“What was the ROI on Q2?” is a fair question. “We did $19k in revenue so ROI is infinite” is not an answer - it’s a vibe. Business ROI gets messy because attribution is political and margin is someone else’s spreadsheet tab. I still run the simple version first; if the simple version is embarrassing, the fancy dashboard won’t save the story.
Fence the cost to the experiment
For one campaign, cost should be the cash that wouldn’t have been spent if the campaign didn’t exist - ads, creative, that landing-page experiment, the contractor who set up tracking. Not your entire office lease. I once saw a deck allocate 12% of “brand team salary” to every initiative; maybe that’s your accounting policy, but then apply it consistently or you’re comparing apples to tax forms.
Suppose paid search + creative for a month was $6,500. That’s your denominator candidate unless you have a cleaner definition you can defend out loud.
Revenue is bragging; margin is closer to truth
Say you attribute $19,000 in revenue to that spend. Cool slide. If variable costs eat 60%, gross profit attributable is about $7,600. Subtract the $6,500 spend and you’re left with roughly $1,100 - still positive, far less cinematic. ROI on the $6,500 is about 17%, not whatever story you’d tell if you divided revenue by spend.
Change margin to 35% and the same revenue barely clears cost. That sensitivity is why I roll my eyes when people treat top-line attribution as profit.
Where the calculators live
Know gain and cost already? The ROI calculator is enough. Living in marketing-English? The marketing ROI calculator matches how media teams talk about campaign gain vs spend.
If ROI looks fine but cash feels awful, pair with profit margin work - timing and COGS hide in there.
Stuff I won’t pretend to solve in 800 words
Brand campaigns with fuzzy lift: track what you can, label the rest as strategic, stop forcing a fake single ROI number you’ll regret defending in January.
Founder time has a cost; if you’re arguing with investors, either estimate loaded hours or exclude it - but don’t mix methods across two slides.
Still not GAAP advice. Your finance partner owns the final word.