ROAS Calculator
Calculate Return on Ad Spend (revenue ÷ ad spend) with profit, ACOS, and platform benchmarks.
Campaign Numbers
Related Metrics
ACOS is the inverse of ROAS, expressed as a percentage of revenue spent on advertising — useful for Amazon Ads and other platforms that report cost-of-sale instead of a spend-to-revenue ratio.
Platform Benchmarks
Commonly-cited averages — tap one to preview the revenue that ratio implies for your current ad spend.
How ROAS works
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures how much revenue you earn for every unit of currency spent on advertising: ROAS = Revenue ÷ Ad Spend. A ROAS of 4:1 means every $1 spent returned $4 in revenue. Unlike ROI, ROAS uses gross revenue rather than net profit, so it doesn't account for product cost, fulfillment, or overhead — a campaign can show a healthy ROAS and still be unprofitable once those costs are factored in.
A ROAS above 1:1 means the campaign generated more revenue than it cost; exactly 1:1 is break-even; below 1:1 means the ad spend lost money before accounting for margin. ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale) is the same relationship inverted and shown as a percentage — ACOS = (Ad Spend ÷ Revenue) × 100 — and is the metric Amazon Ads and some other platforms report natively. All calculations run locally in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Working out return on ad spend from revenue and spend.
- Getting ACOS alongside ROAS, which are reciprocal views.
- Comparing a campaign against a platform benchmark.
- Checking whether a stated ROAS covers the margin.
- Producing a figure for a campaign review.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is ROAS calculated?
- Revenue divided by ad spend. £5,000 from £1,000 of spend is a ROAS of 5, usually written 5:1 or 500%. It is a ratio, so it has no units and can be compared across campaigns of different sizes.
- What is ACOS and how does it relate?
- Advertising Cost of Sale — spend divided by revenue, the exact inverse expressed as a percentage. A ROAS of 4 is an ACOS of 25%. Amazon sellers work in ACOS, most other platforms in ROAS, and they say the same thing.
- Is a high ROAS always good?
- No. A very high ROAS often means you are underspending on a campaign that could profitably scale, or that you are only bidding on branded terms customers would have found anyway. Total profit, not the ratio, is what you bank.
- Does ROAS tell me if I am profitable?
- Not on its own — it ignores cost of goods, fulfilment and overhead. A ROAS of 3 is excellent on a digital product and loss-making on a 20%-margin physical one. Break-even ROAS is the figure that answers this.
- How should I read the benchmark figures?
- As rough orientation only. Published averages vary enormously by industry, margin, attribution window and season, and email's spectacular figure reflects an owned audience with almost no marginal cost.
- Why does my platform report a different ROAS?
- Attribution. Each platform counts conversions it believes it influenced, within its own lookback window, so the same sale can be claimed by several. Platform-reported ROAS almost always exceeds what your accounts show.
Common errors and gotchas
- Treating ROAS as profit, when it ignores cost of goods entirely — a 3x ROAS can still lose money.
- Comparing ROAS across products with different margins.
- Using attributed revenue without checking the attribution window.
- Mixing time periods between the revenue and the spend figures.
- Optimising ROAS by cutting spend, which usually shrinks profit along with it.