Numbers
Did it actually make money
Reported ROAS almost always excludes what the creative cost to make. For a campaign running one expensive video that is a rounding error, and for one running forty pieces of UGC it is most of the answer.
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The campaign
$4,200 spend, $14,800 revenue, 40 assets
- Reported ROAS: 3.52
- With production: depends on asset cost
- Break-even asset cost: about $270 each
Three steps
How it will work
Take the reported figure
Revenue divided by ad spend, straight out of the platform. This is the number everyone quotes.
Add production
Divide by spend plus what the assets cost. The gap between the two numbers is the part nobody reports.
Find the break-even asset cost
The per-asset production cost at which the campaign stops being profitable, which is the number that should govern creative decisions.
What it is for
Why this one is worth having
Production cost is not free
Creative is treated as a fixed cost that happened elsewhere. At forty assets a month it is a variable cost and frequently the largest one.
Attribution is doing a lot of work
Platform-reported revenue is generous by construction. It is fine for comparing campaigns against each other and unreliable as an absolute.
Cheap assets change the maths entirely
The reason generated creative matters commercially is not quality. It is that the break-even calculation moves when an asset costs a few pennies rather than a few hundred pounds.
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What you can already do
The per-model credit rates are published on the pricing page, so the production side of this can be a real number rather than an estimate.
PricingFAQ
ROAS calculator, asked and answered
What ROAS should I aim for?
Whatever clears your margin plus your other costs, which is a business question rather than an advertising one. A 3x on a 20 percent margin is a loss.
Should I trust the platform's ROAS?
As a relative measure between campaigns, mostly. As an absolute claim about incremental revenue, no, and the gap has widened since the attribution changes.
Does including production cost change decisions?
Frequently. It is what tells you whether to make one expensive asset or thirty cheap ones, which is the actual strategic question.
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