ROAS Calculator

Calculate your Return on Ad Spend and see how you compare against industry benchmarks in real time.

Data: DataForSEO July 2026

Industry

Ad Platform

Ad Spend ($)

Revenue Generated ($)

Your CPC ($)

Conversion Rate (%)

Your ROAS

4.20x

$4.20 revenue per $1 spent

Industry Benchmark — E-commerce

Median CPC$1.80

Breakeven ROAS—

Quartile—

Your CPC vs. industry

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What ROAS measures, and what it hides

Return on ad spend is revenue divided by advertising cost. It answers one narrow question well: how much top-line revenue did this spend produce?

ROAS = Revenue attributable to ads ÷ Ad spend

What it deliberately ignores is cost of goods, shipping, returns and overhead. A ROAS of 3.0 is comfortably profitable for a software product with 85% margins and loss-making for a retailer with a 25% margin after shipping. ROAS is a media efficiency metric, not a profitability metric.

ROAS or CAC?

Use ROAS when the transaction is immediate and revenue per order is the unit that matters: e-commerce, direct response, ticketing. Use CAC when the customer relationship extends past the first purchase: subscriptions, B2B, services with repeat business. Reporting ROAS on a subscription business systematically undervalues acquisition, because it counts the first payment and discards the rest.

Attribution changes the number more than optimisation does

The same campaign will report materially different ROAS under last-click, data-driven and view-through attribution. Before comparing ROAS across channels or against a benchmark, confirm both sides use the same attribution window and model. Most disagreements about channel performance turn out to be disagreements about attribution.

Cost context by industry

ROAS targets are only meaningful next to what traffic costs in your category. Verticals with high click prices need proportionally higher conversion value to hit the same return:

Median Google Search CPC by industry, July 2026
Industry	Median CPC	Typical range	Demand, 12 mo
Legal Services	$89.55	$44.64–$163.25	+33.4%
Insurance	$50.36	$24.21–$105.21	-50.1%
B2B / Lead Gen	$49.92	$48.70–$60.59	-26.1%
SaaS / Software	$45.30	$41.12–$76.36	-58.5%
Education	$28.48	$16.49–$41.23	+71.6%
Home Services	$23.39	$13.08–$32.79	-13.9%
Healthcare	$9.51	$5.09–$11.01	-0.5%
Financial Services	$6.93	$4.72–$21.20	-42.6%

Common mistakes

Setting one ROAS target for the whole account. Prospecting and retargeting have structurally different returns. A blended target starves prospecting and over-rewards retargeting for demand it did not create.

Chasing high ROAS. The highest-ROAS campaign is usually branded search, which largely captures demand you already had. Optimising toward it shrinks the business while the dashboard improves.

Comparing platform-reported ROAS across platforms. Each platform attributes generously to itself. Summed platform revenue routinely exceeds actual revenue.

Ignoring returns. In apparel especially, return rates can invalidate a ROAS calculation entirely. Use net revenue.