What is ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)?

The fastest way to lift your ROAS is to feed campaigns more winning creative — and with Polaris connected to Claude, you generate those ad variations right inside the chat instead of babysitting a dashboard. ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue you earn for every dollar you spend on ads: the clearest gauge of whether a campaign is making or losing money, found by dividing the revenue an ad drove by what you spent to run it.

What is the ROAS formula?

The formula is simple: ROAS = revenue / ad spend. If you spend $500 on a campaign and it drives $2,000 in sales, your ROAS is 4 (often written as 4x or 4:1). A ROAS of 1 means you made back exactly what you spent, before you account for the cost of the product itself.

What is a good ROAS?

There is no universal "good" number — it depends entirely on your margin. A store with fat margins can be profitable at 2x, while a low-margin product might need 4x or 5x just to stay afloat. Judge ROAS against your own economics, not a benchmark you read somewhere.

What is break-even ROAS?

Break-even ROAS is the point where ad revenue exactly covers ad spend plus product cost, and it equals 1 / profit margin. If your margin is 40% (0.4), your break-even ROAS is 2.5 — anything above that is profit, anything below is a loss. Knowing this number tells you the exact threshold a campaign has to clear. Run your own figures through the ROAS calculator to find your break-even point in seconds.

How does ROAS fit into testing?

ROAS tells you the outcome, but not why an ad worked. Pair it with upstream signals like hook rate and hold rate so you can see which creatives earn attention before they earn revenue — more on that in reading ad metrics. The more angles you test, the more room ROAS has to find a winner — and you can spin up those variations by generating ads inside Claude: ask in plain chat and finished UGC videos render in a live panel, then let ROAS pick your winners.