Free contractor tool
Enter your total marketing spend and the revenue you can trace back to it. See your ROI, ROAS, gross profit generated, and profit-based return in real time. All channels. No email required.
Your marketing return for this period
How this works
Revenue-based ROI is the most common way to measure marketing return: take the revenue your marketing produced, subtract what you spent, and divide by what you spent. A 1,100% ROI means you got back $12 for every $1 you put in. But revenue is not what you keep.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is even simpler. Divide revenue by spend. A 12x ROAS means $12 of revenue for every $1 spent. This is useful for quick comparisons between channels or time periods.
Gross profit generated strips out your direct job costs (labor and materials) to show how much margin your marketing actually produced. This is a much better gauge of real value than raw revenue.
Profit-based ROI uses that gross profit number and compares it to your spend. It is the most honest of the four. If this number is negative, your marketing costs more than the margin it produces. If it is positive, your marketing is working.
Use this calculator at the end of each month or quarter. Enter the total you spent across all channels and the revenue you can trace to those channels. The four outputs will tell you exactly where you stand.
Real result, not a projection
per month running the full system: website, Google Ads, and content, all pulling in the same direction.
Questions
Marketing ROI is calculated as (Revenue from Marketing minus Marketing Spend) divided by Marketing Spend, expressed as a percentage. For example, if you spent $5,000 and generated $60,000 in revenue, your ROI is 1,100%. For a more conservative view, use gross profit instead of revenue: (Gross Profit minus Marketing Spend) divided by Marketing Spend.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the simpler of the two: it is just revenue divided by spend. A 12x ROAS means you generated $12 for every $1 spent. ROI goes a step further by subtracting your spend from revenue before dividing, so it measures net gain. Profit-based ROI also factors in your gross margin, giving you the most accurate view of what you actually kept.
Include all spending directly tied to generating new customer inquiries: ad spend (Google, Meta, etc.), agency or management fees, SEO services, website costs if the site is primarily a lead-generation tool, and any software you use solely for marketing. Do not include general business overhead that would exist whether or not you were running campaigns.
Attribution is the hardest part of measuring marketing ROI. A simple approach: track where each lead came from when they first contact you (which ad, which search, which referral). Total up the revenue from jobs where the first contact came through a paid or organic marketing channel. Exclude pure word-of-mouth referrals that required no marketing spend unless you have a formal referral program you are paying for.
On a revenue basis, a 5:1 ROAS (500% ROI) is often cited as a healthy benchmark for service businesses running paid ads. On a profit basis, positive returns after subtracting your margin are the floor. Because contractor margins vary widely by trade, focus more on the profit-based ROI in this calculator than the raw revenue number. The goal is to make sure your marketing investment returns more profit than it costs.
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