The median ecommerce brand earned a ROAS of 3.27 on Google Ads, 3.08 on Amazon, 1.88 on Meta, and 1.51 on TikTok from August 2025 to July 2026, according to Triple Whale data from more than 21,000 brands on Google and more than 40,000 on Meta. A good ROAS for your business is any number above your breakeven ROAS, which is 1 divided by your gross margin. In short, a store with a 50 percent margin breaks even at 2.0, and a store with a 25 percent margin needs 4.0 just to cover its product costs. The same 3.0 campaign can make money for one store and lose money for another.
This guide pulls together current ROAS benchmarks by industry and platform, shows how to turn your margin into a breakeven number, and compares the two so you can tell whether a benchmark is actually good for your category. To check your own campaign first, enter revenue and ad spend in the ROAS Calculator. To find the margin you need for the breakeven math, use the Margin Calculator.
ROAS Benchmarks by Platform
Triple Whale, an ecommerce analytics company, publishes median results for the brands that connect their ad accounts to its software. The figures below cover August 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026, and the change column compares them with the same 12 months a year earlier.
| Platform | Brands in sample | Median ROAS | Prior year | Change | Median CPA | Median conversion rate | Median order value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 21,000+ | 3.27 | 3.39 | -3.54% | $28.14 | 3.11% | $87.65 |
| Amazon Ads | 2,800+ | 3.08 | 2.81 | +9.70% | $13.98 | 10.77% | $39.93 |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | 40,000+ | 1.88 | 1.86 | +0.57% | $38.99 | 1.53% | $73.36 |
| TikTok Ads | 5,900+ | 1.51 | 1.43 | +5.85% |
Google leads because search ads mostly reach people who are already looking for a product. Meta and TikTok mostly create demand among people who were not shopping yet, so fewer of the sales they start are credited back to the ad. Even so, the same brands put 66.88 percent of their ad spend on Meta and 22.50 percent on Google over the period. Meta reaches far more new customers, and many brands accept a lower first-order ROAS there in exchange for that reach.
Amazon shows a different pattern. Its conversion rate (10.77 percent) is more than three times Google's, because shoppers on Amazon are already on a store page, but its median order value ($39.93) is less than half of Google's. Use the AOV Calculator and the Conversion Rate Calculator to see where your own store sits on those two numbers, since both feed straight into ROAS.
ROAS Benchmarks by Industry on Google Ads and Meta
The table sets the median ROAS for each industry on both platforms side by side. Triple Whale labels the categories, and a few appear on only one platform.
| Industry | Google Ads ROAS | Change | Meta ROAS | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sports and Outdoors | 4.35 | +6.49% | 2.35 | +5.02% |
| Automotive | 4.07 | -2.06% | ||
| Travel Accessories (and Luggage on Meta) | 4.07 | -13.10% | 2.28 | +0.76% |
| Apparel and Accessories | 3.99 | -0.47% | 2.24 | +4.76% |
| Baby | 3.71 | -4.90% | 2.25 | +4.20% |
| Home and Garden | 3.48 | -2.55% | 2.25 | +6.04% |
| Toys, Art and Collectibles | 3.22 | -0.75% | 1.95 | +2.04% |
| Food and Beverage | 3.18 | -5.04% | 1.61 | +7.08% |
| Business Supplies and Equipment | 3.15 | -2.45% | 2.34 | +16.56% |
| Lifestyle and Boutique | 3.10 | +10.13% | 2.04 | +9.72% |
| Electronics | 2.91 | -9.73% | 1.94 | -1.31% |
| Pets and Animals | 2.88 | +2.54% | 1.60 | +2.50% |
| Beauty | 2.81 | -2.13% | 1.54 | -3.59% |
| Books and Music | 2.79 | +1.07% | 1.65 | +2.35% |
| Health and Wellness | 2.06 | -8.73% | 1.44 | -8.47% |
| Medical Devices and Equipment | 1.63 | +7.41% | ||
| E-Learning and Online Courses | 1.19 | -5.80% | ||
| Media and Publishing | 1.13 | -3.14% | ||
| All brands | 3.27 | -3.54% | 1.88 | +0.57% |
Google beats Meta in every industry that appears on both lists, usually by more than a full point. The gap is shrinking, though. Google ROAS fell in 11 of 15 industries over the year while Meta ROAS rose in 12 of 17. Sports and outdoors leads on both platforms, and health and wellness sits near the bottom of both.
Amazon ROAS by Category, and How ROAS Converts to ACOS
Amazon sellers usually track ACOS, the advertising cost of sales, instead of ROAS. Amazon Ads defines ROAS as the inverse of ACOS, so ACOS = 1 / ROAS. A ROAS of 4.0 is an ACOS of 25 percent. The ACOS column below is our arithmetic using that definition.
| Category | Median Amazon ROAS | Change | Equivalent ACOS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electronics | 3.93 | +7.75% | 25.4% |
| Sports and Outdoors | 3.56 | +8.95% | 28.1% |
| Home and Garden | 3.54 | +11.85% | 28.2% |
| Apparel and Accessories | 3.46 | +16.95% | 28.9% |
| Toys, Art and Collectibles | 3.44 | +4.37% | 29.1% |
| Pets and Animals | 2.74 | +5.72% | 36.5% |
| Food and Beverage | 2.73 | +11.04% | 36.6% |
| Beauty | 2.72 | +6.29% | 36.8% |
| Health and Wellness | 2.46 | -2.44% | 40.7% |
| All brands | 3.08 | +9.70% | 32.5% |
Every Amazon category improved except health and wellness, and the overall median rose 9.70 percent. Electronics does far better on Amazon (3.93) than on Google (2.91) or Meta (1.94).
Your Breakeven ROAS Decides What Counts as Good
A benchmark tells you what other brands earn. It does not tell you whether a campaign makes money for you. For that you need your breakeven ROAS:
Breakeven ROAS = 1 / gross margin (as a decimal)
Amazon's own ACOS guide makes the same point from the other direction: breakeven ACOS equals your profit margin, and ROAS is the inverse of ACOS.
Example 1: one product. A store sells a jacket for $80, and the jacket costs $32 to make and land. Gross profit is $48, a 60 percent margin. Breakeven ROAS = 1 / 0.60 = 1.67. Check it: $1,000 of ad spend at 1.67 brings in about $1,667 of revenue, and 60 percent of $1,667 is $1,000, which exactly covers the ads.
Example 2: a stricter margin. A store's gross margin is 40 percent, so the simple breakeven is 1 / 0.40 = 2.50. But it also pays free shipping worth 5 percent of revenue and card fees of 3 percent. Its contribution margin is 40 - 5 - 3 = 32 percent, and breakeven rises to 1 / 0.32 = 3.13. A campaign at 3.0 looks fine against the simple number and loses money against the real one.
Example 3: a margin cliff. At a 25 percent margin, breakeven is 1 / 0.25 = 4.0, which is higher than the median on every platform in the tables above. Low-margin sellers usually need a higher order value, repeat purchases, or a cheaper channel to make paid ads work.
Breakeven ROAS by Industry Margin
To see whether the benchmarks clear breakeven in each industry, the table below converts typical gross margins into breakeven ROAS. The margins come from Aswath Damodaran's January 2026 data set at NYU Stern, which covers US public companies. The breakeven column is our arithmetic, and the matching Triple Whale category is the closest fit, not an exact one.
| Industry (Damodaran) | Gross margin | Breakeven ROAS | Closest Triple Whale median (Google / Meta) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel | 56.88% | 1.76 | Apparel and Accessories 3.99 / 2.24 |
| Healthcare Products | 54.00% | 1.85 | Health and Wellness 2.06 / 1.44 |
| Household Products | 51.04% | 1.96 | Beauty 2.81 / 1.54 |
| Shoe | 43.88% | 2.28 | Apparel and Accessories 3.99 / 2.24 |
| Recreation | 39.79% | 2.51 | Sports and Outdoors 4.35 / 2.35 |
| Electronics (Consumer and Office) | 38.77% | 2.58 | Electronics 2.91 / 1.94 |
| Retail (Special Lines) | 35.30% | 2.83 | |
| Retail (General) | 33.18% | 3.01 | |
| Furniture and Home Furnishings | 30.28% | 3.30 | Home and Garden 3.48 / 2.25 |
| Retail (Grocery and Food) | 26.31% | 3.80 | Food and Beverage 3.18 / 1.61 |
| Food Processing | 23.23% | 4.30 | Food and Beverage 3.18 / 1.61 |
| Retail (Automotive) | 21.96% | 4.55 | Automotive 4.07 / none |
| All US public companies | 37.76% | 2.65 | All brands 3.27 / 1.88 |
Read this way, the Google medians clear gross-margin breakeven in most categories, apart from food and automotive retail. Home furnishings is the closest call, with a 3.48 median against a 3.30 breakeven. The Meta medians clear breakeven only in apparel, where a 2.24 median beats a 1.76 breakeven by a wide margin.
That does not mean Meta loses money for most brands. These are first-order, platform-reported numbers. Brands that keep spending on Meta below first-order breakeven are usually counting on repeat purchases from the customers it brings in, or on sales the platform does not credit to the ad. If your business has neither, the table is a fair warning.
Target ROAS for a Profit Goal
Breakeven only covers product costs. If you want each campaign to leave a set share of revenue as profit after ads, subtract that share from the margin before dividing:
Target ROAS = 1 / (gross margin - target profit share)
With a 50 percent gross margin and a goal of keeping 15 percent of revenue as profit, target ROAS = 1 / (0.50 - 0.15) = 1 / 0.35 = 2.86. Check it: $1,000 of ad spend at 2.86 brings $2,860 in revenue, gross profit is $1,430, and after the $1,000 of ads, $430 is left, which is 15 percent of $2,860.
Here is a worked example with the ROAS Calculator. A home furnishings store spends $3,200 and records $9,600 in attributed revenue. The calculator returns 3.00, or 300 percent. With a 30.28 percent margin, breakeven is 3.30, so the campaign is under water: gross profit is about $2,907, which falls $293 short of the ad spend. The store needs either a higher ROAS or a better margin before it adds budget.
Why Platform ROAS and Your Real Return Disagree
Every number in this guide is reported by the ad platforms themselves. Each platform credits itself with any sale that falls inside its attribution window, so two platforms can both claim the same order. Triple Whale notes that its Amazon figures are platform-reported, and it warns that last-click tracking may undercount TikTok sales that happen days after someone sees an ad. TikTok's industry medians swing too much to use as benchmarks, with some close to zero, so this guide leaves them out.
Keep three checks in mind before acting on a ROAS figure:
- Compare like with like. Use the same date range, attribution window, and revenue definition (before or after refunds and discounts) for every channel.
- Separate new and returning customers. Retargeting ads close shoppers who were already likely to buy, so they show high ROAS that would partly have happened anyway.
- Test incrementality when budgets are large. A holdout test, where one region or audience gets no ads for a period, shows how many sales the ads actually added.
ROAS for Lead-Generation and B2B Businesses
The benchmarks above come from online stores, where revenue is recorded at checkout. Service and B2B businesses sell offline, so they have to estimate revenue from lead value:
Lead value = close rate × average sale value
Take a home services firm that pays $80 per lead, closes 20 percent of leads, and earns $1,000 per job. These are illustrative numbers, not benchmarks. Each lead is worth 0.20 × $1,000 = $200, so ROAS is $200 / $80 = 2.5. If the firm keeps a 40 percent gross margin on each job, breakeven is 1 / 0.40 = 2.5, so this campaign only breaks even. To lower your cost per lead, look at your cost per click with the CPC Calculator and your ad click-through rate with the CTR Calculator.
How to Set a ROAS Target in Google Ads and Meta
Both platforms let you bid toward a ROAS target, but they write it differently.
- Google Ads writes the target as a percentage. Google's help page gives the example of a store that wants $5 in sales for every $1 of ad spend: that is a target ROAS of 500 percent. Search and Shopping campaigns need at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days before the strategy works well. Google suggests starting from your historical figure, found in the "Conv. value / cost" column, and warns that a target set too high can cut traffic.
- Meta writes the goal as a ratio. Its help page explains that a ROAS goal of 1.100 aims for about $110 in purchases for every $100 spent, a 110 percent return. It works best with 50 to 100 conversions a week, and Meta advises waiting 7 days after a change before judging results.
A sound starting target is your breakeven or profit-goal ROAS from the sections above, not the industry median. If your target is far above your recent results, raise it in steps so the campaign keeps enough volume to learn. For campaigns bought on impressions, the CPM Calculator shows what each thousand views costs before any sale happens.
Methodology and Limitations
- Sources. Platform and industry medians come from Triple Whale's Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, and TikTok Ads benchmark reports, updated in August 2026, covering August 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026 with year-over-year changes against the prior 12 months. Gross margins come from Aswath Damodaran's "Margins by Sector (US)" data set at NYU Stern, dated January 2026. Definitions come from the Google Ads Help article on Target ROAS, the Meta Business Help Centre article on ROAS goals, and Amazon Ads' guide to ACOS. We loaded every source on October 3, 2026.
- Our calculations. The ACOS, breakeven ROAS, and target ROAS figures are our arithmetic from the published numbers, using the formulas shown above.
- One data set for industry ROAS. We found no second independent source of industry ROAS that published its sample, date range, and method. Figures from other vendors that we could not trace back to a primary source are left out.
- Who is in the sample. Triple Whale's customers are mostly direct-to-consumer brands selling through online stores. Service businesses, B2B firms, travel, finance, and legal advertisers are not represented, so use the lead-value method above instead.
- Margins are from large public companies. Smaller online brands often earn higher gross margins because they sell direct, but they also carry shipping and fulfilment costs that gross margin may not include. Use your own margin whenever you have it.
- Medians change. Triple Whale updates these reports in place, so the figures will move. Treat them as a reference range, not a target.