What is return on marketing investment?
Return on marketing investment, or ROMI, measures the gross profit your marketing produced against what it cost. It answers whether the spend made money, not just whether it brought revenue in.
The difference from ROAS is the whole point. ROAS counts revenue; ROMI counts gross profit, so a campaign can post a healthy ROAS and a poor ROMI once the cost of delivering the product is taken out.
The ROMI formula.
ROMI = ((revenue × gross margin) − marketing cost) ÷ marketing cost × 100. The revenue-times-margin step turns top-line revenue into the gross profit the marketing actually generated.
Express the result as a percentage. Zero means marketing exactly paid for itself in profit terms, and every point above that is profit beyond the spend.
A worked example.
Marketing drives 100,000 in revenue at a 50% gross margin, costing 20,000. Gross profit is 50,000, so ROMI is (50,000 − 20,000) ÷ 20,000 × 100, which is 150%.
What is a good ROMI?
Above 0% means the marketing covered its own cost in gross profit, and 100% means it returned more than twice that cost. Because ROMI uses margin, the bar is higher than for ROAS, and a result that looks fine on revenue can turn negative once margin is applied. Compare it to your own history and to the margin of the products being sold.
ROMI judges a dollar of paid spend. To see whether the customers it buys are worth more than they cost over time, pair it with the CAC behind the spend.
How to improve it.
Push budget toward the segments and channels with the best gross-profit return, not just the most revenue, and protect margin while you scale. Cutting waste often lifts ROMI faster than raising spend.
Paid spend stops returning the moment you pause it. Organic search keeps compounding, which is how you build a channel that does not bill per click.