ROAS Calculator

Enter your ad spend and the revenue attributed to it to get your ROAS (return on ad spend). Add your gross margin to see the break-even ROAS and what is left after the ads, compare up to three scenarios side by side, and download the result as a PDF or CSV.

Free vs paid — when to upgrade

What this free tool is great for: a quick, one-off job with no signup — it runs in your browser and there's nothing to manage.

Its honest limit: it works the number out once, by hand — it won't pull your live data, trend it over time, or flag when it shifts, so it's a snapshot rather than a dashboard.

Where AdCreative.ai does more: This calculator does not track ROAS over time or pull your ad accounts; it works one number out. If what the number reveals is weak creative, that is a different job: AdCreative.ai generates ad variants you can test against the current ones.

Try AdCreative.ai →Read our full AdCreative.ai review →

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no cost to you. It never changes our honest take.

What the calculator works out

ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue your ads are credited with, divided by what you spent on them. The break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ your gross margin: the ratio at which the gross margin on those sales exactly pays for the ads. Gross margin here means revenue minus the direct cost of what you sold, as a share of revenue.

One worked example

You spend 1,000 on ads and the ad platform credits them with 4,000 in revenue. ROAS is 4,000 ÷ 1,000 = 4x. At a 40% gross margin those sales leave 4,000 × 40% = 1,600 of gross margin, and after the 1,000 of ad spend 600 is left. The break-even ROAS at 40% is 1 ÷ 0.40 = 2.5x, so this campaign is above it.

The 600 is not profit. It still has to pay for everything your gross margin figure leaves out: overheads, salaries and software, and depending on how you calculate your margin also returns, payment fees and agency fees.

Three ways the number misleads

• Credited is not caused. The revenue comes from the ad platform’s attribution, which also counts sales that would have happened anyway, such as brand searches by people already looking for you. Only a holdout or lift test shows how much revenue the ads added.
• Revenue is not margin. The same 4x is well above break-even at a 40% gross margin and below it at 20%. Read ROAS against your own break-even, not against a figure from someone else’s business.
• A first purchase is not the whole customer. ROAS counts the sales in the period you measure. If customers come back, judge acquisition spend against lifetime value (our CAC/LTV calculator does that math), and look at new and returning customers separately.

Going further

Within one ad platform, ROAS is useful for comparing campaigns with each other. Platforms measure differently, so don’t compare one platform’s self-reported ROAS with another’s. Total revenue divided by total ad spend, sometimes called MER, is a useful cross-check because no single platform reports it, though it also includes sales the ads didn’t drive. And recalculate your break-even when prices, costs or your product mix change.

Frequently asked questions

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The pricing behind our reviews is published as an open dataset, with the sentence behind every cost-trap flag and the date it was researched. Free to use with attribution (CC BY 4.0).

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