Your 19x ROAS is really 4x ROAS.
July 29, 2026
Part of our Forgotten CFO series, written for the finance leaders who have to make marketing numbers add up. And marketing teams looking for quicker sign-off.
Most finance leaders know this moment well. The marketing team comes into the trading meeting with a return on ad spend of 19x. For every £1 of media, the ad platform says the campaign brought back £19. Everyone is pleased, except finance. The problem is that the £19 is what the platform reports, not what the business gets to keep. And the finance leader is usually the only person in the room thinking about the difference.
A lot of the friction between finance and marketing starts here, with two teams looking at two different numbers and assuming they mean the same thing. Marketing brings the platform number to be celebrated, and finance is left to question it, which is how the finance leader so often ends up cast as the blocker on a good day. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a gross figure. It counts the revenue a platform attributes to a campaign before the business has paid for any of the costs that sit behind that revenue. Once those costs come out, the real return is a long way below the headline.
Where the 19x goes
Let’s say a campaign reports 19x on £100,000 of media. That is £1.9m of revenue credited to the campaign. Then the business starts paying for what that revenue actually cost.
Product returns: These come out first. In fashion that is often around 40% of orders, so £1.9m drops to roughly £1.14m.
Cost of goods: At a 50% product margin that leaves about £570,000 of gross profit.
Cost of fulfilment, selling and payment: Fulfilment plus the selling and payment fees on every order, including the ones that came back, take another slice, leaving around £500,000.
Media spend: Last of all, take out the £100,000 spent on the media itself, and about £400,000 of contribution remains.
That £400,000 on £100,000 of spend is a return of 4x. The 19x that looked so good in the meeting is a 4x by the time the money reaches the P&L. And that lower figure is the one finance answers for.
People go bust with amazing sales, because they’ve not thought about the contribution.
Karl Lloyd, Fractional CFO
And 4x ROAS is a good outcome. Plenty of businesses are not running at 19x ROAS, they are running at 5x, and a 5x headline through the same set of costs can leave a business barely covering the media that produced it. The top line looks like growth while the contribution line barely moves.
Two numbers doing two jobs
None of this makes marketing wrong. The platform number is useful for steering campaigns during the week, deciding what to turn up and what to pause. However, it is the wrong number for working out whether the business made money. Finance has to answer that every month, and the platform figure does not help them do it. Marketing is measured on the platform number, so that is the number it defends. Finance is measured on contribution, so that is the number it trusts. Both sides are doing their job, and that is exactly why they keep talking past each other.
Agree on the number that matters
The way through this is to settle on one number that both finance and marketing use the same way. For a consumer business, that number is contribution: what is left after product, fulfilment, fees and the media itself. Marketing can still run day-to-day campaigns on platform signals. But when the meeting comes round to signing off the next £100,000, everyone is looking at the same figure, so the meeting is spent agreeing how much to invest, rather than arguing over what the numbers mean. Finance stops being the one who questions every win, and marketing stops feeling second-guessed.
This is what finance-fluent marketing looks like in practice. It is less about marketers learning to read a P&L, though that helps, and more about leading with the number the board already trusts. When they do, finance can spend the meeting deciding how hard to back the plan, rather than working out what the numbers really mean.
The best operators we work with understand this. They have stopped presenting the 19x ROAS. They present the 4x ROAS, and what they intend to do with it.
Forward this to your marketing team to get the conversation started.
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