Highprime©
Highprime©
Amazon marketing · Answer
The short answer
ACoS stands for advertising cost of sale. It is your advertising spend divided by the sales that advertising generated, expressed as a percentage. Spend ₹2,000 and generate ₹10,000 of attributed sales and your ACoS is 20 percent, meaning 20 paise of every advertised rupee went to Amazon for the click.
ACoS = ad spend ÷ advertising attributed sales × 100.
Expand it and it becomes more useful, because ACoS also equals cost per click divided by conversion rate times selling price. Written that way it is obvious that your listing's conversion rate moves ACoS exactly as hard as your bids do.
It is not profitability. ACoS only compares advertising spend against advertising revenue. It knows nothing about your product cost, your Amazon referral fee, your shipping or your returns.
It is also not a measure of your business. It only counts sales Amazon attributes to an ad. Organic sales sit outside it entirely, which is what TACoS exists to capture.
Amazon reports advertising attributed sales on orders placed, not on orders that stayed sold. On Indian marketplaces, where returns and undelivered cash-on-delivery orders commonly take 20 to 30 percent of orders in some categories, that gap is large enough to change decisions.
It means your reported ACoS always looks better than your economics, and the gap widens with your return rate. Any target set from a break-even calculated without returns is set too high.
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | ₹2,000 |
| Advertising attributed sales | ₹10,000 |
| ACoS | 20 percent |
| The same thing as RoAS | 5.0 |
ACoS and RoAS are the same measurement inverted. One is a cost ratio, the other a return ratio.
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