ROAS is the number every ad platform reports and every ecommerce brand argues about. We set what Meta and Google reported against what online stores actually sold over nine months of 2026. Together, the two platforms took credit for 106% of everything the stores sold.
ROAS, return on ad spend, is revenue divided by ad spend. If a campaign cost one thousand and brought in five thousand in sales, its ROAS is five, sometimes written as a percentage. Because it is a ratio, it has no currency: a ROAS of five means the same thing in dollars, pounds, euros or shekels.
That simplicity is why ROAS became the default scorecard for paid social and search. It is also why it misleads so many brands. The formula has two parts, and only one of them is a fact. Ad spend is what you were billed. Revenue depends on who is counting it.
Every store owner knows the moment. Ads Manager says one number, Google Ads says a higher one, and the bank account says something else. The question we hear most, from clients and from brands we meet for the first time, is which number to believe.
So we measured it. The data comes from online stores we grow, January to September 2026: 39,727 orders, every store running Meta and Google side by side. Our dashboards pull three things straight from the source for every store: orders from Shopify, WooCommerce or Wix, spend and reported purchase value from Meta, and the same from Google Ads. Because ROAS is a ratio, the lessons travel to any market where those two platforms do the selling.
Across all the stores, Meta and Google together attributed more purchase value to their ads than the stores sold in total. Not more than the stores sold from ads: more than they sold, full stop, including organic search, returning customers, email, SMS and WhatsApp, word of mouth, everything.
The platforms' combined claim came to 106% of real revenue. According to the two of them, nothing in these stores happened without them, and a little more on top.
The monthly view makes the point harder to dismiss. In every single month, reported blended ROAS sat above real ROAS. The claim was lowest in January (101% of revenue) and highest in July (115%), a month of big sales events, when email, messaging and returning customers drive a large share of orders and the platforms still book them as their own.
Pooled numbers hide the real problem. Look at the stores one by one, and the platforms' claim ranges from 48% of what the store sold to 129%.
In almost half the stores, the platforms reported more revenue than existed. In some, they claimed less than 80% of it. The median store sat at 94%.
This is why you cannot benchmark yourself against a reported ROAS you read in a forum or heard at a conference. A store showing six in Ads Manager can be doing better or worse than a store showing four. The distortion is not a fixed tax you can subtract: it depends on your share of returning customers, how much brand search you get, your promo calendar and your attribution settings.
Blended ROAS is total store revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel, for the same period. It is what we called real ROAS above. Nothing is attributed to anyone; every sale counts once, and every ad dollar counts once.
MER, the marketing efficiency ratio, is total revenue divided by total marketing spend. The difference is in the denominator. Blended ROAS usually counts paid media only. MER can also include influencer fees, affiliate commissions, agency retainers and the cost of your email and SMS sends. If paid media is your only marketing cost, the two are the same number. Some teams flip the ratio and track marketing spend as a share of revenue; it is the same information read upside down.
Here is what that looks like in our data:
| Measure | ROAS |
|---|---|
| Meta reported ROASpurchase value Meta attributes to its ads, divided by Meta spend | 4.84 |
| Google reported ROASsame, on Google Ads (stores that advertise on Google) | 7.27 |
| Both platforms, reportedall attributed value divided by all spend | 4.99 |
| Real ROASstore revenue divided by all media spend | 4.58 |
Per store, the median reported ROAS on Google was 7.27. On Meta, 4.84. Put the two together and the median reported blended ROAS was 4.99, against a median real ROAS of 4.58. Pooled across all stores, real ROAS was 5.26 and reported was 5.57.
Google's number looks 50% better than Meta's for a structural reason: a lot of Google's conversions come from brand search. Someone sees the product on Instagram, searches the brand name two days later, clicks the ad at the top, buys. Google reports the sale. Often Meta reports the same sale inside its own click window. The store paid twice for the credit and received one order. Moving budget from Meta to Google because "Google's ROAS is higher" is the most common expensive mistake we see in new accounts.
Four mechanisms create the gap, and all four work exactly as designed:
The platform is not lying. It is counting what it saw. Your job is to count what you banked.
There is no single good ROAS, for two reasons.
The first is margin. A ROAS figure tells you how much revenue came back, not how much profit. A brand selling high-margin skincare can be very profitable at a ROAS that would bankrupt a brand selling low-margin electronics. The useful question is not whether your ROAS is high, but whether it clears your break-even with room to spare.
The second is attribution. A good reported ROAS on one platform is not comparable with a good reported ROAS on another, or with another brand's number, because each one counts differently. Set your target on real, blended ROAS, and judge it against your own margin.
For reference, the median store in our data ran at a real ROAS of 4.58. That is a description of these stores, not a target for yours.
Break-even ROAS is the point where ad spend eats exactly all of the profit an order leaves. The formula is one divided by your margin. Use contribution margin, not gross margin: gross margin only takes off the cost of the product, while contribution margin also takes off shipping, payment fees, packaging and the cost of returns. Using gross margin makes break-even look lower than it is.
| Step | Value |
|---|---|
| Average orderprice the customer pays | 100 |
| Product cost | 40 |
| Shipping, payment fees, returns | 20 |
| Contribution marginwhat is left: 40 of 100 | 40% |
| Break-even ROAS1 divided by 0.40 | 2.5 |
| Target for a 15% profit after ads1 divided by (0.40 minus 0.15) | 4.0 |
At a 40% contribution margin, a real ROAS of 2.5 only covers costs, and you need 4 to keep 15% of revenue as profit after ads. At a 25% margin, break-even itself is 4. The same ROAS can be a healthy business in one brand and a loss in another.
A good ROAS is one that clears your break-even with room to spare, and break-even ROAS is one divided by your contribution margin. At a 40% margin, a ROAS of 2.5 only covers costs, so 4 and above is healthy; at a 25% margin you need 4 just to break even. Judge real, blended ROAS against your own margin, never a reported number against someone else's. In our data, the median store ran at a real ROAS of 4.58.
ROAS stands for return on ad spend: revenue divided by ad spend. A ROAS of five means every unit of currency spent on ads brought back five in revenue. It is a ratio, so it reads the same in any currency. The catch is the revenue side: the platform's reported ROAS uses the sales it attributes to itself, while real ROAS uses what the store actually sold.
ROAS usually describes one platform or campaign: the revenue that platform attributes to its ads, divided by what you spent there. MER, the marketing efficiency ratio, is total store revenue divided by total marketing spend, across every channel and with no attribution at all. ROAS helps you compare campaigns inside a platform; MER tells you whether your marketing as a whole pays.
Blended ROAS is total store revenue divided by total ad spend across every platform, for the same period. Every sale counts once and every ad dollar counts once, so it cannot be inflated by two platforms claiming the same order. In our data the median store's blended ROAS was 4.58, while the platforms' reported blended ROAS for the same store was 4.99.
Every growth playbook says the same thing: find your hero products and put everything behind them. We opened 31.5 thousand orders to see what heroes actually do. They carry the revenue, open the door to new customers and fill bigger baskets. They do not, on their own, bring customers back.
Daniel Hirsh8 October 202610 min readEcommerce is easy to define and harder to run. This guide covers what it means, how an order travels from the first click to the doorstep, the main types of ecommerce, what a business needs behind the store, and what 42.6 thousand real orders show about how online stores make and grow their revenue.
Daniel Hirsh8 October 20269 min readMost guides to building an online store start with picking a theme. We start with the data: 42.6 thousand orders in online stores we grow show where sales come from, when they arrive and who comes back. The build order follows from that: which pages first, how many products to launch with, what to set up on day one, and what it costs in money and time.
Daniel Hirsh8 October 202610 min readEvery Preneuriat client gets a live dashboard: store revenue, all media spend, real ROAS, updated all day. The first call goes both ways.
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