-even is 4, so a ROAS of 4 means you spent exactly what you made and the campaign is a wash. At a 60% margin, break-even is about 1.67, and the same ROAS of 4 is strongly profitable.

So the first thing to work out is not your ROAS; it is the ROAS you need. Take gross margin after cost of goods, payment fees, shipping and returns, the real contribution per order, not the headline markup, and invert it. Everything above that line is profit, everything below it is buying revenue at a loss, however good the multiple looks next to someone else’s.

ROAS, ROI and the attribution window

ROAS and ROI are not synonyms. ROAS counts revenue against ad spend. ROI counts profit against total cost, including the things advertising never sees: the agency fee, the production of the creative, the salary of the person running it, the platform charges. A campaign can have a ROAS its manager is proud of and a negative ROI once the rest of the invoice is included.

The other thing to pin down is the window. A 7-day click ROAS and a 30-day click-through ROAS are different numbers for the same campaign, and the longer window always looks better. Comparing a prospecting campaign measured over 30 days with a retargeting campaign measured over 7 is not a comparison. Fix one window, apply it everywhere, and say which one it is whenever you quote the figure.

And ROAS says nothing about incrementality. Retargeting and branded search report high ROAS by catching people who had already decided; the honest question is how much of that revenue would have arrived anyway. A holdout test answers it; the platform’s attribution model does not.

Checking a plan or an account

Switch to bulk mode and drop in a CSV with one row per campaign, a name plus any two of revenue, spend and ROAS, and each row is solved for the missing value, with the gross profit on each. Copy the table or download it as a CSV.

As with any blended figure, the total hides the shape. A single high-ROAS branded campaign can carry an account average while every prospecting campaign underneath it loses money, which is exactly the situation that looks fine in a summary and gets worse every month. Read the rows, not only the total. The delimiter is detected, so an Italian or German Excel export works unchanged, and 3,2 is read as 3.2.

What a ROAS below 1 means

It means the campaign returned less revenue than it cost: every euro spent brought back less than a euro. That is not automatically a reason to switch it off. Prospecting that acquires a customer at a loss on the first order can be the right purchase when the second and third orders are profitable, which is the argument for measuring lifetime value rather than first-order ROAS.

But it only works if the repeat purchase is real and measured, not assumed. Everyone planning a loss-making acquisition campaign believes in the lifetime value; the ones who are right have the cohort data to show it.