Is your funnel actually profitable?
Plug in your traffic, ad spend, conversion rate, and average order value. Get monthly revenue, ROAS, CAC, profit, and break-even traffic in real time. Real numbers, no marketing-spin defaults.
Four numbers that decide everything.
Every paid funnel lives and dies by four metrics: ROAS, CAC, ROI, and break-even traffic. Get them right and you can scale spend confidently. Get them wrong and you'll burn cash chasing vanity revenue.
ROAS · Return on ad spend
ROAS = Revenue / Ad spend
How many dollars of revenue you generate per dollar of ad spend. A ROAS of 3 means $3 in revenue for every $1 spent. Healthy benchmark for info products is 3-5x. Below 2x usually means the campaign loses money after refunds and fixed costs.
CAC · Customer acquisition cost
CAC = Total costs / New customers
The fully-loaded cost to acquire one buyer. A common rule: CAC should be under 30-40% of average order value for single-purchase funnels. Subscription businesses can tolerate higher CAC because they recover the cost over months.
ROI · Return on investment
ROI = (Revenue - Costs) / Costs × 100
Profit as a percentage of total spend. 200% ROI means you doubled your money. Different from ROAS because ROI accounts for ALL costs (ads + tools + content + refunds), not just ad spend.
Break-even traffic
Break-even = Total costs / RPV
RPV (revenue per visitor) equals AOV times conversion rate. Break-even traffic is the number of visitors needed to cover all costs. Every visitor above that line generates pure profit.
Industry benchmarks
| Metric | Healthy | Weak | Strong |
|---|---|---|---|
| ROAS (info products) | 3-5x | Below 2x | 6x+ |
| ROAS (e-commerce) | 4-6x | Below 3x | 8x+ |
| CAC : AOV ratio | 1:3 to 1:4 | 1:1 or worse | 1:5+ |
| Cold-traffic conversion | 2-3% | Below 1% | 5%+ |
| Warm-traffic conversion | 5-10% | Below 3% | 15%+ |
| Refund rate (digital products) | 3-7% | 10%+ | Below 2% |
Benchmarks aggregated from public reports by WordStream (2024), Klaviyo Q4 2023 e-commerce data, and aggregated systeme.io customer funnel data. Numbers vary by niche, traffic source, and offer maturity.
Honest answers.
Funnel ROI (return on investment) is the profit a sales funnel produces divided by the total cost to acquire those buyers, expressed as a percentage or ratio. The formula is (revenue minus costs) divided by costs, multiplied by 100. A 200% ROI means you earn $2 of profit for every $1 spent. Funnel ROI is the single most important health metric for any paid-traffic operator because it tells you whether your ad spend is creating real economic value.
Return on ad spend (ROAS) benchmarks vary by business model. For info products and courses, a healthy ROAS is 3-5x. Below 2x usually means the campaign is unprofitable after refunds and fixed costs. For low-ticket tripwire funnels designed to break even on the front end and profit on the backend (upsells, recurring revenue), 1.5-2x ROAS is acceptable. Subscription and high-LTV businesses can sustain ROAS below 1x if customer lifetime value is high enough to recover the loss within 6-12 months.
CAC is total acquisition cost divided by the number of new customers acquired in the same period. For a paid funnel, CAC equals ad spend divided by buyers. If you spent $5,000 on ads in a month and got 100 customers, your CAC is $50. The same formula works for organic acquisition: divide content costs (writer fees, time at hourly rate, SEO tools) by the number of buyers attributed to that channel.
A common rule of thumb is that CAC should be no more than 30-40% of average order value for a profitable single-purchase funnel. If your AOV is $100, your CAC ideally stays under $30-40. Businesses with high customer lifetime value (subscriptions, repeat-purchase models) can sustain CAC above AOV because they recover the loss over time. For pure tripwire funnels with no backend, CAC above 50% of AOV usually means the campaign is unprofitable.
Cold-traffic sales funnels typically convert 1-3% of visitors into buyers on the main offer page. Warm traffic (existing email list, referrals, retargeting) converts 5-15%. Two-step squeeze funnels (where visitors opt in first, then see the sales page) can hit 10-25% lead-to-buyer rates. Conversion rate varies heavily by traffic source, offer maturity, price point, and niche. Optimize the page itself before scaling traffic spend.
Break-even traffic is the number of visitors you need to recover your ad spend. The formula is total costs divided by revenue per visitor. Revenue per visitor equals AOV times conversion rate. If your AOV is $100, conversion rate is 2%, and total monthly costs are $4,000, you earn $2 per visitor and need 2,000 visitors per month to break even. Anything above that line is profit.
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