Which ad channel is actually making you money?

ROAS (return on ad spend) is just revenue / spend. A 4x ROAS means you got $4 of revenue for every $1 spent. Profit ROAS bakes in your gross margin: (revenue x margin) / spend. That same 4x ROAS at 25% margin is actually 1x profit ROAS, which means you broke even before counting overhead. Always make budget decisions on profit ROAS, not revenue ROAS.

A 3x blended ROAS can hide a 6x Google channel and a 1x TikTok channel. The Google channel is funding the TikTok losses, and the blended number looks fine. But you'd be more profitable killing TikTok and reinvesting that budget anywhere else. Per-channel ROAS forces those decisions. Blended ROAS lets the worst channels hide behind the best.

The model assumes linear scale, which is conservative. In practice, doubling spend on your best channel will hit diminishing returns somewhere between 1.5x and 2x current spend. The directional answer (kill the worst, fund the best) is almost always right. The exact dollar lift is a ceiling, not a promise. We use this exact logic when modeling a Nirvani N1 deployment, then verify with a 30-day test on the reallocated budget before locking it in.

The five channels here cover roughly 90% of SMB ad spend. If you run podcasts, OTT, influencer, or affiliate, lump them into the closest analog (programmatic for OTT, direct mail for offline, etc.) or use the "other" slot. The math is channel-agnostic. If you have a custom mix you'd like modeled accurately, get the detailed report and we'll add your channels to the analysis.

Use whatever you've been using consistently. The goal here is to compare channels against each other, not to find absolute truth. If your attribution model is biased the same way for every channel, the relative ranking is still valid. The one thing to avoid: mixing platform-reported ROAS (Meta says it drove the sale, Google says it drove the sale, both claim credit) with last-click. Pick one source of truth and stick with it.

Margins drive the floor. Ecommerce DTC (30-50% margin) needs 4x+ to be profitable. SaaS (70-85% margin) is fine at 2-3x. Service businesses (50-65% margin) target 3-4x. Direct mail at 1.4x revenue ROAS is almost always losing money once you factor in margin and creative production. The detailed PDF report includes industry-specific ROAS benchmarks.

Five pages: (1) Your per-channel ROAS and profit ROAS table with industry benchmarks. (2) A budget reallocation plan with exact dollar moves, ranked by expected profit lift. (3) A creative and audience audit for the channels likely to scale. (4) The three campaigns we'd test next based on your channel mix. (5) Implementation roadmap, week 1 through day 60. You'll receive it within 2 minutes of submitting.