Paid Social ROAS: Measuring the Return on Your Social Ad Spend

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) = Revenue attributed to ads ÷ Ad spend

Example: £10,000 revenue from £2,000 ad spend = 5.0× ROAS (often written as 5.0x or 500%).

Roas is the primary efficiency metric for paid social. It tells you how many pounds of revenue you're generating per pound spent on advertising.

Your break-even ROAS is: 1 ÷ (1 − COGS% − variable costs%). If COGS is 40% and fulfilment/platform fees are 15%, break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ (1 − 0.55) = 2.22×. Below this, ads are losing money.

ROAS benchmarks vary significantly by platform, industry, and funnel stage:

| Platform | Average ROAS (e-commerce) |

|----------|---------------------------|

| Meta (Facebook/Instagram) | 3–6× |

| TikTok Ads | 2–4× |

| Pinterest Ads | 3–5× |

| Google Shopping (for comparison) | 5–10× |

These are industry averages. Your target ROAS should be your break-even ROAS plus your desired profit margin — not an industry average.

Brand awareness campaigns typically have lower ROAS (1–2×) than retargeting campaigns (8–15×). Blended ROAS across campaign types is more meaningful than any single campaign.

Platform ROAS (reported by Meta, TikTok) uses their own attribution — typically last-click with a 7-day click / 1-day view window. Because each platform claims credit, the sum of all platform ROAS figures often overstates actual return.

MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) = Total revenue ÷ Total ad spend across all channels. MER is a blended, channel-agnostic view that avoids double-counting.

For most e-commerce businesses with under £100k/month ad spend, MER is the most practical metric. Target MER: 3–5× for most product categories.

In AskBiz, view your MER in Analytics → Channels → Media Efficiency Ratio.

Meta Ads Manager typically reports higher ROAS than AskBiz for three reasons:

1. View-through attribution: Meta includes purchases by people who saw (not clicked) your ad up to 1 day after. AskBiz uses click-based attribution only.

2. No cross-channel deduplication: Meta claims revenue even if the customer also clicked a Google ad. AskBiz deduplicates across channels.

3. Attribution window: Meta defaults to 7-day click / 1-day view. AskBiz uses your configured window.

Meta's figure is useful for optimising within Meta. AskBiz's figure is more accurate for total business decisions.

Creative: creative is the biggest lever in paid social. Test 3–5 creative variants per ad set. Video outperforms static by 2–3× on average. UGC (user-generated content) outperforms polished brand content for most DTC products.

Audience: retargeting (website visitors, past purchasers) has significantly higher ROAS than cold prospecting. Lookalike audiences based on your best customers typically outperform interest-based targeting.

Bid strategy: for accounts with sufficient conversion data (50+ conversions/week), Advantage+ or automated bidding outperforms manual CPC.

Landing page: sending traffic to a general homepage versus a product-specific page reduces ROAS by 30–50% on average. Always match the ad to a relevant landing page.