Advertising in Dubai: how do you check your return on investment?
How much do you pay to advertise in a newspaper, a magazine, or on a billboard? The real question is: are you tracking the return on investment on that spend? Without it, advertising is guesswork. This guide covers the ROI formula, a worked example, why measuring it is genuinely hard, and how to track the return on every dirham.
The ROI formula
Your ROI is revenue from sales, minus advertising cost, divided by the cost of advertising, times 100 to express it as a percentage:
((Sales − Cost) ÷ Cost) × 100 = ROI
A worked example
- You pay AED 1,000 for an ad and it generates 100 calls or leads.
- 10 of those leads become customers, each worth on average AED 120, so AED 1,200 in revenue.
- The value of each lead is AED 12 (AED 1,200 ÷ 100 leads).
- ROI = (AED 1,200 − AED 1,000) ÷ AED 1,000 × 100 = 20%.
If your ROI is negative, your ad spend is higher than the revenue it produced, and something needs to change.
Why measuring marketing ROI is hard
The formula is simple. Measuring it accurately is not, because customers rarely convert from a single touch. Someone might see a social ad, search for you a week later, click an email, then phone the office. A few things make attribution difficult:
- Multi-touch journeys: several channels contribute to one sale, so which gets the credit?
- Cross-device behaviour: a person researches on mobile and buys on desktop.
- Offline conversions: phone calls and walk-ins are easy to miss in digital reports.
- Last-click bias: crediting only the final step understates channels that built awareness earlier.
- Time lag: the gap between first touch and purchase can be days or weeks.
This is why two reports (Google Ads and Analytics, for example) rarely show the same numbers.
How to attribute conversions properly
Attribution is how you assign credit for a sale across the touchpoints that led to it. To get closer to the truth:
- Set a value per lead so every enquiry carries a monetary value you can measure against.
- Use call tracking so phone leads are counted, not lost.
- Set up conversion tracking on your site and link Google Ads to Google Analytics.
- Move beyond last-click to a data-driven or multi-touch model, so you do not cut a channel that is quietly driving sales.
How Leads Dubai helps
We place your ads on the Google network and report on your ROI so you can see exactly what you are paying per lead and per sale. Set an estimated value per lead, and we will show you which campaigns pay back and which do not, so your budget goes where the return is.
The best part: users can call you directly from your ads on mobile, so a prospect reaches your sales team the moment they are ready to buy. With social media and the rise of micro-moments, you can reach customers in the exact moments that matter, and measure it. Talk to us, call +971 50 304 7470.
