Why marketing ROI matters
Marketing budgets are under pressure. The Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets average 7.7 percent of revenue, the same as a year earlier. 59 percent of the marketing leaders surveyed say that budget is too tight for their strategy.
With a fixed budget, you want to know which activities pay off. Marketing ROI helps in three ways:
- Allocating budget: you see which channels and campaigns deserve more.
- Adjusting course: you change or stop campaigns that deliver little.
- Accountability: you show the board and finance what marketing contributes to revenue.
How do you calculate marketing ROI?
The standard formula for marketing ROI is simple. Subtract marketing costs from the return, then divide by marketing costs:
Marketing ROI = (return from marketing − marketing costs) / marketing costs × 100%
Salesforce and Mailchimp both use this formula. An example: you spend €20,000 on marketing in a quarter and win four new clients who together bring in €60,000 in gross margin. Your marketing ROI is then (60,000 − 20,000) / 20,000 × 100% = 200 percent.
Use margin, not just revenue
Many examples use revenue. For a fair picture, gross margin works better: revenue minus the cost of your product or service. A campaign that brings in €100,000 in revenue at a 20 percent margin earns back less than it seems.
Count all marketing costs
Media spend is only part of the bill. For an event, Salesforce also lists promotion, speakers, venue and catering. So include:
- ad spend on LinkedIn, Google and other channels;
- production of content, video and landing pages;
- tools, such as marketing automation and analytics;
- hours from your own team or agency.
Look at value across the whole client relationship
In B2B, a client often brings in revenue for years. Customer lifetime value is the total value of a client over the whole relationship. Oracle lists it as one way to measure return, alongside cost per acquisition and sales cycle length. If you only count the first order, you underestimate what your marketing is worth.
What is a good marketing ROI?
A common rule of thumb is a 5 to 1 ratio: five euros back for every euro of marketing spend. That is a marketing ROI of 400 percent. Mailchimp, Oracle and Alexander Jarvis call 10 to 1 exceptional. Below 2 to 1, marketing is usually not profitable according to them, especially once production and distribution are counted.
| Return : cost ratio | Marketing ROI | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| 2 : 1 | 100% | Often not profitable after all costs |
| 5 : 1 | 400% | Good |
| 10 : 1 | 900% | Exceptional |
Treat these figures as a guide, not a standard. What counts as good depends on your margin, your industry and the stage your business is in. With a high margin, a lower ratio can still be profitable.
What is the difference between ROI and ROAS?
ROAS stands for return on ad spend. It divides revenue from ads by ad costs. ROAS therefore only looks at media spend and revenue, without other costs or margin.
ROAS is useful for comparing campaigns within an ad platform. Marketing ROI shows whether your marketing as a whole is profitable. A campaign with a high ROAS can still have a low ROI, for example when the margin is thin or production costs are high.
How do you measure marketing ROI in B2B?
Marketing ROI is harder to measure in B2B than in an online shop. Months pass between the first click and a signed contract. According to 6sense, the average B2B buying cycle in 2025 was just over ten months. There are also several decision makers and touchpoints, as we describe in our article on what B2B marketing is.
Choose an attribution model
Attribution decides which touchpoint gets credit for the revenue. Oracle describes two basic models:
- Direct attribution: all of the return goes to one touchpoint, usually the last one before the purchase.
- Indirect attribution: the return is spread across all touchpoints.
Oracle recommends using both. That shows which activities close deals and which help start them.
Connect marketing to your CRM
In B2B, revenue comes from sales conversations, so the data on won deals sits in your CRM. Without a link to your marketing, you cannot tell which campaign led to a client. With marketing automation in HubSpot you connect enquiries, deals and campaigns. Sales intelligence also shows which companies visit your website before they get in touch.
Give brand awareness time
According to LinkedIn's B2B Institute, about 95 percent of your potential buyers are not in the market right now. If you only measure marketing ROI in the short term, you mostly measure the 5 percent who already want to buy. The same research found that 96 percent of B2B marketers expected to see a campaign's effect within two weeks. Brand awareness campaigns often pay off later and deserve a longer measurement period.
How we measure marketing ROI at Art of Advertising
We judge campaigns on what they deliver in the pipeline, not on clicks or forms. Where possible, we feed sales results from the CRM back into the campaigns for our clients. That way you see per channel which enquiries become clients.
At Partnify we connected HubSpot to Meta. Every deal in HubSpot feeds back to Meta, so the campaigns learn which leads become clients.
every deal in HubSpot feeds back to Meta, so the campaigns learn which leads become customers
Want to know how we build demand and measure it all the way to the deal? Read more on our page about demand generation.
Marketing ROI becomes reliable with the right data
You calculate marketing ROI with a simple formula, but the result is only as good as the figures you put in. Use margin instead of revenue, count all costs and look at value across the whole client relationship. In B2B, ROI only becomes truly measurable when you connect marketing and CRM and give brand campaigns time to take effect.
