A free tool by DOTS Growth to calculate Return on Ad Spend, CPA, and projected profits.
ROAS
2.00x
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) ($)
$25.00
Projected Revenue ($)
$2,000
Net Ad Profit ($)
$1,000
Total Clicks
2,000
Total Sales
40
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Book a Free ConsultationROAS — return on ad spend — answers the simplest question in advertising: for every pound or riyal you spend, how much revenue comes back? The calculator takes four numbers you already have — budget, average cost per click, your page's conversion rate, and average order value — and builds the full picture before you spend: how many clicks you will buy, expected sales, projected revenue, cost per acquisition (CPA), and net ad profit.
The real value is not the final number itself but the diagnosis: when actual results come in below the projection, the four inputs tell you exactly where the leak is — an expensive click from wrong targeting, a weak conversion rate from the page or the offer, or a small average order eating the margin.
The math is a single five-step chain: clicks = budget ÷ cost per click, sales = clicks × conversion rate, revenue = sales × average order value, ROAS = revenue ÷ budget, and CPA = budget ÷ number of sales. Every step is an independent lever: cutting cost per click by 20% lifts sales by the same percentage without growing the budget, and raising conversion rate from 2% to 3% grows revenue 50% on exactly the same spend.
And the most important number is not written in the formula: break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ your gross margin. At a 40% margin your break-even is 2.5 — any campaign below it loses money even if the platform dashboard is green. At a 25% margin, break-even is 4. That is why there is no universally «good» ROAS; there is a good ROAS for your store at its margin, and comparing against a generic market number without the margin will mislead you.
Compare the ROAS you got against your own break-even, not against market numbers. Below break-even: the campaign loses money, and every budget increase enlarges the loss instead of treating it. Around break-even up to 1.5× above it: a fragile zone — any rise in click cost or dip in conversion flips you into loss within a week. Twice break-even or more: solid ground for gradual scaling, as long as you watch CPA move as budget rises.
Watch CPA as closely as ROAS: CPA is the maximum you can pay for one customer and still profit. If your average order is EGP 800 at a 40% margin, your maximum CPA before break-even is EGP 320 — that is the real bidding ceiling your accounts must respect, not a gut feeling that the market is «expensive» or «cheap».
One last warning before you judge: ROAS measures revenue, not profit. This calculator subtracts ad spend only — it does not deduct product cost, shipping, or returns, which are exactly the costs that turn cash-on-delivery stores from paper profit into a real bank-account loss. If your store runs COD, complete the picture in the e-commerce profit calculator after this one.
An accessories store spends EGP 30,000 a month: cost per click EGP 3, conversion rate 2.5%, average order value EGP 800. Put those numbers into the calculator above and you get exactly this:
Budget
EGP 30,000
Clicks
10,000
Sales
250
Revenue
EGP 200,000
ROAS
6.67x
CPA
EGP 120
If this store's margin is 40%, its break-even is 2.5 — and 6.67 is not just profitable, it is more than two and a half times break-even. That means there is real scaling headroom before spend efficiency starts to decay, which is exactly the kind of decision this calculator exists to settle before the spend, not after it.
The same math runs services: a clinic in Riyadh spends SAR 20,000 on search and messaging campaigns, cost per click SAR 2.4, click-to-confirmed-booking conversion 3%, and an average confirmed booking value of SAR 350:
Budget
SAR 20,000
Clicks
≈ 8,333
Bookings
250
Revenue
SAR 87,500
ROAS
≈ 4.38x
Cost per booking
SAR 80
The logic is identical for products and services: the number that should govern your decision is the cost of a confirmed customer against the margin of the service or product — not the click price alone. An expensive click that converts well is effectively cheaper than a cheap click that never buys.
Expensive clicks, few sales: the problem is targeting, or an ad attracting curiosity instead of purchase intent. Narrow the audience and match the ad's promise to the page content, literally.
Cheap clicks, weak conversion: traffic arrives and does not buy — the bottleneck is the page, the offer, or reply speed on conversations. Fixing conversion here raises ROAS without one extra unit of ad spend.
Good conversion, small order value: sales happen and the margin leaks into small orders. Work bundles, a free-shipping threshold, and checkout add-ons — raising average order value 20% lifts ROAS by roughly the same percentage.
High ROAS, negative real profit: the math is missing the costs outside advertising. Review product cost, shipping, and returns in the e-commerce profit calculator before judging or scaling the campaign.
1. Adding up platform numbers. Meta, Google, and TikTok each attribute the same purchase to themselves, so total «platform sales» exceed your actual sales. The cure: server-side tracking and one source of truth for revenue.
2. Judging from a single day. One day of data swings with launch timing, auction conditions, and small-sample luck. Give any test enough time and budget for a meaningful sales sample before deciding to kill or scale.
3. Blind scaling on the same audience. Raising budget fast on the same audience lifts click costs and erodes ROAS step by step. Correct scaling is measured steps, in parallel with improving conversion and order value so efficiency holds as you grow.
Google search campaigns harvest demand that already exists — a customer typed the product or service name themselves — so their ROAS naturally comes out higher. Discovery campaigns on Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat create demand from zero among people who were not looking for you, so their direct number naturally runs lower, because part of their value shows up later: returning visits, branded search, and cheaper retargeting sales. Judging a discovery channel by a search channel's standard is the fastest way to kill a working growth engine.
Read it on two levels: each channel alone against its break-even and its role in the funnel, then the blended ROAS = all marketing-attributed revenue ÷ all ad spend. The blended number is the one that belongs next to the overall budget decision, because it is the only one that sees the whole picture instead of summing the platforms' overlapping claims.
A practical rule: if a discovery channel sits below break-even on its own but the blended number is comfortably above break-even and branded search volume is growing, the channel is most likely working and feeding the rest of the funnel. And if you pause it and total revenue drops two weeks later, the experiment has proven its value the hard way — log the lesson and do not repeat it.
The calculator pays off most when it becomes a weekly habit rather than a one-time visit. Once a week, same day: log the week's budget, average cost per click, conversion rate, and average order value as they actually happened, and compare actual ROAS against your store's break-even and against the week before. Four numbers and three comparisons — fifteen minutes that let you see a trend while it is forming, not after it has become a realized loss.
Run your decisions by a one-variable-at-a-time rule: if ROAS drops, change one thing — audience, ad, or page — and give it a clean measurement window before judging. Changing three things at once leaves you unable to name the cause, so you pay for the experiment without learning from it. And if the number holds above break-even two weeks in a row at the same efficiency, that is the signal for deliberate, percentage-based scaling — not a random doubling.
The number that comes out of this calculator is not a report to look at; it is a direct input to three decisions made before the campaign runs. First: the test budget. Any serious test needs enough sales volume to judge — as a working rule, plan a budget that buys at least 20 to 30 expected sales at the target CPA; below that, you are judging luck, not performance. If expected CPA is EGP 120, a test budget under EGP 2,400–3,600 will usually tell you nothing reliable.
Second: the CPA ceiling inside the platform settings themselves. Turn your computed break-even into an operating limit: bidding or cost targets that stay at 70–80% of the maximum allowable CPA during testing, leaving that safety margin to absorb first-days volatility and attribution gaps between the platform and your source of truth. Third: the scaling ladder. Write it down before launch — if actual ROAS beats break-even by an agreed margin for a full week, budget rises by a fixed step (20%, say); if it falls below, the campaign pauses and gets diagnosed. Decisions written before the spend protect you from emotional decisions after it.
Finally: re-run the calculator with your actual numbers after every operating week, not with the original projections. The gap between projected and actual in each of the four inputs is next week's improvement map — one moving input at a time, one clear decision at a time.
Instead of recomputing from zero each time: break-even = 1 ÷ gross margin. Find your margin in the table — any actual ROAS below it means the campaign loses money no matter how reassuring the platform dashboard looks, and any figure safely above it is your scaling starting point:
Margin 20%
Break-even 5.00
Margin 25%
Break-even 4.00
Margin 30%
Break-even 3.33
Margin 40%
Break-even 2.50
Margin 50%
Break-even 2.00
Margin 60%
Break-even 1.67
Note the sensitivity at the thin end: at a 20% margin every ad pound must return five in sales just to avoid losing — which is why thin-margin products only survive on exceptional conversion or a large average order, while a 50% margin buys you a far wider margin for error and experimentation.
Because real profit is decided after shipping, returns, and product cost — especially under cash on delivery. Complete the picture in the e-commerce profit calculator, and if you want to compute your store's break-even by hand, step by step, read our break-even ROAS guide. And if the numbers show the problem is in the campaign management itself — targeting, budgets, and follow-up — that is exactly what our ad campaigns management service fixes.