Return on ad spend (ROAS)
ROAS is the ratio of revenue earned to money spent on advertising — how much you get back for every dollar you put into user acquisition. It is the single number most user-acquisition teams steer by, because it answers the only question that ultimately matters about a paid channel: is the spend making money or losing it?
How it is calculated
The basic definition is a simple ratio:
ROAS = revenue attributed to ad spend / ad spend
A ROAS of 1.0 (or 100%) means you broke even on revenue; above 1.0 you earned more than you spent. But the timing of the revenue is what makes ROAS subtle. Because users pay over weeks and months, teams measure ROAS at fixed checkpoints — day-0, day-7, day-30 ROAS — that grow as a cohort matures. A campaign at 40% day-7 ROAS isn’t necessarily losing money; it may be on track to cross 100% by day-90 as lifetime value accumulates. This is why ROAS and the LTV curve are read together.
Why it matters
ROAS is the operational form of the LTV-to-CAC relationship. Knowing your day-30 LTV lets you set a day-30 ROAS target that keeps acquisition profitable, then judge every campaign against it in real time. It is more actionable than raw CAC because it ties spend directly to the revenue it produced, channel by channel, so you can scale what clears the bar and cut what doesn’t. Getting ROAS right depends entirely on clean attribution — if revenue is tied to the wrong campaign, the ratio lies.
In games and apps
Mobile teams live by cohort ROAS curves segmented by channel, campaign, creative and country. Because game revenue is skewed by whales and accrues slowly, early ROAS is noisy and predicted ROAS — projecting the mature value from early signals and retention — drives the daily bid and budget decisions. A channel with lower install volume but a steeper ROAS curve usually beats a cheap channel whose users never convert.
In Keentics
Keentics builds cohort ROAS from your raw revenue events tied back to acquisition data, so the curve matches your real ledger and lets you compare channels honestly. You can read day-N ROAS alongside the LTV analysis curve that drives it, segment by channel and country, and feed attribution back into your bidding. Explore the game analytics feature for acquisition dashboards.
Related: Active users · ARPPU · ARPU · Attribution