How to Tell Whether an Online Promotion Actually Made You Money

The short answer: A promotion made money only if the extra profit it produced is larger than the profit you would have made anyway, minus everything it cost. In practice: take your normal weekly contribution as the baseline, add up the contribution from the promotion period after the discount, subtract the ad spend and any free gifts, and compare. If the promotion total is higher than the baseline, it paid. If not, more orders and more revenue did not help you.

Last updated 28 October 2026.

Promotions are easy to judge badly. The shop feels busier, the number of orders goes up, the notifications keep coming. But busy is not the same as profitable. A discount reduces the profit on every order, including the orders you would have received without it. An ad costs money whether or not anyone buys. This guide gives you a method you can run in a spreadsheet or on paper after any sale, with a worked example so you can see how the numbers behave.

First, three terms in plain words

• Revenue is what customers paid. It ignores your costs.
• Contribution is revenue minus the costs that move with each order: product cost, packaging, payment charges, any delivery you pay for, and any platform fee per order. It is what an order leaves to pay for everything else. For a full breakdown of these, see How to Calculate the Real Profit on Each Online Order.
• Baseline is what you would normally have earned in the same period if you had not run the promotion.

If you are on a plan with a fee per order, include that fee in your per-order costs, because a promotion that brings more orders also brings more of that fee.

Step 1: Set the baseline before you start

Use the average of the last three or four ordinary periods of the same length, not just one. The closer to your promotion in time and in kind (same season, same weekday pattern), the better.

Illustrative example: the four weeks before your sale had 38, 41, 40 and 41 paid orders. The total is 160, so the baseline is 160 / 4 = 40 orders a week.

Now write the numbers for a normal order. Illustrative:

• Average basket: ₦10,000
• Per-order costs (product, packaging, payment charges, delivery you pay for): ₦6,000
• Contribution per order: ₦10,000 - ₦6,000 = ₦4,000

Baseline weekly contribution: 40 x ₦4,000 = ₦160,000.

Count paid orders only. A new order that was never paid, or was refunded, is not a sale. If you use cash on delivery, count an order when it is delivered and paid, not when it is placed.

Step 2: Add up what the promotion actually cost

A promotion has up to four costs, and people usually remember only one or two.

1. The discount. If you cut 10% off a ₦10,000 basket, each order brings in ₦9,000 and its contribution falls from ₦4,000 to ₦3,000. This cost is already inside your lower contribution figure; do not subtract it twice.
2. Advertising. Boosts, paid ads, influencer fees, printing, anything you paid specifically to push the sale.
3. Free gifts or free delivery. If you absorb delivery or give a free item, add it to per-order costs.
4. Extra work. Overtime, extra packers, rush delivery. Count it if you paid it.

If you run a free-delivery offer, the margin check for it is in How to Set a Free-Delivery Threshold Without Losing Your Margin. If your offer is a set of items sold together, see How to Create Product Bundles That Increase Order Value.

Step 3: Compare promotion profit with the baseline

Worked example (all numbers illustrative): a 7-day store-wide 10% discount with ₦25,000 spent on ads.

Calculation:

• Promotion contribution: 58 x ₦3,000 = ₦174,000
• Less ad spend: ₦174,000 - ₦25,000 = ₦149,000
• Baseline contribution: 40 x ₦4,000 = ₦160,000
• Difference: ₦149,000 - ₦160,000 = minus ₦11,000

Orders rose by 18 (58 versus 40, which is 45% more). Revenue rose from 40 x ₦10,000 = ₦400,000 to 58 x ₦9,000 = ₦522,000, an extra ₦122,000. It looks like a success. But contribution fell by ₦11,000. The extra orders did not make up for the discount given to all orders and the money spent on ads.

Step 4: Find the break-even number of orders

Before a promotion, you can calculate how many orders you need for it to break even. This is the most useful number to know in advance.

Break-even orders = (baseline contribution + promotion costs) / contribution per order during the promotion.

In the example: (₦160,000 + ₦25,000) / ₦3,000 = ₦185,000 / ₦3,000 = 61.67 orders. You cannot have a fraction of an order, so round up to 62.

Check it. At 62 orders: 62 x ₦3,000 = ₦186,000, less ₦25,000 = ₦161,000, which is above ₦160,000. At 61 orders: 61 x ₦3,000 = ₦183,000, less ₦25,000 = ₦158,000, which is below ₦160,000. So 62 is the first order count that beats the baseline.

That means the example promotion needed about 55% more orders than normal (62 / 40 = 1.55) just to match baseline profit. Seeing that number before you launch lets you decide whether it is realistic. If your best past week was only 50 orders, a 10% store-wide discount is a bet on something you have never achieved.

Step 5: Look at the weeks after

Some promotions pull sales forward: customers who would have bought next week bought at a discount this week. Check the weeks after the promotion against your baseline.

Illustrative: the next two weeks had 36 and 37 paid orders, against a baseline of 40. The shortfall is (40 - 36) + (40 - 37) = 4 + 3 = 7 orders. At ₦4,000 each, that is 7 x ₦4,000 = ₦28,000 of normal contribution that did not arrive. Added to the earlier shortfall, the total picture is -₦11,000 - ₦28,000 = -₦39,000.

Be careful here. A dip may be pull-forward, but it may also be a quiet week for unrelated reasons. Treat it as a warning to investigate, not a proof.

Step 6: Know what simple tracking can and cannot tell you

A before-and-after comparison is useful, but it has limits. Be honest with yourself about them.

What you can reasonably conclude

• Whether total contribution during and shortly after the promotion was above or below your recent normal.
• Whether the discount depth and the ad spend were affordable at the order volume you got.
• Which products sold most during the promotion, so you can see whether the discount went on items that earn well.

What you cannot conclude

• That the promotion caused every extra order. A holiday, a payday, a viral post or a competitor running out of stock can lift orders at the same time.
• That an ad platform's own result count is the true number of sales it caused. Platforms report results using their own rules. For example, Google Ads defines Cost / conv. as total cost divided by the Conversions column, counts those conversions according to the account's conversion and attribution settings, and may include modelled conversions. Whichever platform you use, read its definition of a "result" or "conversion", and treat its figure as the platform's estimate, then compare it with your own paid-order count for the same dates.
• How long customers will keep buying at full price after a promotion.
• Anything from a very small number of orders. Two extra orders is noise, not a trend.

A fair way to reduce the guesswork is to change one thing at a time and keep the length the same. Compare equal periods.

Using your Webift dashboard for this

If your store is on Webift, the dashboard shows sales over time (today, 7 days, 30 days and the month), recent orders, sales by payment method and top products. Payment status is kept separate from order status, which helps you count only paid orders. You can also filter orders by date or payment status. The dashboard counts an order as a sale as soon as it is placed (cancelled and refunded orders are left out), including orders whose payment is still pending, so for the weekly figures in this guide filter the order list by payment status "paid" and by date, and total those orders. Discount features are part of the Standard plan; if you are on the Pay per order plan, you can still run a price promotion by lowering a product price and showing the old one as a compare-at price. The plan details are in Webift Pricing Explained.

A spreadsheet is enough for everything above. You do not need special software to do this calculation.

A promotion scorecard to copy

Fill this in before and after every promotion.

Before

• Baseline orders per week (average of last 3 to 4 weeks): ______
• Contribution per order at normal price: ______
• Contribution per order during the promotion: ______
• Promotion costs (ads, gifts, free delivery, extra work): ______
• Break-even orders: (baseline contribution + costs) / promotion contribution per order = ______
• Is that number realistic compared with my best past week? Yes / No

After

• Paid orders during the promotion: ______
• Promotion contribution minus costs: ______
• Baseline contribution: ______
• Difference: ______
• Paid orders in the next two weeks versus baseline: ______
• Decision: repeat / repeat with changes / do not repeat

FAQs

How do I know if my discount is too deep?

Calculate the break-even number of orders at that discount, as in step 4. If the order increase needed is more than you have ever achieved, or more than you can pack and deliver, the discount is too deep. Try a smaller one, or limit it to selected products.

Is revenue or profit the better number to track for a promotion?

Profit, measured as contribution after costs. Revenue can rise while profit falls, as the worked example shows.

Should I include the ad cost if the ad also builds brand awareness?

Include it, then judge the awareness separately. The simplest approach is to count all ad cost against the promotion in your scorecard and note anything else you gained, such as new followers, as a bonus you cannot measure.

How long should I measure after the promotion ends?

At least the two ordinary weeks after, compared with your baseline, so that pull-forward shows up. For products people reorder slowly, look further out.

Can I trust the numbers in my ads dashboard?

Use them as the platform's estimate. Check the definition of each metric, and reconcile with your own count of paid orders for the same dates.

If you want your paid orders and sales-over-time views in one place for the next promotion, you can create a free Webift store.