Google Ads ROAS: benchmarks and how Target ROAS works
The ROAS in your Google Ads account is not quite the same number you would get anywhere else, and the formula is not the reason. The reason is that it rests on conversion values you report yourself, and that the bid strategy wants it as a percentage rather than a multiple. Both are unpacked below, alongside industry medians from more than 21,000 stores. For the plain calculation with no platform attached, use the ROAS calculator.
Pre-filled with figures typical of Google Ads
ROAS
—
Conversion value ÷ cost
Target ROAS as a percentage
—
The format the bid field expects
The second card shows the same figure in the notation the bid field wants. If you want 4x, you enter 400.
What is a good ROAS in Google Ads? Median by industry
These are medians across more than 21,000 stores, measured over twelve months. Median means half the stores sit below the number. Only the comparison within your own row tells you anything.
| Industry | Median ROAS | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| Sports & outdoors | 4.35x | +6.5% |
| Automotive | 4.07x | −2.1% |
| Travel accessories & luggage | 4.07x | −13.1% |
| Apparel & accessories | 3.99x | −0.5% |
| Baby | 3.71x | −4.9% |
| Home & garden | 3.48x | −2.6% |
| Toys, art & collectibles | 3.22x | −0.8% |
| Food & beverage | 3.18x | −5.0% |
| Business supplies | 3.15x | −2.5% |
| Lifestyle & boutique | 3.10x | +10.1% |
| Electronics | 2.91x | −9.7% |
| Pets & animals | 2.88x | +2.5% |
| Beauty | 2.81x | −2.1% |
| Books & music | 2.79x | +1.1% |
| Health & wellness | 2.06x | −8.7% |
The direction is more interesting than the level. Ten of the fifteen industries fell year on year, electronics and health by nearly ten per cent. So if your own ROAS is drifting down, check whether the market moved before you rebuild the account. Whether any of these numbers means profit is a separate question, and the margin decides it: the break-even ROAS calculator works out the line below which a campaign loses money despite the revenue.
Target ROAS as a bid strategy: what Google actually does with it
Target ROAS is an instruction, not a report. Google describes it plainly: for every single query the strategy predicts what a conversion would be worth and bids accordingly. Plenty of predicted value, high bid. Little value, low bid.
Two things about that get missed. The unit, first. The field takes a percentage, not a multiple. A target of 4x is 400. Enter 4 and you have asked for a four per cent return, which the system will happily deliver on.
The data underneath, second. The strategy runs on the conversion values your account reports. Report order values with tax and shipping included and Google works with inflated numbers, so the reported ROAS flatters you. Report no values at all and the strategy has nothing to optimise against. That is what separates this from ordinary reporting: a wrong value does not merely distort the number, it steers the bid.
Which forces an order of work that nobody enjoys. Fix conversion tracking, then set a target. Do it the other way round and the system will optimise reliably towards a metric it has wrong.
The same campaign across three channels gives you three different numbers, and none of them is wrong. How Meta shifts the figure through its attribution window is covered in the Meta ROAS calculator. Why Amazon inverts the metric altogether and reports ACOS instead sits in the ACOS calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good ROAS in Google Ads?
- It depends on your industry and, more than that, on your margin. Medians across 21,000+ stores run from 2.06x in health and wellness to 4.35x in sports and outdoors. More useful than any industry figure is your own break-even ROAS, which is 1 ÷ gross margin. Only above that line does a campaign make money.
- Why is Google ROAS higher than Meta ROAS?
- Largely because Google Ads captures demand that already exists, while Meta has to create it. In the same dataset the median runs 2.06x to 4.35x on Google and 1.13x to 2.35x on Meta. Treat the comparison with care though: each platform attributes conversions by its own rules.
- Do you enter Target ROAS as a multiple or a percentage?
- As a percentage. A target of 4x goes in as 400, and 2.5x as 250. It is the most common mis-entry in that field, and it usually surfaces only when the budget drains faster than planned.
- What happens if conversion values are reported incorrectly?
- The bid strategy optimises towards the wrong thing. If your reported values include tax or shipping, Google treats every conversion as worth more than it is and bids too aggressively. The reported ROAS looks healthy while your contribution margin falls.
Background & sources
- Median ROAS by industry, measured across more than 21,000 stores over a twelve-month period: Triple Whale – «Google Ads Benchmarks by Industry».
- How Target ROAS predicts conversion value and derives bids from it, including the percentage notation in the target field: Google Ads Help – «About Target ROAS bidding».
- The Smart Bidding strategies in context and which signals feed the bid decision: Google Ads Help – «About Smart Bidding».