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Marketing ROI calculator

Calculate marketing ROI as a percentage, plus the net gain in money and the ROAS multiple, from one pair of figures. Explains why breaking even reads as 0%.

Solve for

Your numbers

Revenue you are willing to credit to this activity, net of refunds and cancellations. Enter it in your own currency.

Everything you spent to get that revenue: media, fees, production, tools. Enter it in your own currency.

Return on investment

300%

You kept 300% on top of the money you put in. Zero is break-even here, and anything negative means the activity cost more than it returned.

The sum this ran

Return on investment = (Net gain ÷ Total cost) × 100

Net gain = Revenue attributed - Total cost = $24,000.00

Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, which matters when the inputs are spend, revenue and margin.

ROI, ROAS and net gain are three different answers

They come from the same two numbers and they are read completely differently, which is why a meeting can contain three people who all believe the campaign returned something different and are all arithmetically right.

  • ROI is a percentage of the money you risked, computed on gain rather than revenue. Break-even is 0%. Doubling your money is 100%, not 200%.
  • ROAS is revenue divided by spend, expressed as a multiple. It never subtracts the spend, so a campaign at exactly break-even reads 1.00 and looks like a win on a slide.
  • Net gain is the money itself. A 400% return on a 200 unit test budget is a smaller result than a 30% return on a serious one, and only the money makes that visible.
  • The relationship is fixed: ROI as a percentage equals ROAS times 100, minus 100, whenever both are computed on the same cost base.

The exact sums this page runs

Two inputs, three readings. The net gain is named separately because it is the step where most disagreements actually live, long before anybody argues about the percentage.

  • Net gain = Revenue attributed - Total cost. Revenue minus cost. This is the numerator ROI divides, and getting it wrong breaks every version of the ratio.
  • Return on investment = (Net gain ÷ Total cost) × 100. Gain as a percentage of what you risked, so breaking even reads 0% rather than 100%.
  • Net gain = Revenue attributed - Total cost. The money itself. A percentage hides scale, and a 400% return on a tiny budget rarely pays a salary.
  • Return on ad spend = Revenue attributed ÷ Total cost. Revenue per unit of spend, not profit. A 4.00 ROAS and a 300% ROI describe the same campaign.

Choosing the revenue figure you divide

The arithmetic is trivial and the inputs are contested. Deciding what counts as revenue, and over what window, is where a marketing ROI is won or lost.

  • Use revenue net of refunds, cancellations and chargebacks. Gross bookings flatter any campaign that acquires impulsive buyers, and the correction lands in a later period where nobody connects it.
  • If your gross margin is not close to 100%, consider running ROI on gross profit instead of revenue. A 3.00 ROAS on a 30% margin product is a loss, and a revenue-based ROI cheerfully reports it as a 200% success.
  • Pick the attribution window before you look at the result, not after. A 7-day click window and a 28-day click window credit different amounts of revenue to the same spend, and the larger window is not more truthful, only more generous.
  • Decide explicitly whether repeat purchases from customers the campaign acquired belong in the numerator. Including them turns ROI into a lifetime measure and makes it incomparable with a campaign measured on first purchase only.

The limit this number cannot cross

A marketing ROI answers what was recorded alongside the spend. It does not answer what the spend caused, and the gap between those two questions is usually larger than the effect anybody is arguing about.

  • Attributed revenue includes people who would have bought anyway. Brand search campaigns are the clearest case: they report superb returns partly by taking credit for demand that already existed.
  • The only way to measure what advertising caused is to withhold it somewhere. Geographic holdouts and matched-market tests are ordinary work, and they routinely find that a platform-reported return was two or three times the real one.
  • Long payback confuses the picture in the other direction. Anything that builds awareness looks like a poor investment inside a 30-day window and may be the best one you make over two years.
  • A positive ROI is not an argument for more budget by itself. Returns fall as you scale into a wider audience, so the question at the next budget meeting is the return on the next unit of spend, not on the last one.
The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The marketing roi calculator solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.

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Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

  • Is a 100% ROI the same as doubling my money?

    Yes. ROI is measured on gain rather than on revenue, so spending 100 to receive 200 back is a gain of 100 on a cost of 100, which is 100%. The same campaign has a ROAS of 2.00. This is the single most common mix-up on the metric, and it makes campaigns sound twice as good or half as good depending on which direction somebody made the error in.

  • What is the difference between ROI and ROAS?

    ROAS divides revenue by ad spend and reports a multiple. ROI subtracts the cost first and reports a percentage of the amount risked. ROAS also conventionally counts only media spend, while ROI is normally expected to include the wider cost of running the activity. A campaign at exactly break-even shows a ROAS of 1.00 and an ROI of 0%.

  • Should I use revenue or gross profit in the calculation?

    Gross profit, whenever your margin is meaningfully below 100%. Revenue-based returns are the norm in ad platforms because the platform cannot see your cost of goods, but a business with a 30% margin needs a ROAS above roughly 3.30 simply to avoid losing money. Running the calculation on gross profit makes that threshold visible rather than implied.

  • What counts as a good marketing ROI?

    The only threshold that transfers between businesses is the one your own unit economics set: the return has to clear your break-even ROAS, which is price divided by contribution margin. Beyond that, a good return depends on what else the money could have done and how long the payback takes. Benchmarks quoted by channel are averages across wildly different margins and are close to meaningless for a specific decision.

  • Is my data private?

    Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

  • Is this really free?

    Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

  • Do I need an account?

    No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

  • Can I use the output commercially?

    Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.