Social Media ROI Calculator
Calculate the ROI percentage of a social media campaign from spend and attributed revenue, plus optional cost per engagement and cost per follower.
$
Ad spend, boosted posts, and/or campaign cost
$
Likes, comments, shares, clicks — enables cost per engagement
Enables cost per follower
Campaign ROI
+300.0%
Total spend: $500.00
Cost per engagement: $0.13
Cost per new follower: $1.67
How Social Media ROI Is Calculated
Enter your total social media spend (ad spend, boosted posts, or overall campaign cost) and the revenue you can attribute to that activity. Return on investment (ROI) expresses the net gain as a percentage of what you spent.
If revenue is hard to attribute directly, you can optionally enter total engagements (likes, comments, shares, clicks) or new followers gained to see a cost-per-engagement or cost-per-follower figure instead — useful secondary metrics for brand-awareness or growth-focused campaigns where direct revenue tracking is harder.
Example
A campaign costing $500 in ad spend that generates $2,000 in attributed revenue has an ROI of (($2,000 − $500) ÷ $500) × 100 = 300%. With 4,000 engagements from that same spend, the cost per engagement is $500 ÷ 4,000 = $0.125.
Common Use Cases
- Reporting social media campaign performance to stakeholders or clients.
- Comparing ROI across different platforms or campaign types.
- Evaluating brand-awareness campaigns using cost per engagement or follower.
- Justifying continued investment in paid social media promotion.
FAQs
How do I attribute revenue to social media specifically?
Common methods include unique discount codes, UTM-tagged links, platform-reported conversion tracking (e.g. Meta or TikTok pixel data), or a dedicated landing page used only for that campaign. Mixing in revenue that would have happened anyway will overstate ROI.
What's a good cost per engagement or follower?
This varies enormously by platform, industry, and audience size — there's no universal benchmark. These figures are most useful for comparing your own campaigns against each other over time, or against your own historical averages.
Should organic (unpaid) social media efforts be included?
This calculator is built around a spend figure, so it's best suited to paid campaigns. For organic efforts, you could still estimate ROI by entering the value of staff/creator time as your "spend" figure.