Enter your margin, ad spend, and revenue to instantly see ROAS, break-even ROAS, net profit, and your max break-even CPA.
3.50x
Current ROAS
1.67x
Break-even ROAS
$1,100
Net profit
$48.00
Max CPA (break-even)
Profitable, your 3.50x ROAS beats break-even of 1.67x.
Hitting that target means testing more creative, faster
Break-even is arithmetic. Beating it is throughput: more creative tested per week, winners scaled with their social proof intact. That is the loop Volume Creatives is built for.
Enter your average order value
Use the average order value from the orders your ads actually drive, not the store-wide figure. Ad traffic often buys differently from returning customers, so pull it from the same date range and attribution window you use for spend.
Enter your gross margin
Gross margin is what is left after cost of goods, shipping, packaging and payment fees, expressed as a percentage of revenue. Do not subtract ad spend here, the calculator does that for you.
Enter ad spend and the revenue it produced
Both numbers must cover the same period and the same attribution window. Ads Manager purchase value against Ads Manager spend is the usual pairing. Mixing Shopify revenue with Meta spend inflates ROAS.
Read the four outputs
Current ROAS is what you achieved. Break-even ROAS is the line you must clear. Net profit is revenue times margin minus spend. Max CPA is the most you can pay per order and still break even.
You enter
You get
$5,000 ÷ $2,000
1 ÷ 0.55
$5,000 × 0.55 = $2,750 gross profit, minus $2,000 spend
$75 × 0.55
This account clears break-even by a comfortable margin: 2.50x against a 1.82x floor. The $750 is what the campaign actually earned after product costs and ads. If a media buyer reported this as "2.5x ROAS" without the margin, you could not tell whether it made $750 or lost $1,000. The same 2.50x at a 35% margin would be a loss.
| Gross margin | Break-even ROAS | Max CPA at $50 AOV | Max CPA at $80 AOV | Max CPA at $120 AOV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% | 3.33x | $15.00 | $24.00 | $36.00 |
| 40% | 2.50x | $20.00 | $32.00 | $48.00 |
| 50% | 2.00x | $25.00 | $40.00 | $60.00 |
| 60% | 1.67x | $30.00 | $48.00 | $72.00 |
| 70% | 1.43x | $35.00 | $56.00 | $84.00 |
Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ gross margin. Max CPA = average order value × gross margin. Every value here follows directly from those two formulas, so use the row that matches your margin and the column closest to your AOV.
Your break-even ROAS is the return on ad spend you need just to cover costs, and it is set entirely by your margin: break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ gross margin. A 60% margin means you break even at about 1.67x; a 40% margin means you need 2.5x just to stay flat. Every dollar of ROAS above that line is profit, every dollar below it is a loss that a healthy looking dashboard can hide for months.
The matching ceiling on the buying side is your max CPA, the most you can pay per purchase before a sale stops being profitable. It equals your average order value times your margin. That number is the one you type into a cost cap, and it is the number to compare against Meta's reported cost per purchase when deciding whether an ad set stays on.
There is nothing hidden here, which is the point. ROAS is revenue from ads divided by ad spend. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by gross margin as a decimal. Net profit is revenue multiplied by margin, minus ad spend, which is the money left once both the product and the ads have been paid for. Max CPA is average order value multiplied by margin. If you can hold those four in your head, you can sanity check any report in a few seconds without a spreadsheet.
Two brands can post the same 2.5x and have opposite outcomes. At 55% margin, 2.5x earns $0.38 of profit per dollar spent. At 35% margin, the same 2.5x loses $0.13 per dollar. This is why "what is a good ROAS" has no universal answer and why benchmarks by vertical are only useful once you have translated them through your own margin. Low margin categories such as consumables and supplements typically need 3x or more to be worth running; high margin digital products or skincare can be genuinely profitable at 1.5x.
The calculator treats every order as a first and last order. If customers reorder, first order break-even is too strict, and you can afford a lower ROAS on acquisition as long as you know the real repeat rate rather than the hoped for one. It also assumes the revenue figure is clean. Meta's attributed purchase value includes orders that email, organic search or a retargeting campaign on another platform also claim, so Meta ROAS will read higher than blended ROAS. Run both. Finally, it ignores refunds, which in categories like apparel can take 10 to 20% off the revenue figure after the fact. If your return rate is material, multiply revenue by (1 minus return rate) before entering it.
The most frequent one is entering net margin instead of gross margin, which makes break-even look impossibly high and leads to killing ads that were actually profitable. The second is pairing Meta spend with Shopify revenue, which double counts and makes bad ads look fine. The third is reading ROAS over a window that is too short: a single day's ROAS on a $100 budget is noise, and the number only means something once the ad set has accumulated enough purchases to leave the learning phase. Use the budget calculator to see how much spend that takes, and the cost calculator to project what CPA your CPM, CTR and conversion rate will actually produce.
Knowing your numbers is step one; finding the ads that beat them is step two. Volume Creatives' Analytics ranks your creatives by ROAS and CPA so you can scale winners and cut losers, then relaunch the winners in one click. See the performance analytics feature, or read how to scale a winning ad without resetting what it has learned.
Break-even ROAS equals 1 divided by your gross margin. At a 40% margin that is 1 ÷ 0.4 = 2.5x, meaning every $1 of ad spend needs to return $2.50 in revenue before the sale makes any money. At 60% margin it drops to 1.67x. The formula only needs margin, so two stores selling at the same ROAS can be in completely different financial positions.
ROAS is a result: revenue from ads divided by ad spend. Break-even ROAS is a threshold set by your margin. A campaign returning 2.2x looks healthy in isolation, but if your margin is 40% your break-even is 2.5x and that campaign is losing money on every order. Always read ROAS against break-even, never on its own.
Revenue minus cost of goods sold, inbound and outbound shipping, packaging, payment processing fees, and any per order fulfilment cost. Leave out ad spend, salaries, software and rent. Those are real costs, but the point of break-even ROAS is to isolate what each additional order contributes before marketing is paid for.
Decide how much profit you want per dollar of revenue, then add it on top of break-even. If your margin is 50% (break-even 2.0x) and you want to keep 15% of revenue as profit after ads, your target ROAS is 1 ÷ (0.50 minus 0.15) = 2.86x. A common shortcut is to set target ROAS at 20 to 30% above break-even and adjust once you know your repeat purchase rate.
Max CPA is break-even expressed per order instead of per dollar, and it is what you actually set as a cost cap or bid cap inside Meta. It equals average order value times margin. If your AOV is $80 and margin is 60%, you cannot pay more than $48 for a purchase without losing money, no matter what the campaign ROAS reads.
Use Meta's for optimisation decisions between ads and ad sets, because it is the only view that is consistent across them. Use blended ROAS (total revenue divided by total ad spend across channels) for budget decisions, because Meta's attribution includes purchases that other channels also claim. The gap between the two is normal, and tracking both tells you when Meta is over or under claiming.
No. It measures first order economics only, which is deliberately conservative. If a meaningful share of customers reorder, you can afford a lower first order ROAS. To account for that, replace average order value with the gross profit you expect over 60 or 90 days and rerun the calculation. Just be honest about the repeat rate, because most brands overestimate it.
Connect your ad account, drop in the creatives, and watch the batch land paused. Nothing spends until you say so.