Marketing ROI

Marketing ROI, return on marketing investment, compares what marketing brought in with what it cost. A marketing ROI calculator does the arithmetic: incremental contribution profit before marketing costs, minus those costs, divided by those costs. The arithmetic is the easy part. Marketing ROI measurement is hard because of the numerator: which revenue did marketing actually cause, and what profit did it generate?

Platform dashboards answer with attributed revenue, the conversions their tracking tied to a click or an impression. Attribution overlaps across channels, counts customers who would have converted anyway, and stays high on channels that are already saturated. Add the revenue reported by every platform and the total can exceed the sales the business made. A marketing ROI built on those figures can overstate the return.

Marketing measurement answers with three sources of evidence. A media mix model fitted on the brand’s history gives each channel its contribution and a response curve. Experiments, usually a geo-lift test, measure what a channel caused and calibrate the model. An audited benchmark registry fills the gaps until the brand’s own evidence replaces it. Every figure says which source it came from: measured, projected or benchmark.

Two refinements matter for a budget. The return that ranks channels for the next euro is not the average return but the marginal one, the slope of the response curve at the current spend: marginal incremental ROAS. And a return comes with an interval; a projected lift whose band crosses zero is not distinguishable from flat.

How Kuwalyst measures marketing ROI for brands, and what the brand owns at the end, is on the page for brands.