Understanding your return on ad spending is the first step in calculating how your ad spending efforts affect the revenue generated from your ads and product listings.
What is Return on Ad Spending? ROAS
Companies spend over 150 billion dollars marketing their products and services every year through ad channels including Google, Amazon, and other platforms.
ROAS, also known as return on ad spending is the term used as the amount of money earned for every dollar spent on an ad campaign.
Understanding your return on ad spending is the first step in calculating how your ad spending efforts affect the revenue generated from your ads for your e-commerce store and your product listings on third-party platforms like Amazon, Walmart, or other new eCommerce platforms such as Trustables.
Why Does Return on Ad Spending Matter?
Return on ad spending plays a fundamental role by helping answer how much money will your business earn on a marketing campaign and if it doesn’t achieve the return you need, you need an experienced e-commerce marketing partner to help you optimize your products and marketing campaigns.
Whether you advertise on Google, Amazon, or other platforms, advertising fees go beyond the costs of the ads themselves. When you run an ad campaign, these are additional costs and considerations that affect your bottom line.
Wages & Vendor Costs During a Campaign
These are generally the largest additional costs that are associated with advertising.
Whether you have your team that creates, launches and maintains your ad campaigns or you hire a third-party advertising service to run your ads, the wages and additional fees associated with vendors, partners, and other relevant parties must be included in your advertising costs to get your true picture of your return on ad spending and ensure campaigns provide a profit.
Referral & Affiliate Costs
If you pay affiliates or referrers to promote your products, then you must accurately get the true cost of these payments including commission percentage as well as any network or transaction fees associated with these payments.
Cost Per Click & Cost Per Impression
Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Impression (CPI), and the total number of clicks are important metrics to consider when running advertising campaigns.
Since the cost to advertise keywords is constantly changing, businesses must actively monitor their campaigns to ensure effectiveness and are on course to achieve their desired ROAS ratio.
How Do You Calculate ROAS?
You can calculate your return on ad spending by using the standard formula that calculates ROAS as the revenue earned from ad campaigns after the cost of the ads themselves is taken into account.
Calculating ROAS
ROAS equals the gross revenue from an ad campaign and calculates it by dividing the profits from an ad campaign by the initial amount invested.
ROAS Example Calculation
If a company spends $3,000 on an ad campaign online in a month and the revenue generated equals $12,000; then the return on ad spending ratio would equal 4 to 1 or 400% because $12,000 is divided by 3,000 dollars to equal 4 dollars earned for every dollar spent on advertising before expenses.
What is Considered a Good Return on Advertising Spending Ratio?
While there’s no definitive right or wrong answer to a good ROAS ratio due to it being influenced by operating expenses, profitability as well as the popularity of the brand, 4:1, or four dollars earned for every one dollar spent is typically considered the ‘base’ return on ad spending.
New companies, startups, and businesses with paper-thin margins typically must achieve a higher ratio to cover additional startup costs and expenses in the magnitude of 10:1, while other businesses have the potential to make a profit with a ratio as low as 2:1.
What is the Difference Between ROI and ROAS
When discussing return on ad spending, it’s natural to ask how it’s different from ROI.
While both Return on Ad Spending and Return on Investment deal with monetary returns, return on investment, or ROI allows businesses to calculate the total return on investment after business costs which include wages, procurement, fixed costs including real estate, and applicable taxes.
ROI calculates how much your company makes from advertising (or another channel) after expenses, which includes operational costs, turnover, and more. In comparison, ROAS determines how much your business earns (on average) from advertising only.
Since they measure different aspects of your campaign, ROAS and ROI also use different formulas. While ROAS calculates the average total return on the dollars spent on an ad campaign, ROI on the other hand calculates a business's net profit after expenses are taken into account.
How to Improve Your Return On Ad Spending
Even if a business is achieving a healthy return on investment, there are additional methods that can be used to further optimize your company’s advertising efforts including.
- Optimizing your website & landing pages
- Keyword research
- Utilize branding campaigns
- Using negative keywords in your PPC campaigns
Optimizing Landing Pages, Content & Speed
Your business has 5 seconds for a potential customer to decide whether they want to continue looking at your site once they land there and if your website loads slowly due to unnecessary plugins, un-optimized images, videos, or poor coding, your chances of losing a potential sale increase dramatically.
Having ads directed to your website that are poorly designed, hard to use, or worse, have spelling errors significantly can lower a business's trust rating with potential customers.
When you run ads and you send potential customers to your campaign’s landing page, you want to present a fast-loading and easy-to-use page that promotes your products and helps to promote trust in your brand.
The goal is to make the buying process as easy as possible for potential customers which means having an experienced website team that directly works with your marketing team to create a page experience that is not only optimized but provides a rich experience with content that builds trust but also gives customers a seamless purchasing process.
Utilizing Branding Ad Campaigns
Whether your business is relatively new or has been in operation for a while doesn’t mean that potential customers know who you are, your business exists, or even what products you sell.
Keyword Research
Before running ad campaigns you want to know exactly which keyword customers are searching for that directly assimilates your products to the customer’s search intent.
This is the primary reason why it’s important to have a dedicated team that directly coordinates with your website development team to shape the online buying experience and utilize appropriate keywords not only for your site but your product listings and ad campaigns
Utilizing Branding Campaigns
Branded ad campaigns are a great way to use pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to increase brand awareness by targeting your business's name. These campaigns have the potential to provide a great return by not only increasing the visibility of your brand but also the products you sell.
Using Negative Keywords in Your PPC Campaigns
When you utilize negative keywords, you remove your ads from appearing in searches that have those keywords.
What Are Negative Keywords?
Negative keywords are keywords that can be entered into a PPC campaign that prevents that word from triggering the appearance of your ad, which is also known as a negative match.
An example of this would be adding the word free as a negative keyword in your campaign and Google Ads won’t show your ads on any search that includes the word free.
Creating a negative keyword also means that your ad is less likely to appear on a site when your negative keywords match the site's content.
Maximizing Your Product's Presence
If your business runs ads, they must generate the awareness, purchases, and revenue that your business needs to reach a positive ratio on your ad spending.
While new companies have more to consider when creating their ad campaigns all of the strategies above should be taken into consideration by every business to maximize your ROAS and your profit ratio.
When your business runs ads that fail to generate the profits you need it puts your business in a compromising and more competitive position with other businesses that sell products related to your niche which leads to even more lost revenue opportunities.
All sectors of your business from web development, marketing, advertising, and distribution must work together cohesively to create and implement a comprehensive strategy for your brand and ad campaigns that put your business on a path of profitability.
Leveraging Display Ads to Win Conversions
The right search & display ad strategy is crucial to eliminating wasted efforts and ad spending. CPG.IO fills in the missing pieces of your display ad strategy with attractive, repeatable, and effective display ad campaigns that drive conversions, not just empty clicks.
CPG.IO Search & Display Ad Services
If your ads are underperforming or you think your third-party ads team isn’t getting the ROAS you’ve anticipated, request a free quote to learn how our search and display ad services convert more with a memorable brand experience.
