Campaign profitability calculator

Why margin is in the arithmetic and ROAS is not the answer

ROAS divides revenue by spend, and revenue is not yours. Most of a contract goes back out as materials, labor and subcontractors; what survives that is the only money the campaign is really spending against. Two shops with an identical ROAS and a wide gap in gross margin are not running the same campaign -- one is profitable and one is buying work. That is why gross margin is an input here rather than a footnote, and why the headline figure is margin dollars rather than revenue.

ROAS is still shown, because it is the number every ad platform reports and you will be asked about it. Treat it as a size reading, not a verdict. When somebody quotes a ROAS target at you, the first question is whose margin the target assumed.

Gross profit here is calculated before campaign spend, deliberately. Keeping the two separate is what lets you see the shape of the problem: a campaign can be short on margin because the jobs are thin, or because the spend is high, and a single blended net figure hides which.

The breakeven close rate, and what it is for

Divide the monthly spend by the margin one held appointment is worth when it closes, then by the number of appointments held. What comes out is the share of appointments you have to sign for the campaign to pay for itself. Everything above that line is profit; everything below it is a subsidy you are paying to keep the phone ringing.

Read the distance rather than the number. A campaign that breaks even at a close rate a few points under yours is running with no room at all: one bad month, one crew short, one storm that does not land, and it is underwater. A campaign that breaks even far below where you sit can absorb a soft month, and it is also the one to spend more on.

The calculator will happily return a breakeven above one hundred percent, and it does not clamp it. That is an answer, not an error: it means no close rate rescues the campaign, because closing every single appointment still does not cover the spend. When you see it, stop coaching the sales floor. The lever is spend, job value or margin.

Held appointments, not booked ones

The input asks for appointments held, and the distinction is where most of these calculations quietly go wrong. Booked is a number your calendar produces. Held is a number your crews produce, and the gap between them belongs to the campaign, not to the sales team: a lead who agreed to an appointment they never intended to keep was still paid for.

So take the held figure off the same month's run sheets rather than off the CRM stage, and if the two disagree, use the smaller one. Running this with booked appointments inflates revenue, inflates gross profit and pushes the breakeven close rate down, which flatters exactly the campaign you were trying to test.

One more discipline worth keeping: put the whole cost of the campaign in the spend box. Media, lead fees, and whatever it costs to have somebody chase and confirm those appointments. A spend figure that counts only the ad platform makes every campaign look profitable, and it is the version of this arithmetic that vendors prefer.

Worked example, using the numbers the page loads with

The panel opens with a twelve-thousand-dollar monthly spend, forty appointments held, a thirty percent close rate, a job worth ninety-five hundred dollars, and thirty-five percent gross margin. Forty appointments at thirty percent close is twelve jobs won. Twelve jobs at ninety-five hundred dollars is a hundred fourteen thousand dollars of revenue, and thirty-five percent of that -- thirty-nine thousand nine hundred dollars -- is gross profit. Revenue over spend is a return of 9.5 to one.

The breakeven figure is the one to sit with. Spend divided by margin per appointment (job value times gross margin) divided by appointments held comes out to a close rate of about nine percent -- a third of the thirty percent this plan is actually closing. That much room is what a healthy campaign looks like: it would take the close rate falling by two-thirds, not two or three points, before this account stops paying for itself.

Where this fits

• Roofing lead ROI calculator -- the same campaign priced per lead rather than per appointment, and stopping at revenue. Run both when you buy leads and appointments from different sources.
• Call center cost estimator -- if the answer here is that the spend side is too high, this is where you find out what the appointment-setting half of it should cost.
• Roofing lead generation -- the channels the spend goes to, and which of them survive this arithmetic.
• Storm damage appointments -- the case where held-versus-booked moves the most, because storm demand arrives faster than crews can sit it.