True ROAS: Measure Real Marketing Return on Ad Spend
Why the ROAS in your ad platform is not the ROAS in your bank account, and how Revenue Sensor calculates its own.
Every ad platform reports a return on ad spend. Those numbers rarely agree with each other and almost never agree with your accountant. The reason is not that anyone is lying; it is that they are each measuring a different thing.
What goes wrong with platform ROAS
- It is gross. The store keeps a commission before the money reaches you, and platform ROAS is computed before that deduction.
- It ignores buyer tax. VAT and sales tax are collected from the customer and remitted; they were never yours.
- It is self-attributed. Each network claims the conversions it thinks it drove, and two networks can claim the same one.
- It is same-platform only. Ad revenue, other networks and organic income are invisible to it.
How Revenue Sensor calculates it
ROAS is all revenue divided by all ad spend, over the same date range. It includes organic sales, so it is a blend for the whole business, not the return on any one campaign. Revenue counts each revenue account on its revenue basis (Payout by default). Ad spend is what the platforms billed, plus any fee and tax you set on an account's Config tab. 1.00x is break-even, and a dash means there was no spend to divide by.
Profit is revenue minus ad spend, to the cent. It is ad profit only: salaries, infrastructure and any store fee the source does not net out are not in it. If a revenue account is read before its store's fee, the Profit card says which one.
Expect it to be lower
A ROAS that comes in well below your platform dashboards is the normal result, and it is the number that decides whether your ad spend is paying for itself.
The attribution caveat
Revenue Sensor joins spend and revenue on date, app and country, not on individual users. At the app level that is the right shape for a profit decision. If you need per-install attribution, that is an MMP's job, and the two views complement each other.
Currency and time zones
Ad accounts and stores report in their own currencies, and each one reports its own days. Every amount is converted to US dollars at that day's exchange rate when it arrives, and shown in the display currency you pick. This is the other reason totals can differ slightly from a platform's own dashboard.