Revenue per channel calculator
Compare channels by what each visitor is worth, not by how many visits they send. Free, no account, and every number stays in your browser.
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Your channels
Use the same period for every row. Leave a channel blank to drop it from the comparison.
Enter visitors and revenue for at least two channels. Nothing leaves your browser.
The formulas
Revenue per visitor = revenue / visitors
Traffic share = (channel visitors / total visitors) × 100
Revenue share = (channel revenue / total revenue) × 100
Index = revenue share / traffic shareEvery row uses the same period. The index is the number worth reading: it strips out size, so a small channel that punches above its weight and a large channel coasting on volume are immediately distinguishable.
Why the ranking flips when you sort by money
Almost every analytics dashboard ranks traffic sources by visits. That ordering is a proxy, and it is a bad one, because visits and value are not correlated in the way the layout implies.
Three patterns show up repeatedly:
- The big channel that carries the site but not the revenue. Social and aggregator traffic arrives curious rather than intent-driven. It can be a third of your traffic and a twentieth of your revenue.
- The small channel with an index above 2. Usually a newsletter, a partner integration, or a community where somebody vouched for you. It looks negligible in a visits chart and pays for a meaningful share of the business.
- Branded search flattering everything upstream of it. People search your name because something else introduced them. Under last-click, that channel takes credit that belongs to the podcast or the review that started it.
The first two are visible from the table above. The third needs attribution models, because it is a question about the order of touches rather than about the last one.
What this tool deliberately does not do
It does not know what a channel costs. Revenue per visitor is a return figure, and return without cost is half an argument — a paid channel with your best revenue per visitor is still losing money if each click costs more than it returns. Put spend beside it with the ad cost calculator, or work out the whole unit economics with the CAC payback calculator.
It also assumes the revenue you enter is genuinely attributable to the channel. If your revenue figures come from a tracker that ad blockers can intercept, or from a checkout that completes on a payment provider’s domain, some of the money is missing before it reaches this table. Reading revenue from the payment provider rather than from the browser is what closes that gap.
Where the numbers come from
You need two data sets joined on the same visitor: traffic by source, and money earned. Most teams keep those in different places, which is why the join usually happens once a quarter in a spreadsheet rather than continuously.
sonex reads revenue from Stripe or Polar through their APIs and puts it beside the traffic that produced it, on every plan, with no cookies and no consent banner. The revenue attribution guide covers how to do the same join by hand if you would rather not change tools.
Frequently asked.
- How do you calculate revenue per visitor?
- Divide revenue by visitors for the same channel over the same period. A channel sending 12,000 visitors and earning $4,800 has a revenue per visitor of $0.40. Because it is a per-head figure, it lets you compare a channel sending 500 visitors against one sending 50,000 on equal terms.
- What does the index column mean?
- It is a channel's share of revenue divided by its share of traffic. Above 1.00 the channel produces more revenue than its size would suggest; below 1.00 it produces less. An index of 2.4 means the channel is more than twice as valuable per visit as your average, which is the clearest case for spending more on it.
- Should I use visitors or sessions?
- Either, as long as every row uses the same one. Visitors gives you the value of a person, sessions the value of a visit. Mixing them across rows makes the comparison meaningless because the denominators are not the same unit.
- My best channel by traffic has the worst revenue per visitor. Is that normal?
- Very. Broad channels — social, aggregators, some paid placements — send volume with low intent, while narrow channels send fewer people who already know what they want. That inversion is the most common finding this tool produces, and it is usually the argument for reallocating budget.
- Does this account for the cost of each channel?
- No. Revenue per visitor measures what a channel returns, not what it costs. A paid channel with the best revenue per visitor can still lose money if the clicks cost more than they return. Pair this with acquisition cost and payback to get the whole picture.