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Marketing ROI Calculator

See the return on your marketing investment — enter the revenue your marketing earned and what it cost to get your ROI as a percentage, your net profit, and how much comes back per dollar.

Marketing ROI Calculator

The return on your marketing investment — revenue earned against what you spent.

$

Sales or revenue your marketing generated.

$

Everything you spent to earn it — ad spend, tools, agency, salaries.

Marketing ROI
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Enter the revenue and cost to calculate your ROI.

Guide written by Ovi C., Senior Editor · Updated July 2026

What is marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI — return on marketing investment, sometimes shortened to ROMI — is the profit your marketing brought in, measured against what you spent to get it. It turns marketing from a cost you hope is working into a number you can actually judge: for every dollar you put in, how much came back on top?

It's the broadest of the money metrics. Where ROAS looks at one thing — revenue against ad spend — marketing ROI takes in all your marketing costs and measures profit, not just revenue. That makes it the number executives care about, because it maps directly onto the bottom line.

How to calculate marketing ROI

To calculate marketing ROI, subtract the marketing cost from the revenue it earned, divide by that cost, and multiply by 100 to get a percentage:

Marketing ROI = (revenue − marketing cost) ÷ marketing cost × 100

The result is a percentage. A 100% ROI means you doubled your money — you got the cost back plus the same amount again in profit. A 400% ROI means five dollars back for every one spent (one to cover the cost, four in profit). For a stricter figure, put your profit from those sales in the revenue box instead of the raw sales total — that folds in the cost of the product, not just the marketing.

A worked example

Say you spend $10,000 on a campaign — ads, tools, and a share of your team's time — and it generates $50,000 in sales. Your marketing ROI is:

400% = ($50,000 − $10,000) ÷ $10,000 × 100

So the campaign returned four dollars of profit for every dollar spent. If instead those sales carried a 40% product margin, the profit was $20,000, and a truer ROI would be ($20,000 − $10,000) ÷ $10,000 = 100% — still healthy, but a very different story. Which number you use depends on whether you're judging the marketing alone or the whole deal.

How to use this calculator

  1. Enter the revenue from marketing — the sales (or profit) it generated.
  2. Enter the marketing cost — ad spend, tools, agency fees, and staff time.
  3. Read your ROI %, plus the net profit and the amount returned per dollar. It updates as you type.
  4. Switch currency in the top-right, and use Copy shareable link to send the scenario to a colleague — the numbers travel in the URL.

Marketing ROI vs ROAS

These two get mixed up constantly, but they answer different questions. ROAS is revenue ÷ ad spend, shown as a ratio like 4×. Marketing ROI is profit ÷ cost, shown as a percentage. ROAS is the fast, ad-level signal you watch daily; ROI is the slower, fuller profit picture that includes every marketing cost — not just the ad platform's.

The gap matters. A 5× ROAS sounds like a win, but once you subtract the ad spend and the cost of the product, the real ROI can be slim. That's why the two belong together: use ROAS to steer campaigns in real time, and marketing ROI to decide whether the whole effort actually made money. For a full side-by-side, see ROAS vs ROI, and for a blended, all-marketing revenue ratio, see the MER calculator.

What is a good marketing ROI?

A commonly quoted rule of thumb is a 5:1 revenue-to-cost ratio — which works out to a 400% ROI in this calculator. Around 2:1 (a 100% ROI) is often treated as the floor: below it, once the cost of the product is counted, the campaign struggles to justify itself. But treat these as loose guides, not targets.

The right benchmark is your own. A high-margin software business can be very profitable at a ratio a thin-margin retailer would lose money on, because margin decides how much of each sale you actually keep. The most useful comparison is against your own past campaigns and your break-even point — work that out with the break-even ROAS calculator.

How to improve your marketing ROI

Because ROI is profit over cost, you improve it from both sides — earn more per campaign, or spend less to earn it:

  • Raise conversion rates so the same traffic produces more sales — often the cheapest lever.
  • Lift average order value with bundles or upsells, spreading fixed costs over bigger sales.
  • Cut wasted spend — pause the channels and audiences with the weakest return.
  • Protect your margin, since a fatter margin turns the same revenue into more profit.

To model the spend side before you commit, use the Campaign Forecast calculator; to track what each customer costs to win, use the CAC calculator.

Frequently asked questions

What is marketing ROI?
Marketing ROI is the profit your marketing generated as a percentage of what it cost. It answers a blunt question: for every dollar put in, how much came back beyond the dollar itself.
What does ROI stand for in marketing?
ROI stands for return on investment. In a marketing context the investment is your campaign cost, and the return is the profit that campaign produced — which is why marketing ROI is a stricter measure than metrics built on revenue alone.
How do you calculate marketing ROI?
Marketing ROI = ((revenue − marketing cost) ÷ marketing cost) × 100. For example, $50,000 of revenue from $10,000 of spend gives ((50,000 − 10,000) ÷ 10,000) × 100 = 400%.
How do you measure marketing ROI?
The maths is easy; the measurement is the hard part. You need to decide which sales count as caused by the marketing, over what window, and whether you are using revenue or profit. Attribution is where most disagreements live: last-click gives all credit to the final touch, which flatters search and undersells everything that created the demand. Pick one method, write it down, and compare periods on the same basis rather than switching to whichever looks best.
What is a good marketing ROI?
It depends on your margins, not on a benchmark. A 400% ROI on revenue can still lose money if your product costs 80% of the sale price to deliver. The honest version is to run the sum on profit rather than revenue: if what comes back exceeds what went in after all costs, the campaign is working — however modest the percentage looks.
What's the difference between marketing ROI and ROAS?
ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend — a ratio, and it ignores costs. Marketing ROI subtracts the cost first and expresses the result as a percentage. A campaign can post a strong ROAS and a negative ROI at the same time, which is exactly why the two should be read together.
How can I improve marketing ROI?
Move budget toward the channels that already return best rather than spreading it evenly. Improve conversion rates so the same spend produces more sales. Raise average order value so each sale is worth more. And cut the spending that never produces measurable return — that usually lifts ROI faster than anything you add.
Why is my marketing ROI negative?
Because the campaign cost more than the profit it generated. That happens when acquisition costs exceed what a customer is worth, when the tracking window is too short to capture sales that arrive later, or when you are counting revenue as though it were profit. Check the window and the definition before concluding the campaign failed.

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