Calculating your ROAS bid | Profit Bidding Guide | GROW
Profit Bidding – The Complete Guide

Section 4 · Calculating your ROAS

Calculating your ROAS bid

Lesson 13 of 26 · 1 min read

Once you have all of your costs tracked, or even if you don’t have all costs tracked yet, you are now able to calculate a more accurate ROAS bid based on your true margins.

ROAS bid calculation

  1. Decide how much profit you want to makeAs a percentage of the selling price (without VAT), e.g. 10%.
  2. Get your selling priceWithout VAT, to match what your conversion tracking reports.
  3. Get your costsYour profit per sale after returns, from the margin calculation.
  4. Calculate your max ad cost per saleProfit per sale after returns, minus your profit target.
  5. Calculate your ROAS bidSelling price divided by your max ad cost per sale.

Example: the same product, with a 10% profit target

Selling price without VAT£50.00
Profit per sale after returns£21.38
Profit target (10% of £50.00)−£5.00
Max ad cost per sale£16.38
ROAS bid (£50.00 ÷ £16.38)3.05

Breakeven ROAS

2.34

ROAS bid for 10% profit

3.05

In Google Ads, target ROAS is entered as a percentage, so a ROAS bid of 3.05 is a target ROAS of 305%.

Do this for every product and every product gets its own precise bid. A product with a thin margin gets a higher ROAS target, so you stop overpaying for it. A product with a healthy margin gets a lower one, so it can win more of the sales it can afford.