7 min read

Real ROAS Dashboard: See What Your Ads Actually Earn

A revenue-first ROAS dashboard that ties purchases, renewals, and refunds back to the campaigns and creative that drove them.

Jun 8, 2026 · Grometrics Team

The short version

Your ads platform shows you a ROAS number. That number is lying to you. Ad platforms claim conversions they didn't drive so you keep spending. They count clicks that never became customers, and they attribute purchases made by people who already knew about you through another channel. When you spend $5,000 on Meta Ads and the dashboard shows 4x ROAS, you feel good — until you check your payment provider and realize half those "conversions" never actually paid, or were refunded within seven days. That's why Grometrics built a real ROAS dashboard. Instead of relying on ad platform conversion data, we connect directly to your payment provider — Stripe, RevenueCat, LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, Paddle, or Teachable — and calculate return on ad spend from actual settled revenue, minus refunds, tied back to the specific campaign, ad set, and creative that drove each customer. This isn't vanity ROAS. This is the number you use to decide whether to scale, kill, or rework every paid acquisition campaign you run.

Real ROAS pulls from payment provider revenue, not ad platform conversion pixels
Refunds subtract from attributed revenue so you see net return, not gross volume
Campaign-level ROAS shows which ads drive customers, not just clicks

What makes ROAS "real" instead of advertised

Most ROAS dashboards show you what ad platforms want you to see — their interpretation of what drove a conversion. That interpretation comes from their pixel firing on your thank-you page, which means they count every event that fires, whether the payment succeeded, was refunded, or was charged back.

Real ROAS starts with your payment provider as the source of truth. When a customer completes a purchase, the payment provider records the transaction, its amount, its status, and its timestamp. Grometrics pulls that transaction data and matches it against the traffic source that brought that customer to your site in the first place.

This matters because ad platforms count a conversion the moment their pixel fires. If a customer buys, then requests a refund two days later, the ad platform still calls that a conversion. Your real ROAS dashboard subtracts that refund and shows you what you actually kept. If a customer was acquired through an organic search result but clicked an ad on the way to purchase, the ad platform might claim that sale — but Grometrics sees the full visitor journey and attributes based on first-party data.

Payment provider revenue > ad platform conversion pixels
Refunds subtracted in real time — you see net, not gross
Full visitor journey context, not last-touch attribution alone

The difference between advertised ROAS and real ROAS: If you spent $2,000 on ads and the platform shows $8,000 in attributed revenue, your advertised ROAS is 4x. If $2,000 of that was refunded, and another $1,500 came from customers who found you through a newsletter they were already on, your real ROAS is closer to 2.25x. That's the number that tells you whether the campaign actually makes money.

Real ROAS Dashboard: See What Your Ads Actually Earn

The short version

What makes ROAS "real" instead of advertised

How Grometrics calculates real ROAS

Campaign-level ROAS for acquisition decisions

Attribution confidence: knowing which numbers you can trust

Built for digital product operators who buy traffic

Revenue attribution for digital products

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