Marketplace Ads Profitability Analyzer

About the Marketplace Ads Profitability Analyzer

Your ad consoles tell you ACoS and ROAS; they do not tell you whether the ads make money after the product, the marketplace's fees, shipping, GST and returns. This tool reads the reports you download yourself — Amazon Ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display: search term, targeting, advertised product and campaign reports, or a bulk file), Flipkart Ads and Meesho Ads, in India or any Amazon store — with your business or sales report and your own costs, and works out the break-even ACoS of every product and the profit after ads of every campaign, ad group, keyword, search term and word.

You see ACoS against break-even, TACoS (ad spend as a share of all sales), the spend that brought no order, where the profit is made and lost, and what to change: negatives to add, search terms to add as keywords, and bid changes towards your target ACoS. Several files and marketplaces go in at once; amounts in different currencies are kept apart.

Without a pass the result is a free preview: every count and total, the profit, ACoS, TACoS, break-even and wasted spend in full, and the first rows of each list; the full lists, the Excel and PDF reports, the CSV lists, the bulk file and the periods you keep unlock with a Premium pass. Your reports are read in your browser and never uploaded.

Common uses

• Month-end check of Amazon, Flipkart and Meesho ads against product costs before the next month’s budgets.
• Finding the search terms and words that eat the budget without an order, and the ones to bid on as exact keywords.
• Setting bids and a target ACoS from each product’s real margin instead of a rule of thumb.
• Agencies and accountants reporting a seller’s ad profitability by campaign and SKU, as an Excel or PDF report.

How the figures are worked out

• ACoS = ad spend ÷ ad sales × 100, and ROAS = ad sales ÷ ad spend (Amazon Ads: ACoS, Amazon Ads: ROAS). Flipkart and Meesho call ROAS “ROI”.
• TACoS = ad spend ÷ total sales × 100: ads as a share of every sale, with and without ads (Amazon Ads guide).
• Break-even ACoS = the margin before ads. Amazon Ads puts it plainly: to keep a profit, your ACoS must stay below your profit margin (Amazon Ads: ACoS).
• Profit after ads = ad sales × margin before ads − ad spend.
• CPC = spend ÷ clicks: what a click cost in the auction, which is based on your bid and its adjustments (Amazon Ads: CPC); CTR = clicks ÷ impressions; conversion rate = orders ÷ clicks.

ACoS, ROAS, CTR and conversion rate are worked out from the spend, sales, clicks and orders of the reports, never copied from their columns, so every row is worked out the same way.

Break-even ACoS from your costs

For a selling price P that includes GST at rate g (prices on Amazon.in, Flipkart and Meesho do; where tax is added at checkout, untick “Selling prices include GST or VAT”):

• price without GST = P ÷ (1 + g)
• fees = commission % × P + fixed or closing fee + shipping or fulfilment
• profit of a delivered order = price without GST − fees − cost price − packaging and other costs
• profit of an order = (1 − returns %) × profit of a delivered order − returns % × cost of one return
• break-even ACoS = profit of an order ÷ P

A registered seller claims the GST on fees and ad invoices as input tax credit, so it is not a cost; if you cannot claim it, untick the box and it is added to the fees and to the ad spend (the break-even ACoS your console shows is then the margin ÷ (1 + GST rate)). TCS and TDS that marketplaces hold back are not costs either: you claim them back. A campaign’s break-even weighs its own advertised products by their ad sales; without an advertised product report it uses a SKU written in the campaign name, else your typical product. A cost a SKU leaves empty, in your cost sheet or in the table of SKUs, is your typical product’s, and an empty selling price is the SKU’s average price in your ad reports (its sales ÷ its units).

Which report gives what

• Campaign report: each campaign’s totals, including impressions without a click. With it, campaign figures never come from the other reports, so nothing is counted twice.
• Search term report: the words shoppers typed (Amazon lists only terms that got a click): spend with no order, negatives, keywords to add, and the words (single words and pairs) that sell or waste.
• Targeting or keyword report: every keyword and product target, for bid changes; without it they are worked out from the search terms.
• Advertised product report (Flipkart: FSN report; Meesho: catalog report): spend and sales by SKU, so every campaign gets its own products’ margin, and TACoS by product with a sales report.
• Bulk file: your current bids, ids and negatives; bid changes start from your bid instead of the cost per click, negatives already in place are not offered again, and the changes can be downloaded as a bulk file.
• Business or sales report: every sale, with and without ads, for TACoS.

Sponsored Products counts sales for 7 days after a click, Sponsored Brands and Display for 14; Flipkart’s direct revenue is the advertised product and its indirect revenue your other products bought after the click; both are added to the ad sales.

Negatives, keywords to add and bid changes

• Negative exact: a search term with no order after your number of clicks (10 to start with), or that has spent more than one order’s profit (its order value × break-even ACoS), in that ad group. ASINs become negative product targets.
• Negative phrase: a word or pair of words in two or more search terms that never sold.
• Keyword to add: a search term with at least your number of orders (2 to start with) at or below the target ACoS that is not yet an exact keyword, with a starting bid.
• Bid change: the bid moves towards sales per click × target ACoS — the same as cost per click × target ÷ ACoS — by at most your step (30% to start with), from your current bid when a bulk file gives it. A keyword with no order after your clicks is lowered by the step, and paused once it has spent more than one order’s profit.

They are suggestions from your own figures: check them against your stock, seasons and plans before you change a campaign.

Limitations

• It reads the files you download; it does not connect to Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho, never asks for your seller login or an API key and cannot change a campaign for you.
• Ad sales are what the consoles attribute to ads within their windows (7 or 14 days on Amazon; Flipkart’s and Meesho’s own rules), so they can differ from the orders in your order report.
• Sales of your other products bought after an ad click (Amazon’s other SKU sales, Flipkart’s indirect revenue) are valued at the campaign’s margin.
• Presets match the columns of the reports as they download today; consoles rename columns from time to time and reports in other languages need their columns chosen once under “Columns”.
• At most 50,000 rows are read from one sheet: split a longer period into several files.
• Suggested bids start from your current bid only with a bulk file, otherwise from the cost per click; the consoles have minimum bids of their own.
• The figures show where to look; they are not financial or tax advice.

Privacy

On this device; its files download once

Your reports and costs are read in your browser and never uploaded. Your column matches, settings, typical product and SKU costs, and the periods you keep, stay in this browser’s storage until you remove them.