Glossary · ad-metrics
What is ROAS?
ROAS means return on ad spend: the sales value credited to your ads divided by what you paid for them, written as a multiple. A 4.0 ROAS means every rupee of ad money is linked to four rupees of sales. It is a revenue ratio, not a profit ratio — it says nothing about what the goods cost you, what your staff cost, what the agency costs, or what came back undelivered. Every business therefore has its own break-even ROAS, set by its margin. A brand keeping 55 percent gross margin needs roughly 1.8 to break even on media alone; a business keeping 20 percent needs 5.0 before it has covered anything.
What does ROAS mean for a business in Pakistan?
Cash on delivery quietly destroys reported ROAS. Orders count as revenue the moment they are placed, but a slice of the parcels come back unopened weeks later, and the platform never subtracts them. Anything sold through Instagram or Daraz with COD needs a returns adjustment before you believe the dashboard. Sales closed on WhatsApp cut the other way, since the platform cannot see them and your true return is better than reported.
A worked example
A Rawalpindi lawn brand spends PKR 50,000 and Meta reports PKR 200,000 of purchases — 4.0 ROAS. But 28 percent of COD parcels return undelivered, leaving PKR 144,000, and cloth plus stitching eats 45 percent of that. Real gross profit is PKR 79,200 against PKR 50,000 spent — still a good month, but not four times anything.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- CPACPACPA means cost per action — the money spent divided by the number of completed results you decided to count. The action is whatever you defined it…
- ConversionconversionA conversion is one completed action that you have decided counts as a result. Nothing about it is automatic — you pick the action, and the platform…
- Ad spendad spend / ishtihaar ka kharchaAd spend is the money that goes to the platform itself — Meta, TikTok or Google — in exchange for showing your ads. It is not the same thing as an…
- AttributionattributionAttribution is the set of rules that decides which ad gets the credit when a sale happens. Every platform applies its own rules and every platform…
- Landing pagelanding pageA landing page is the single page someone arrives on after clicking your ad, built to get one specific action and nothing else. It is not your…
ROAS — quick answers
What does ROAS mean?
ROAS means return on ad spend: the sales value credited to your ads divided by what you paid for them, written as a multiple. A 4.0 ROAS means every rupee of ad money is linked to four rupees of sales.
ROAS ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
اشتہاری خرچ پر منافع — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "ROAS". Cash on delivery quietly destroys reported ROAS.
Why does ROAS matter for a business in Pakistan?
Cash on delivery quietly destroys reported ROAS. Orders count as revenue the moment they are placed, but a slice of the parcels come back unopened weeks later, and the platform never subtracts them. Anything sold through Instagram or Daraz with COD needs a returns adjustment before you believe the dashboard. Sales closed on WhatsApp cut the other way, since the platform cannot see them and your true return is better than reported.
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