Glossary
Break-even ROAS
Definition
The formula, worked through
Take what is left of each revenue dollar after every cost except ads: product cost, payment fees, shipping, returns. That is your margin before ad spend - in practice your contribution margin before ads. Divide 1 by it. Keep 40 cents per dollar and break-even ROAS is 1 / 0.40 = 2.5x. Keep only 25 cents and it is 4x.
That second example is the trap. A media buyer celebrating a 3x ROAS on a 25%-margin product is celebrating a loss. The same 3x on a 40%-margin product is comfortably profitable. ROAS targets mean nothing until they are anchored to margin.
Why break-even ROAS differs per product and campaign
Margins differ across your catalogue, so there is no single break-even ROAS for a store. A campaign selling your high-margin hero product can afford a much lower ROAS than one pushing a thin-margin accessory, and a campaign that attracts discount-code users has a lower real margin than its product page suggests.
This is why per-campaign break-even targets beat one account-wide number. Easy Profit Calculator computes a break-even ROAS per campaign from your actual margins and shows it next to each campaign's profit-aware ROAS, so the compare is one glance, not a spreadsheet.
Example
Margin before ads is 40%: break-even ROAS = 1 / 0.40 = 2.5x. A campaign at 2.2x loses money, at 2.5x it treads water, at 3.5x it earns 40 cents of profit per ad dollar.