Your breakeven ROAS is the return on ad spend at which an order makes you exactly nothing. Above it you are ahead, below it you are paying for the privilege of making a sale. It is the single number that decides whether an ad set is working, and most people running Meta ads either have not worked it out or are using a figure they were told once by somebody selling them something.
It comes from one subtraction. Take what an order is worth, take out what the goods cost, what it costs to ship, and what the payment processor takes. What is left is the contribution — the money available to pay for the advertising that produced the order. Spend exactly that on ads and you break even. Spend more and the sale cost you money.
Breakeven is a floor, not a goal. A business that runs at breakeven is working for nothing, so the more useful number is a target: the cost per sale that leaves the margin you actually want. That is the second half of what this works out, and it is the figure worth judging an ad set against.
Fill in what you know below. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, stored, or seen by us — the arithmetic runs in your browser, there is no account, and there is nothing to sign up for.
These numbers are an example, so you can see the tool working before you type anything. Replace them with yours — nothing is sent anywhere, and the answer updates as you type.
What a typical order is worth, before costs.
What the goods in that order cost you.
Postage, packaging, pick and pack. Zero is fine.
Percent of each order you want left over after ads. We start at 20% because a number has to go here — it is not a recommendation. Put your own in.
Prefilled at 2.9% plus $0.30, a common US card rate. Yours is on your processor statement, and it is worth checking rather than taking ours.
The flat part of the fee, charged per order.
Leave both of these blank to get the targets only.
Orders those ads produced, however you count them.
Pay more than this for a sale and that sale lost money.
The same fact as a ratio, which is how Meta reports it.
Stay under this and the margin you asked for survives.
The number to judge an ad set on. Breakeven is the floor, not the goal.
You paid $100.00 for each sale, against a target of $38.80 — that is above your target.
About $1,224.00 of that spend ran above your target — an estimate from the numbers you typed, not money you are owed or will get back.
Judge an ad set against the target, not against breakeven. An ad set sitting between the two is producing sales that pay for themselves and leave you nothing, which is usually a sign to change something rather than to switch it off.
And check the inputs before you trust the output. The two numbers this page has to guess at are the processing fee and the margin you want, and it says so beside both. The rest comes from your own books.
Doing this for a whole account, ad set by ad set, is the job the free audit does — it reads your real numbers and checks every ad set against a target you set. More on what it can and cannot touch is on the trust page.