ROI (return on investment)
ROI answers the question every UA budget eventually faces: after paying for the ads, how much did we gain or lose for each dollar spent? Zero means you broke even; below zero means the campaign has not paid back yet.
Updated
In app marketing, ROI compares the revenue a campaign’s users generated with what the campaign cost. Adapty Ads Manager reports it for every campaign, ad group and keyword, and as a cohort metric, so you can read it at the level where bidding decisions are made.
How ROI is calculated
A positive ROI means revenue exceeded spend; a negative ROI means it has not yet. Because the result is net of spend, 0% is the breakeven line, which makes ROI easy to read at a glance across many keywords. An ROI of 100% means revenue was twice the spend; an ROI of −100% means it has returned nothing yet.
ROI vs ROAS
ROAS divides revenue by spend without subtracting spend first, so breakeven is 100% rather than 0%. The two carry the same information: ROI is ROAS minus 100 percentage points. In the example above, a ROAS of 150% is an ROI of 50%. Use whichever your team reads more easily, and do not mix them in one report.
What revenue ROI uses
In Adapty Ads Manager, Revenue is the money generated from purchases, renewals and other monetized conversions before store commission. That keeps revenue comparable across apps and store programs, but it means ROI is not profit.
- Store commission. Apple keeps a share of each transaction, so the amount that reaches you is lower than the revenue ROI uses.
- Other costs. ROI here counts only ad spend. Creative production, tools and team costs are outside the formula.
- Your breakeven. If your net share after commission is lower than gross revenue, the ROI you need to break even in cash terms is above 0%. Work out that threshold from your own commission rate and costs.
Cohort ROI and payback
Subscription revenue arrives over months, not on install day. ROI for a reporting period mixes revenue from users acquired long ago with spend on users acquired this week, which can make a campaign look better or worse than it is.
Cohort ROI fixes this by tying revenue back to the users acquired in a given period and tracking it as the cohort ages. A cohort that starts with a negative ROI and crosses 0% on a later day tells you your payback period, which is the number that should set how aggressively you bid.
Improving ROI
- Move budget toward keywords and ad groups whose cohorts pay back fastest.
- Lower bids on terms that bring downloads but few trials or subscriptions.
- Match the paywall to the keyword’s intent, so more of the traffic you pay for converts.
- Add negative keywords for searches that never become paying subscribers.