Find the return on ad spend you need before a campaign starts making money. Enter your order value and costs, and the calculator shows your break-even ROAS, a target ROAS for the profit you want, and the most you can pay per sale.
Built and maintained by the Kadima team. Updated September 2026.
Works in any currency. Enter every amount in the same one.
Use your average order value from the last few months, not your best month.
Product cost, shipping, payment fees and anything else you pay each time someone buys.
Choose how much of each sale you want to keep after ad spend. The calculator gives you a target ROAS to bid towards.
Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ your profit margin before ad spend.
Say your average order is $80 and it costs you $40 to make, ship and process. Your margin before ads is 50%, so your break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ 0.5 = 2.0. Every $1 you spend on ads has to bring back $2 in revenue just to cover costs. At 2.5 you make money. At 1.8 you lose money on every sale, however good the ROAS looks in your ad account.
Break-even means zero profit, which isn’t the goal. Target ROAS builds your profit in: 1 ÷ (margin − profit goal). With a 50% margin and a 10% profit goal, your target is 1 ÷ 0.4 = 2.5. In Google Ads, target ROAS is entered as a percentage, so 2.5 becomes 250%.
Include every cost that rises with each order: product cost, shipping, packaging, payment and platform fees, and an allowance for returns. Leave out fixed costs like rent and salaries. Those are paid from the profit you keep, which is why the profit goal matters.
Selling leads or services rather than products? The CPA calculator is the better fit.
A good ROAS is any ROAS above your break-even point, and that depends on your margin. A 3x ROAS can be excellent for a business with a 50% margin and a loss for one with a 25% margin, which needs 4x to break even.
No. ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend. ROI measures profit after all costs. A campaign can show a 4x ROAS and still lose money if your margins are thin.
A high break-even ROAS means low margins. At a 20% margin you need 5x just to break even. Raising your average order value with bundles, cutting fulfilment costs or adjusting prices will bring it down faster than ad tweaks.
If customers reorder, a first order below break-even can still be profitable over their lifetime. Only rely on that if you have the data and the cash flow to wait for it. The CPA calculator lets you plan around lifetime value.
ROAS equals revenue from ads divided by ad spend. If $1,000 of ad spend brings in $4,000 in sales, your ROAS is 4, often written as 4x or 400%.
Our PPC team builds and runs Google Ads and paid search campaigns around your real margins, not click-through rates.
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