Profit, blended ROAS and currencies

With a store and ad spend connected, the dashboard shows Return on all ad spend: one sentence, such as "Every $1 on ads brought $4.20 in sales last month, up from $3.80 the month before.", then the numbers behind it. Add your costs, and it shows profit too. It needs Stripe or Shopify, plus Meta Ads, another ad platform or a spend file, on paid plans: Solo, Studio, Agency and Custom.

Blended ROAS#

Blended ROAS is every sale from your store divided by every ad platform's spend, for the period. Some tools call it MER (marketing efficiency ratio). It is the same number.

• Sales are orders and renewals from Stripe and Shopify, before refunds: the same as the Sales card.
• Ad spend is every platform you connected or imported, added up.
• It counts every sale, whether or not Sporetag tied it to an ad. The ROAS on the ad spend panel counts only sales from tracked ad visits. Blended ROAS is the one that still works when tracking misses some sales.
• Ads cost is the same comparison the other way round, as a share of sales: $1,000 of spend on $4,200 of sales is 23.8%.

With no ad spend in the period, there is nothing to divide by, and the panel says so.

Profit#

Profit shows only once you say what things cost. Sporetag never guesses a cost.

1. Open the site, then Settings, then Profit.
2. Type your cost of goods as a percent of sales, such as 40.
3. Optional: type your fixed costs a month, such as rent, salaries and software, and pick their currency.
4. Click Save costs.

The panel then shows:

Fixed costs are spread over each day of their month, so a 7-day period carries 7 days of them.

Product costs from Shopify

When your Shopify app can read products or inventory (the read_products or read_inventory scope), Sporetag reads each product's cost from Shopify and keeps what each order's products cost. Orders with a cost for every product use it. The percent covers the rest.

• Shopify keeps only today's cost. An order Sporetag reads later uses the cost at that time.
• If some orders have product costs and you set no percent, profit is not shown, rather than counting the rest as free. Add a percent to fix it.
• Added the scope after connecting? Paste the app details again on the Shopify connector page, so Sporetag sees it.

One currency#

Sporetag adds money up in one currency. Pick it in Settings, Reporting currency. On Automatic, it is the currency most of each site's sales are in.

Sales, refunds, ad spend and MRR in other currencies are converted at the European Central Bank's euro reference rate:

• Each sale at the rate for the day it was paid, and each day of ad spend at that day's rate.
• Each change in MRR at the rate for the day it happened, so past MRR does not move when rates do.
• A weekend or bank holiday uses the last rate before it.
• The ECB publishes rates for about 30 currencies, around 4 PM in Frankfurt on working days. Money in a currency it does not quote stays out of the totals, and the panel says Some currencies left out.

Converted numbers carry an ECB rates tip with the original amounts, such as "Includes 1,240 EUR and 300 GBP, converted to USD at the European Central Bank rate for each day." Emailed reports print the same line.

The ECB publishes these rates for information. They are right for reporting, not for accounting or tax.

Where money is converted

Common questions#

Why is my blended ROAS higher than my ad ROAS?

Blended ROAS counts every sale, including people who came back by email, search or word of mouth. Ad ROAS counts only sales from tracked ad visits. The gap between them is roughly what your ads bring that tracking cannot see, plus what would have sold anyway.

What is a good break-even ROAS?

It depends on your margin. At 30% cost of goods, ads break even at 1.43x. At 60%, they need 2.5x. Blended ROAS above break-even means ads pay for themselves, before fixed costs.