Free ROI ToolROI, ROAS & Profit
Free Marketing ROI Calculator

Marketing ROI Calculator

Enter your marketing spend and the revenue — or leads — it generated to see your ROI, ROAS, profit, and cost per lead instantly. Prove what your marketing is really worth.

ROI & ROASRevenue or leads modeProfit & cost per leadNo email required

Your Numbers

Results update live as you type

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The formula: ROI = ((Revenue − Spend) ÷ Spend) × 100. All figures are estimates for planning purposes.

Marketing ROI300.0%Every dollar is making money back
ROAS4.0 : 1Revenue per dollar of spend
Revenue$20,000.00
Profit$15,000.00
Cost per CustomerSwitch to Leads mode to estimate

ROI is shown net of marketing spend; it does not subtract cost of goods or overhead.

ROAS is gross revenue per dollar of spend — a quick efficiency signal.

For long sales cycles, match revenue to the period the spend actually influenced.

Education

How Marketing ROI Works

ROI turns marketing from a line-item cost into a measurable investment. Here's what drives it.

01

ROI vs ROAS

ROAS is gross revenue ÷ ad spend (a ratio). ROI is profit ÷ spend as a percentage. ROAS shows channel efficiency; ROI shows whether you actually made money.

02

The ROI Formula

ROI = ((Revenue − Marketing Spend) ÷ Marketing Spend) × 100. Subtract spend from revenue, divide by spend, multiply by 100 for a clean percentage.

03

What Counts as Spend

Include ad budgets, agency fees, software, creative, and the staff time tied to a campaign. Leaving out costs inflates ROI and leads to bad decisions.

04

Attribution Challenges

Buyers touch many channels before converting. Your attribution model decides which channel gets credit — and that choice can swing ROI dramatically.

05

Payback & LTV

A customer is worth more than a single sale. Factoring lifetime value (LTV) and payback period reveals campaigns that look weak short-term but win over time.

06

Improving ROI

Raise conversion rates, lift average order value, and cut wasted spend on poor-performing channels. Small efficiency gains compound into large ROI swings.

Benchmarks

Making a Marketing ROI Number Mean Something

ROI is easy to calculate and easy to calculate wrongly.

Marketing ROI is revenue attributable to marketing, less the cost of that marketing, divided by the cost. The arithmetic is trivial; the difficulty is entirely in the word 'attributable'. Most reported ROI figures are wrong not because someone divided badly, but because the revenue in the numerator was never really caused by the spend in the denominator.

Two disciplines fix most of it: count all the costs, and be conservative about what revenue you claim. Both make the number look worse and make the decisions better.

How to read a marketing ROI figure

ROIInterpretationUsual next step
NegativeCosting more than it returnsCheck tracking before cutting — broken measurement is the more common cause.
0% – 100%MarginalCovers direct costs, rarely overheads. Fix efficiency before scaling.
100% – 300%HealthyA sustainable range for most paid channels. Reinvest.
300% – 700%StrongTypical of well-run search and email. Consider spending more.
Above 1000%Suspiciously goodUsually brand traffic, email to existing customers, or an attribution error.

A very high ROI almost always signals that the channel is harvesting demand created elsewhere. That is not a reason to stop, but it is a reason not to conclude you have found free money.

01

Use Gross Profit, Not Revenue

ROI on revenue ignores the cost of delivering what you sold. In a 30% margin business, a campaign returning 200% on revenue is barely breaking even in reality.

02

Count the Full Cost

Media, management fees, salaries, tools, creative production. Media-only ROI reliably overstates return by a wide margin.

03

Incrementality Beats Attribution

The right question is what would have happened without the spend. Holdout tests and geo experiments answer it; last-click reporting does not.

04

Match the Time Windows

Comparing this month’s spend to this month’s revenue misstates any business with a sales cycle longer than a few days. Align the periods.

05

Channels Assist Each Other

Single-channel ROI double-counts shared conversions. If every channel’s reported ROI sums to more than total revenue, the model is wrong.

06

Brand Investment Lags

Brand spend shows poor short-run ROI by design; its return appears as lower acquisition costs later. Judging it quarterly guarantees you cut it.

Common mistakes

Including brand-search revenue in paid ROI

People searching your name were already coming. Counting those conversions makes paid look far better than it is and hides weak prospecting.

Using platform-reported conversions as truth

Every platform claims the same conversion. Summing across dashboards routinely produces more conversions than the business actually had.

Ignoring repeat purchase

The reverse error. If customers buy again, first-order ROI badly understates the return, and you will underspend on acquisition.

Reporting ROI without volume

A 900% ROI on $500 of spend is less valuable than 250% on $50,000. Always report the ratio alongside the absolute profit.

The most useful discipline is to calculate ROI twice — once on the platform's numbers and once on what actually landed in the bank. Where those two diverge sharply is where your measurement is broken, and that gap is usually worth more to fix than any optimisation you could make inside the ad account.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

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