Strategy & Tracking
Return on Investment (ROI)
The profit you earn relative to what you spent — the ultimate scoreboard for whether a marketing dollar was worth it.
Definition
Return on Investment measures the profit generated by a spend against the cost of that spend, expressed as a percentage. A positive ROI means you made more than you put in; a negative ROI means the effort lost money.
In depth
Return on investment takes the revenue a marketing effort produced, subtracts what the effort cost, divides by that cost, and turns it into a percentage. A campaign that cost $5,000 and returned $20,000 in revenue earns 300% — every dollar in came back as three dollars of profit on top. It's the broadest of the numbers you'll track; a return on ad spend figure looks only at media cost, while this counts the whole effort.
For a residential contractor, this is the question every other key performance indicator serves. Clicks, leads, and bookings only matter if the jobs they produce return more than the ads, the answering, and the chasing cost you. Knowing the figure by channel tells you where to put the next $10,000 and where to stop bleeding it.
The common mistake is plugging in revenue instead of margin — a $60,000 remodel is not $60,000 of profit. We base the math on your actual job margins and tie spend to closed work through your CRM, so the number reflects money you keep, not money that passed through your account.
The formula
ROI = (Revenue − Cost) ÷ Cost × 100% Worked example
You spend $4,000 on ads in a month and close two deck jobs worth $9,000 in gross margin combined. Your return on investment = ($9,000 − $4,000) ÷ $4,000 × 100% = 125%.
Strategy & Tracking
Want this run for you, not just read about?
Clean tracking and honest attribution, so you know which dollars actually produce revenue.