How to Calculate Return on Investment (ROI) in Excel

Measure a marketing campaign’s ROI properly — on profit, not revenue — and annualise it for comparison.

You will learn to

• Calculate a simple ROI
• Base ROI on profit rather than revenue
• Annualise a return earned over several months

How it works

Return on investment compares what you gained with what you spent: ROI = (gain − cost) ÷ cost. If a $12,000 campaign produced $15,400 of gross profit, ROI is (15,400 − 12,000) ÷ 12,000 = 28.3%.

Use profit, not revenue, as the gain — revenue ignores the cost of the goods sold and overstates ROI. To compare investments of different lengths, annualise: (1 + ROI)^(12 ÷ months) − 1.

=(B3*B4-B2)/B2