If you don’t know what’s working, you’re just burning through your marketing budget.

In the world of home services, every dollar counts. That’s especially true when it comes to your marketing spend. Whether you’re running paid search, social campaigns, or investing in SEO, you need to know exactly what you’re getting in return. That’s where understanding how to track marketing ROI becomes critical.

For contractors, calculating ROI isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s the only way to confidently optimize your marketing campaigns. Without tracking what actually drives calls, form fills, and booked jobs, you’re flying blind. And in a competitive market, guessing wrong means wasted marketing cost, missed revenue, and no clear path forward.

At RYNO, we build every strategy with data at the core. Because the truth is: you can’t improve what you’re not measuring. When you know which marketing channels generate the highest return on investment, you can scale what’s working and cut what’s not—no more gut decisions, just smart growth.

How to Calculate Your Marketing ROI

Marketing shouldn’t be a gamble. If you want to grow smarter, not just faster, you need to know exactly how your marketing spend is performing. That means measuring ROI the right way, with the right data, over the right time frame.

First, let’s define ROI. Salesforce defines ROI as “a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of a marketing campaign or to compare the efficiency of several different campaigns”, which is the working definition we’re using here.

Calculating your marketing ROI gives you insight into what’s generating real returns and what’s draining your marketing budget without delivering. It’s how we help contractors stop wasting money and start scaling with purpose.

Collect Your Data Before Calculating Marketing ROI

Before you start crunching numbers, you need to gather a few key data points. At RYNO, we work closely with our contractor partners to collect these metrics accurately and consistently because what you don’t track, you can’t measure.

While there are many ways to calculate marketing ROI, we use a relatively straightforward formula.

Here’s what you need to calculate your ROI:

  • A defined period of time (for example, Q1 2024 or all of last year)
  • Marketing investment – this includes your total marketing cost: ad spend, agency fees, and any other associated expenses
  • Revenue generated during that time from your marketing campaigns

Working with an experienced agency is key here. The challenge isn’t just collecting the numbers, it’s aligning them with the right marketing channels. Without proper tracking in place, your ROI calculation will be flawed from the start.

The Formula: How to Track Marketing ROI

Once you have the numbers, the formula to measure marketing ROI is straightforward:

ROI = ((Revenue Generated – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost) × 100

You’re calculating the percentage your original investment grew—or didn’t. It’s expressed as a percentage so you can easily compare campaign performance across different channels or time periods.

Marketing ROI Calculation Example 1

That means for every dollar spent on marketing, you earned back more than three times the investment. But getting numbers like these—and knowing exactly which channel produced them—takes more than just plugging numbers into a formula. It takes the right systems, tracking, and team behind you.

Understanding ROI by Channel

Not all marketing channels perform equally—and not all of them deserve your investment.

It’s one thing to calculate your overall return on investment. But if you’re serious about optimizing your marketing budget, you need to go deeper. That means measuring ROI by channel—so you know exactly which platforms are pulling their weight and which ones are just pulling from your bottom line.

To do this, you’ll use the same ROI formula, but break down your data by marketing channel:

  • Defined period of time (monthly, quarterly, or annual)
  • Marketing investment per channel – this includes ad spend, management fees, and tech costs for each individual channel
  • Revenue generated per channel – this requires clear attribution and accurate tracking, which is exactly what we help build at RYNO

Let’s say you ran both SEO and PPC campaigns last year. Here’s how the math might look when you segment it:

Marketing ROI Calculation Example 2

Same formula, different insights.

By analyzing marketing ROI on a per-channel basis, we can help you make data-backed decisions—like increasing spend on high-performing campaigns and cutting back or adjusting where returns fall short. It’s not about playing favorites with platforms—it’s about understanding where your money works hardest, so you can reinvest with confidence.

But here’s the catch: collecting accurate, channel-specific data takes deep expertise in both marketing and analytics. That’s why we build customized reporting for every contractor we work with. We know that when your growth depends on smart decisions, guessing is not an option.

Stop Guessing. Start Growing Smarter.

Tracking marketing ROI isn’t just about reporting numbers. It’s about uncovering what actually drives growth. When you understand the return on every dollar of marketing spend, you gain control over your strategy, your budget, and your future. But the truth is, calculating ROI the right way — by channel, over time, with accurate attribution — is incredibly difficult without the right systems and the right team.

That’s where we come in.

At RYNO, we specialize in helping home services companies get clarity on their marketing performance. We track every campaign, every click, and every conversion, then deliver insights that drive real, measurable ROI. No fluff, no guesswork. Just data that fuels better decisions and bigger results.

Ready to stop wasting your marketing budget and start investing in what actually works? Let’s talk today!.