What is platform ROAS?

Platform ROAS is return on ad spend as the ad platform itself reports it: the revenue the platform claims its ads caused, divided by what you paid it. It is the number you see inside each ads manager, reproduced here per campaign and creative so it can sit next to the figures that correct it.

Formula

platform ROAS = platform-reported revenue ÷ ad spend

Worked example

A campaign spends €4,000; the platform claims €20,000 of conversion revenue, so platform ROAS reads 5.0×. The same campaign's true ROAS — attributed contribution margin over the same spend — reads 1.76× once cost of goods, shipping and fees come out and the attribution engine splits credit across touchpoints. Both numbers are "correct" by their own rules; only one of them is money you keep.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

fact_ad_performance stores each platform's claimed platform_revenue_base (the as-reported amount converted to EUR at the day's ECB rate, alongside the original currency) per creative per day. The campaign table on Marketing → Overview divides summed platform_revenue_base by summed spend_base over the last 30 days from v_campaign_performance; v_creative_performance carries the same division per creative as platform_roas. Both sides come from the same platform rows, so the figure faithfully mirrors what the ads manager shows — deliberately, since its job here is comparison.

Why it matters

Platform ROAS is the number budget conversations tend to start from, so the app keeps it visible — but every platform counts conversions under its own click-through and view-through windows and has no idea what your products cost. Two platforms can each claim the same order in full. The useful signal is the gap: campaign by campaign, platform ROAS versus true ROAS shows where a channel's self-reporting flatters it most.

Common mistakes

• Summing platform ROAS numerators across channels. The claimed revenues overlap; their sum routinely exceeds actual store revenue. Blended ROAS is the sanity check.
• Comparing platform ROAS between platforms. Different attribution windows make the comparison meaningless; compare each platform against its own history, or use true ROAS for cross-channel calls.
• Scaling a campaign on platform ROAS when its margin profile is unknown. A 5× platform ROAS on heavily discounted stock can be below breakeven in margin terms.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Overview, in the top-campaigns table's ROAS column.