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ROAS Calculator for paid social.

Calculate your return on ad spend for Meta, TikTok, and other paid social channels.

How to use this calculator

Enter your ad spend and revenue data to calculate your return on ad spend (ROAS) for paid social campaigns.

  1. 1
    Enter your ad spend

    Input the total amount you spent on ads. You can find this in your ad platform under "Amount Spent" or similar.

  2. 2
    Enter your revenue

    Input the total revenue generated from those ads. This is your "Purchase Conversion Value" or "Website Revenue" in most platforms.

  3. 3
    Add profit margin for ROI (optional)

    If you want to calculate your true ROI, enter your profit margin percentage. This accounts for the cost of goods sold.

  4. 4
    Read your results

    Results appear automatically as you type. The benchmark indicator helps you understand if your ROAS is healthy for e-commerce.

Your Data

Do you know your revenue?
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What is ROAS?

ROAS — return on ad spend — measures how much revenue you generate for every £1 spent on advertising. It's the fastest way to tell whether a paid social campaign is pulling its weight.

The formula: ROAS = Revenue from ads ÷ Ad spend

If you spent £1,000 on a Meta campaign and generated £4,000 in revenue, your ROAS is 4x (400%). Simple — but easy to misread without context.

What is a good ROAS for paid social?

It depends on your margins, but here's a practical benchmark for e-commerce brands running Meta or TikTok ads:

  • Below 2x — You're likely losing money once product costs and overheads are factored in.
  • 2x–4x — Breakeven territory for most brands.
  • 4x–8x — Healthy, depending on your margin.
  • 8x+ — Strong. You have room to scale or reinvest in creative.

Paid social typically runs at lower ROAS than search. You're reaching people who weren't actively looking for your product — that's the nature of the channel, not a flaw. Benchmark accordingly.

ROAS vs ROI — what's the difference?

ROAS tells you how a specific campaign performed against its spend. ROI tells you whether the business made money overall.

A campaign can have a 5x ROAS and still be unprofitable if your product margin is thin. Always sanity-check ROAS against your actual margin — that's what the profit margin input in the calculator above is for.

How to improve your ROAS

Most levers for improving ROAS come down to two things: reducing what you pay to reach people (CPM), and increasing how many of them convert. Creative affects both.

Better ad creative lowers your CPM because platforms reward content that earns attention. It also improves your conversion rate because the right message lands with the right person. That's why creative testing is the highest-leverage activity for most paid social teams.

A/B testing your ad creative — systematically running two versions of an ad against each other and measuring the difference — is the most reliable way to find what actually moves your ROAS. Not guessing. Not going with what looks good. Testing.

A few things worth testing:

  • Hook — the first 2–3 seconds of a video or the headline of a static.
  • Format — UGC vs polished production vs motion graphics.
  • Offer framing — discount vs benefit vs social proof.
  • Audience — same creative, different targeting.

Each test that produces a statistically significant result is a permanent improvement to your ROAS baseline. Over time, this compounds.

FAQs