What Is a Good Marketing ROI?

What Is a Good Marketing ROI Percentage?

A good marketing ROI percentage is any figure above your own minimum, and when ROI is measured on gross profit after every cost of winning customers, the break-even point is zero. How far above zero you need to be depends on how long a customer takes to pay back what you spent to win them, and how long you can afford to wait.

Marketing ROI is the gross profit from the customers marketing won, minus what it cost to win them, divided by that cost, and how to measure digital marketing ROI covers where each input comes from. To work out the minimum to hold it against:

1. Choose the basis, first-year or lifetime gross profit, and write it down, because the same campaign can show a first-year ROI near zero and a lifetime ROI several times larger.
2. Count every cost of winning a customer: ad spend plus agency fees, tools, channel-only creative and any free work your team does to win the sale.
3. Agree with finance how long you can wait to earn that cost back, given your cash position and how fast you're trying to grow.
4. Turn that wait into a floor: a business that can wait a full year has a first-year floor of zero, one that needs its money back sooner needs a higher first-year ROI, and one that can wait longer can accept a negative first year only if it has measured that customers stay.
5. Add a margin for error, since attribution and future tenure are both estimates.
6. Hold each channel and the whole plan against that floor, which is the profit check the Marketing Action Plan applies to every step.

We'll use one running example: a commercial HVAC contractor doing about forty million dollars a year, which sells maintenance agreements to property management firms.

The contractor's channels win firms well under that ceiling, and how to measure digital marketing ROI shows each one's return.

Is a 5:1 Marketing ROI Ratio Good?

A 5:1 marketing ROI ratio, five dollars of revenue for every dollar spent, is a rule of thumb we couldn't trace to any study, and whether it's good depends on your gross margin, because it counts revenue rather than profit. At a gross margin of one fifth, five dollars of revenue leaves one dollar of gross profit, so 5:1 only breaks even.

The ratio also travels badly between reports, because the same 5:1 can be written as several different percentages depending on whether the spend is subtracted and whether margin is applied.

A ratio of revenue to spend is the same arithmetic as ROAS, and what is a good ROAS shows how to find your break-even ratio from your margin, so when someone quotes 5:1, ask which of those lines they mean and translate it into gross profit before comparing it with anything.

What Is the Average Marketing ROI by Industry?

We haven't found an average marketing ROI by industry, with a disclosed method, that a B2B company could plan around. The most rigorous published figures we've found come from econometric studies of consumer advertising, which show how much returns vary and how long they take to arrive.

The largest recent one, Profit Ability 2, was commissioned by Thinkbox, the marketing body for UK commercial TV, and covered £1.8 billion of UK media investment across 10 media, 141 brands and 14 categories.¹ It found an average profit return of £1.87 per pound within 13 weeks and £4.11 over 24 months, on a scale where £1 of profit per pound is the point at which spend stops paying for itself.¹ The full return ran from £4.65 per pound in automotive to £1.95 in financial services, which the study puts down to differences such as product value, operating margins and how strongly advertising moves sales.¹

For a B2B plan the timing matters more than the averages: 58% of the profit arrived after the first 13 weeks, and unbranded paid search had the highest immediate payback but a weak sustained one,¹ so judge each channel over a period that matches your sales cycle.

Survey benchmarks have a different limit, because they report what marketers believe: in the Fall 2024 CMO Survey of US marketing leaders, 54.6% of the 141 who answered said they prove the short-term impact of marketing spend quantitatively, and 41.8% said the same of long-term impact.² So when a survey asks marketers for their ROI, many of the answers are likely to be estimates rather than measured returns, as does email marketing still have the highest ROI shows for the most quoted channel figure.

When Is a Lower Marketing ROI Still a Good Result?

A marketing ROI below your usual target can still be a good result when the customers it wins stay long enough to pay back later, when the spend is a planned test with an end date, or when the return arrives after the period you measured. Each of those needs evidence, because the same explanations are also the usual defense of a channel that isn't working.

• Long-tenure customers, whose modest first-year ROI becomes a large lifetime one, provided you've measured how long that type of customer stays.
• A planned test of a new channel, with a budget you've agreed to risk and a date by which it must show qualified leads.
• Returns that arrive late, from content, events and anything a buyer remembers months before calling, which how to measure content marketing ROI covers.

A high average ROI can point the other way, toward too little spend, because Profit Ability 2 defines a channel's saturation point as the last point where every pound invested still generates at least £1 of profit,¹ and a channel well short of that point may deserve more money. A high ROI also says nothing about whether you can deliver the extra customers, and on the Marketing Action Plan page the contractor's real limit turned out to be how many new buildings its service team could take on.

How Do You Know If Your Marketing ROI Is Good Enough to Spend More?

Your marketing ROI is good enough to spend more when the return on the added spend, measured on gross profit in your CRM, still clears your minimum and your sales and delivery teams can take on the extra customers. The channel's average return matters less than what the next customers cost.

1. Rebuild last quarter's ROI from the CRM on gross profit with every cost included, setting aside the platforms' own figures, which Channel Selection shows can claim more customers than were signed.
2. Put each channel's ROI beside your floor, over a period long enough for its leads to close.
3. Divide the extra spend by the extra customers whenever a budget rises, because the added customer's cost climbs before the average shows it, as the Marketing Action Plan shows.
4. Check capacity with sales and operations, so the added customers can be served at the margin you planned.
5. Raise one proven channel by a step you can afford to lose, keep everything else steady, and read the result before the next step.

When a channel sits below your floor, in our experience the fix is more often in the pages and follow-up than in the budget, and how to improve ROI in digital marketing covers where to look first.