Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a performance metric that tells you how much revenue you earn for every dollar spent on advertising. It's one of the most useful numbers for anyone running digital ads, because clicks are nice, but revenue pays the bills.
How to Calculate ROAS
The formula is:
ROAS = Revenue from Ads / Cost of Ads
Example: If you made $5,000 in sales from a $1,000 ad campaign, your ROAS is:
$5,000 / $1,000 = 5.0
That means for every $1 you spent, you earned $5 back.
Why ROAS Matters
ROAS helps you:
- Evaluate ad performance across different platforms and campaigns
- Decide where to invest more and where to cut back
- Set realistic budgets and forecast growth
- Measure profitability, as well as traffic or clicks
A high ROAS means your ads are earning well, and a low ROAS means something needs a closer look.
What’s a “Good” ROAS for a WordPress website?
It depends on your margins, since a high-ticket SaaS product may do fine with 2.0 while an ecommerce store with tight margins may need 4.0 or higher.
General ballpark:
- < 1.0 – You’re losing money
- 1.0 – 2.9 – Barely breaking even
- 3.0 – 4.9 – Decent performance
- 5.0+ – You’re doing great (assuming margins support it)
How Conversion Bridge Helps Track ROAS in WordPress Websites
Accurate ROAS depends on accurate tracking, and Conversion Bridge handles that part for you:
- Automatically tracks purchases and sends revenue data to your analytics platform
- Supports Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, and more
- Includes item and variation data (SKU, variant, product name) so you can report by product
- Avoids duplicate conversions, so your ROAS math isn’t inflated
- Works with WooCommerce and other ecommerce plugins out of the box
You don’t need to set up custom tags or hire a data team, because Conversion Bridge sends the purchase value to your ad platforms and analytics tools for you. If your products have very different margins, you can also send WooCommerce profit to your ad platforms instead of revenue, which is the idea behind POAS.
Example WordPress ROAS
Here's a made-up example: a $200 ad campaign for a new product brings in 8 sales totaling $1,000 in revenue, and Conversion Bridge tracks each transaction and passes the value to Google Ads and GA4.
ROAS = $1,000 / $200 = 5.0
That campaign earned $5 for every $1 spent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I track ROAS without ecommerce?
You can, but it's harder, because ROAS works best when you can assign clear dollar values to conversions like purchases, subscriptions, or lead value estimates. For example, if a business averages $500 net income from all its website form submissions, you could use Conversion Bridge to set a value for the event to help calculate ROAS.
Do I need Google Analytics to track ROAS?
Not necessarily, because Conversion Bridge supports ROAS reporting through several other platforms, including Meta, TikTok, and Plausible.
What’s the difference between ROAS and ROIA broad measure of how much profit or value you gain from a specific investment, like a website, plugin, or marketing campaign.?
ROAS looks only at ad revenue vs. ad spend. ROI includes all costs (ad spend, production, overhead), which makes it broader but harder to calculate cleanly.