Marketing ROI Calculator

Revenue is not return. Gross profit is. The ROI most marketing dashboards show divides revenue minus spend by spend, which treats every dollar of revenue as if it were profit. Finance doesn't. They take the revenue marketing produced, apply the gross margin, subtract the marketing spend, and divide by the spend. That is return on marketing investment, and it is the number that survives a CFO review. At 60% margin, $500,000 of attributed revenue on $120,000 of spend is a 317% ROI on revenue but a 150% ROMI. Both are arithmetically true. Only one tells you what the campaign earned.

The incremental version goes one step further. Some of the revenue attributed to a campaign would have arrived anyway, from customers who were already going to buy. If you can estimate that baseline, from a holdout group, a geo test, or last period's run rate, enter it and the tool computes ROMI on the incremental revenue alone. This is the strictest version, and the one to use when arguing for more budget, because it's the one the argument will be tested against.

Break-even revenue is a useful planning number: spend divided by margin. It's the revenue a campaign must produce before it contributes anything, and it grows fast as margin falls. A $120,000 campaign at 60% margin needs $200,000 to break even; at 30% margin it needs $400,000. Know that figure before launch, not after.