Free marketing ROI calculator — see your return across every channel
Enter your spend and revenue by channel. Get your ROI instantly, compare against 2026 industry benchmarks, and share a one-click results link with your team.
Multi-channel (email, PPC, SEO, content)Industry benchmarks includedCFO-ready payback period outputNo sign-up, no paywall
Your ROI is below the channel benchmark. The most common causes: wasted ad spend on poor-match keywords, landing page conversion rate below 3%, or attribution window mismatch.
Compare your result against these 2026 industry averages. Source: HubSpot State of Marketing 2025, Litmus Email ROI Report, First Page Sage SEO ROI data.
Channel
Average ROI
Measurement window
Best for
Email marketing
36:1
30–90 days
Retention, nurture, upsell
SEO / organic content
12:1
12–36 months
Compounding long-term traffic
Influencer marketing
5:1
60–90 days
Brand awareness + social proof
Content marketing
6:1
6–24 months
Lead generation, thought leadership
Paid search (PPC)
4:1
Immediate
High-intent demand capture
Social media ads
3:1
7–30 days
Discovery, awareness
Display / programmatic
2:1
14–60 days
Retargeting, brand recall
Benchmarks are averages — your result depends on industry, targeting quality, and attribution model. Full benchmark guide →
The maths
Marketing ROI formula
The formula is simple. What trips most marketers up is using the wrong inputs — particularly forgetting agency fees, tool costs, and team time in the "cost" figure, which inflates ROI artificially.
Revenue = attributed revenue from campaign · Cost = total spend including all fees + tools + team time
Common mistake: Using total company revenue instead of attributed campaign revenue inflates ROI by 5–10×. Only count revenue that can be attributed to this specific spend.
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A good marketing ROI is generally 5:1 — five dollars in revenue for every dollar spent. That said, benchmarks vary widely by channel: email marketing averages 36:1, SEO averages 12:1 over three years, and paid search averages 4:1. Your acceptable ROI also depends on your gross margin — a business with 20% margin needs a much higher ROI than one with 80% margin to justify the same spend.
ROI (return on investment) measures total profitability after all costs. ROAS (return on ad spend) measures only revenue against ad spend. A campaign can show 5× ROAS but still lose money if agency fees, tool costs, and team time push the total cost higher. Use ROAS to compare individual ad campaigns against each other; use ROI to evaluate whether your overall marketing investment is profitable. Our ROAS calculator calculates both.
Calculate ROI per channel first, then blend them. For each channel: (attributed revenue − channel spend) ÷ channel spend × 100. The challenge is attribution — how you assign credit to each channel affects the result significantly. Multi-touch attribution models (available in GA4) distribute credit across all touchpoints and give a more accurate picture than last-click attribution, which typically over-credits paid search.
Include every cost directly attributable to the campaign: ad spend across all platforms, agency or freelancer fees, software subscriptions used for the campaign (analytics, CRM, automation, design tools), creative production costs (copywriting, design, video), and team time if you can quantify it (hours × hourly rate). The more complete your cost calculation, the more honest — and more useful — your ROI number will be.
300% ROI means you generated $4 for every $1 spent — $3 profit after recovering the original spend. For most channels, this is above average. Email marketing and SEO at scale can achieve much higher. Paid search typically averages around 300–400% ROI. Whether 300% is 'good' for your business depends on your gross margin and whether that level of return justifies continued investment versus other uses of capital.
It depends on the channel. Measure paid search ROI weekly (fast feedback loop, short attribution window). Measure content and SEO ROI quarterly — these channels compound over 6–18 months and monthly measurement shows misleading early-stage losses. Measure email marketing ROI per campaign or monthly. Set a consistent measurement window before launching any campaign and stick to it — changing the window mid-campaign makes comparison impossible.