For the last few months I've been studying PPC advertising. There are many excellent books and blogs on the subject. However, almost nothing is specifically mentioned about gross ROI (gross return on investment) Simply put, I'm trying to discover if many advertisers are receiving more than they spend for their adwords.... and by how much? What's the ratio? Here's an example. About 19 years ago I ran a small newspaper ad campaign. It lasted for 3 months. For $30,000 spent in one newspaper, we received subscription revenue of $150,000. Those numbers are rounded off but bottom line, for every ad dollar spent, we received $5 back. That's a 5:1 ratio of return to cost. Considering we used only small ads and all replies with cheques enclosed had to be mailed, the response was incredible. But times have changed. Now we have the internet with easy payment options just a click away. Unfortunately, we also have everyone and their uncle advertising on it. So my question is what return on adwords investment is average or likely? This has nothing to do with overall profit. It's simply if you spend $100, how much do you typically get back in payments? Without giving anything away, you might reply "furniture items, average selling price $140.00, for every $100 spent on adword advertising, we get $375.00 in sales" Another example might be "special books" or "$39 newsletter" and $2.50 back for every ad dollar spent, or just breaking even, or whatever your situation may be. We all might learn something here. No need to get too specific. Don't give away anything confidential. This is just about hard dollar returns from advertising within a short period (say a couple weeks) after running campaign.