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Join early accessBlended ROAS
MERTotal revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel.
Blended ROAS is total revenue (all channels, including organic) divided by total ad spend across all platforms. Unlike per-platform ROAS, it counts each sale once, so it's the honest read on whether your whole marketing engine pays off. It's the same figure most people call MER.
In practice
Blended ROAS is deliberately unflattering. The denominator is every dollar of marketing spend and the numerator is all revenue — organic, email, repeat customers and word of mouth included — so it can't be gamed by shifting budget between platforms. If it holds flat while one channel's reported ROAS doubles, that channel didn't get better; it got better at claiming credit.
The trade-off is that it won't tell you what to do next. Blended is a business-level health check, not a campaign decision. Use it to answer "is marketing as a whole paying for itself?", then drop into per-channel numbers and incrementality tests when you need to decide where the next dollar goes.
Formula
Blended ROAS = Total revenue ÷ Total ad spend
Example: $120,000 revenue on $29,000 total spend = 4.14× blended ROAS.
What a good result depends on
Depends on margin — a 60%-margin brand can thrive at 2.5×, a thin-margin brand may need 4×+.
Common mistakes
- Comparing blended ROAS to per-platform ROAS — blended is always lower because it removes double-counting.
- Ignoring organic revenue, which flatters the number.
Questions people ask
- Is blended ROAS the same as MER?
- Yes — same calculation, two names. Total revenue divided by total marketing spend. Some teams say blended ROAS, others say MER; if someone quotes one at you, they mean the other.
- Why is my blended ROAS so much lower than Meta's?
- Because Meta counts only the sales it attributes to itself, while blended counts every dollar you spent everywhere. Lower is expected and correct — it's the double-counting coming out, not performance falling.
- Should organic revenue be in the numerator?
- It usually is, and that's the honest point of debate. Including it measures the whole engine; excluding it isolates paid. Either is defensible — pick one, write it down, and stay consistent so the trend stays readable.