ROMI Return on Marketing Investment
What ROMI answers is the question ROAS leaves open: after the goods have been paid for, did this campaign make money?
ROMI = (ROAS × gross margin − 1) × 100
The result is a percentage. Above zero the campaign earns, below zero it does not.
What is ROMI called in English, and why you rarely see it
Mostly, it is called marketing ROI. The acronym is common in continental European marketing writing and in academic work, and comparatively rare in day-to-day English-language agency talk, where the same idea travels as marketing ROI or gets skipped in favour of ROAS.
That matters for a practical reason. Search for marketing ROI in English and most results divide revenue minus cost by cost. The continental convention, used here, divides gross profit minus cost by cost. Same name, different numerator.
On identical inputs the gap is not subtle. A campaign with $10,000 revenue on $2,500 spend at a 30% margin reads as 300% under the revenue convention and 20% under the profit one. Neither is wrong, but only one of them survives contact with your bank account.
Worked through
Take a 4x ROAS at a 35% margin:
- (4 × 0.35 − 1) × 100
- (1.4 − 1) × 100
- 40%
Forty cents of gross profit per dollar of advertising. Now drop the margin to 20% and hold everything else:
- (4 × 0.20 − 1) × 100
- −20%
Same campaign, same platform report, same 4x that would have been called a win in the stand-up. The product changed, and the campaign now loses money on every order.
Zero sits exactly on the break-even ROAS
ROMI hits zero when ROAS equals 1 ÷ gross margin, which is the definition of break-even ROAS. The two metrics are the same statement read from different ends: one gives you the threshold, the other tells you how far past it you are.
ROMI and POAS
POAS measures the same thing and displays it differently — a multiple that breaks even at 1, rather than a percentage that breaks even at 0. A ROMI of 40% is a POAS of 1.4.
Pick whichever your team reads faster and use only that one. Running both is how two people argue over a campaign they agree on.
When it earns its keep
Any time you compare campaigns across products whose margins differ from one another. A 6x ROAS on a thin-margin item can be worth less than 3x on a fat-margin one, and ROAS alone will rank them backwards. ROMI orders them correctly. The margin is already inside the number.