Marketing ROI Calculator: ROI, ROAS and Profit in Seconds

This ROI calculator shows in seconds whether a campaign makes you money or just moves revenue around. It uses your margin and splits ad spend from other costs, so you get ROI and ROAS side by side.

How to use the ROI calculator

1. Pick the scenario closest to yours

   Done

   Google Ads, Meta Ads, email or event. Each one loads sample figures and changes the hint under every field, so you know what goes where.

2. Split your investment in two

   Done

   Under “Media spend,” what you pay the platform. Under “Other costs,” agency fees, creative, tools and team hours. Splitting them is what lets the calculator show ROI and ROAS at once.

3. Add revenue and your margin

   Done

   Revenue is the sales the campaign brought in, before tax. Gross margin is what you keep from each sale after product costs. Leave it blank and you get ROI on revenue, which always looks better than the real thing.

4. Read the result and copy it

   Done

   You see the formula with your own numbers. “Copy result” gives you a clean line for a report or an email.

What is ROI in marketing? What the number tells you

ROI (return on investment) measures how much profit you get back for every dollar you put into an action. An ROI of 0% means you broke even, and anything below zero means you lost money.

ROI	What happens to $1,000 invested
−25%	You get $750 back
0%	You get $1,000 back: no gain, no loss
50%	You get $1,500 back
100%	You get $2,000 back

Here is the trap, and the reason this calculator asks for your margin. Spend $1,000, sell $1,500 and your ROI on revenue is 50%. At a 40% margin, those sales leave you $600, so your true ROI is −40%. You lose money on a “50% ROI.” Don’t know your margin? Work it out with the margin calculator.

ROI also ignores time. A 20% ROI after three months is a better deal than 20% after three years. Annualized, 20% in three months is 1.20 to the fourth power minus 1, about 107% a year: a way to compare campaigns, not a forecast.

How to calculate ROI: the formula with and without margin

ROI is the profit from an investment divided by what it cost, as a percentage. The quick version subtracts spend from revenue. The true version uses your margin, because $6,000 in sales is not $6,000 in profit.

Metric	Formula	What it tells you
ROI on revenue	(revenue − total investment) ÷ total investment × 100	Whether sales cover what you spent
True ROI	(revenue × margin − total investment) ÷ total investment × 100	Whether you actually make money
ROAS	revenue ÷ media spend	How much your ads sell per dollar
Break-even ROAS	total investment ÷ (media spend × margin)	The minimum ROAS to avoid losing money

Take the Google Ads scenario the calculator loads: $1,500 in ads, $400 in agency fees, $6,000 in sales and a 40% margin. ROAS is 4 and true ROI is 26%. ROI on revenue would say 216%: the gap is your margin.

ROI vs ROAS: what’s the difference?

ROAS measures what your ads sell; ROI measures what you earn. ROAS only looks at platform spend and revenue. ROI takes out everything: product, agency, tools and hours.

That’s how a 3x ROAS can hide a loss. Sell $3,000 with $1,000 in ads at a 30% margin and you keep $900 to pay for $1,000 of ads. You’re down $100 before the agency invoice. At that margin you need a 3.33 ROAS just to cover the ads, and the calculator flags it.

So this works as a ROAS calculator too, but don’t stop there. Use ROAS to tune campaigns week to week and ROI to decide whether to keep investing. To dig into cost per click and cost per sale, the ad cost calculator connects CPM, CPC, CTR and CPA.

Marketing ROI examples for small businesses

These are the calculator’s sample scenarios. They’re practice numbers, not industry averages:

• Meta Ads: $800 in ads and $200 in creative bring in $3,200 at a 50% margin. True ROI: 60%.
• Email: $90 for the platform plus $250 for design bring in $2,400 at a 45% margin. ROI: 218%, while the 26.7 ROAS overstates it because media spend is tiny.
• Event: a $3,000 booth and $1,200 in travel bring in $9,000 at a 35% margin. ROI: −25%, unless you count deals that close in the following weeks.

This marketing ROI calculator is only as good as your revenue data. Tag every link with the UTM builder so you know which campaign drove each sale. If you sell through forms, measure cost per contact first; we explain it in what a lead is in marketing. Need another number? Browse our free marketing tools.

ROI calculator Excel: the formulas to build your own

Prefer a spreadsheet? Open Excel or Google Sheets and set up column B like this, formatting the results as percentages:

• B1 to B4: type your media spend, other costs, revenue and gross margin, for example 1500, 400, 6000 and 40%.
• B5, total investment: =B1+B2.
• B6, ROI on revenue: =(B3-B5)/B5.
• B7, true ROI: =(B3*B4-B5)/B5.
• B8, ROAS: =B3/B1.
• B9, break-even ROAS: =B5/(B1*B4).

With the Google Ads scenario above, the sheet returns an ROI on revenue of 216%, a true ROI of 26%, a ROAS of 4 and a break-even ROAS of 3.17. The same answers as the calculator, because the formulas are the same. Wrap each division in an IF that returns a blank when B5 is 0, so an empty sheet doesn’t throw a division-by-zero error.

Frequently asked questions about marketing ROI

01

How do you calculate the ROI?

Divide profit by total investment and multiply by 100. The hard part isn’t the math, it’s what goes in. Count every cost the campaign created: ad spend, agency or freelancer fees, creative, tools and team hours. On the revenue side, use sales you can trace to the campaign within a fixed window, like 30 days, and apply your gross margin. Pick the window before you look at the numbers, not after.

02

Is 4.5% a good ROI?

For a marketing campaign, 4.5% means you made $4.50 for every $100 you put in after all costs. It’s positive, so you’re not losing money, but the cushion is thin: a small jump in CPC or a few returns can wipe it out. Compare it with your other channels and with what that budget could earn elsewhere. If the campaign brings repeat customers, the long-term ROI may be much higher.

03

What is a good ROI for a year?

It depends on what you compare it with. For money you could park somewhere safe, a good yearly ROI is anything that beats that safe return after risk. For marketing, look at the full year per channel: total profit from the channel divided by everything you spent on it. A channel with a modest ROI every month can beat one with a big spike in December and losses the rest of the year.

04

What is a good marketing ROI?

One that stays positive after every cost and your margin. There is no universal benchmark worth trusting, because margins vary so much: a 20% ROI can be great for a store with 25% margins and weak for software with 80%. The most useful number is your break-even ROAS. If your ROAS sits below it, every sale costs you money, however good the revenue looks.