The Ecomm Analyst

ROAS tells you revenue per ad dollar. ROI tells you whether you actually made money, which is a different and harder question. A campaign can run a 3x ROAS and still lose you cash once COGS, shipping, discounts, transaction fees, and the cost of acquiring a customer who never comes back are in the math. The tools below go past revenue to the part that pays your rent: contribution margin, real profit per order, and lifetime value against acquisition cost.

Polar Analytics

Polar Analytics is the one I’d point most stores to for profit-level tracking. It pulls Shopify, ad spend, Klaviyo, and 40-plus sources into one place and calculates contribution margin at the business, product, and campaign level, so you can see that your bestselling SKU is actually your thinnest-margin one before you pour more spend behind it. A free Starter tier exists, with paid plans from around $300 a month and enterprise pricing on request. Blended CAC and ROAS sit next to cohort and LTV views, which is the combination ROI actually requires. It’s broad, so if you only want one report you’ll be paying for more platform than you use.

ThoughtMetric

ThoughtMetric is what I use, and it earns its place in an ROI conversation because attribution accuracy is upstream of every profit calculation. If your attribution is overcrediting Meta, your CAC by channel is wrong, and so is every ROI number built on top of it. ThoughtMetric starts at $99 a month for up to 50,000 pageviews with every feature included, and the post-purchase survey plus server-side tracking gives you a cleaner read on which channels are genuinely cheap to acquire from. Pair it with your margin data and you get honest ROI by channel. Predictable pageview pricing keeps the cost flat as revenue climbs. Two-week trial, no card.

Triple Whale

Triple Whale has grown well past ROAS into profit tracking. You can load COGS, shipping, and fees so the dashboard shows net profit alongside revenue, and the real-time view means you catch a margin problem the same day rather than at month-end close. Pricing runs from a free plan to Starter at $149 a month and Advanced at $219, scaled to GMV. It’s a fit for a team that wants live profit visibility in the same screen as their ad performance. The cost and feature load climb with the store, so smaller operations may pay for headroom they don’t touch.

Peel Insights

Peel Insights comes at ROI through retention, which is where e-commerce profit usually hides. Its cohort and LTV analysis shows whether the customers a channel brings in actually repeat, so you stop celebrating a cheap first order that never turns into a second. Pricing starts at $499 a month, with a free tier for qualifying brands under $1M in trailing revenue if you apply. It’s the pick when your real ROI question is about lifetime value and repeat behavior rather than first-order economics. It’s analysis-focused, so it complements an attribution tool rather than replacing one.

Northbeam

Northbeam frames ROI around efficient growth, combining multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling with a clear focus on profit rather than top-line revenue. It’s built to answer where the next dollar earns the most return across your whole mix, which is the ROI question at scale. Pricing starts around $1,500 a month for Starter (under $250k a month in spend), with Professional near $2,500. For a brand spending enough that small allocation errors cost real money, the modeling pays for itself. Below that spend level, simpler margin tracking gets you most of the way for a fraction of the cost.

Picking between these

ROI lives at the intersection of accurate attribution and real margin data, and no single tool nails both for every store. Polar Analytics is my top general pick because contribution margin and LTV sit in one place. ThoughtMetric is what I run for the attribution layer underneath it, since wrong channel costs poison every ROI number downstream. Triple Whale suits teams wanting live net-profit visibility. Peel Insights is the choice when retention and LTV are the heart of your question. Northbeam earns its premium once spend is high enough to optimize at the margin. Get your attribution honest first, then layer margin and LTV on top, and your ROI numbers will finally be worth acting on.