TACOS (Amazon)
TACOS is a number that tells you how much of a product's total sales went back to ads. TACOS stands for total advertising cost of sales. On Amazon it is total ad spend divided by total sales, including orders the ads did not get credit for. If you spent $1,000 on ads and the listing sold $10,000 in total, TACOS is 10%.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
Formula
TACOS = total ad spend / total sales (ad-attributed + organic)
How to calculate TACOS
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Typical ads run on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. The brand also sells on Amazon. Shoppers search for electrolyte drink, sponsored products appear, and the brand pays for those clicks. Organic ranking on the same search can produce sales with no ad click at all. TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) is how you see both in one number.
Divide total ad spend by total sales in the same window. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand spends $8,000 on Amazon ads in April. Ad-attributed sales are $40,000. Total sales on those ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers), organic included, are $80,000. TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) is $8,000 / $80,000 = 10%. Use every sale on the listing, not just the ones ads got credit for. That is the whole point of the metric.
TACOS vs ACOS
ACOS (advertising cost of sales) tells you whether a campaign paid for itself on the sales it was credited with. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand's $8,000 of ad spend / $40,000 of ad sales is a 20% ACOS. TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) tells you what share of total Amazon revenue you are spending to get. Both can move in opposite directions and both can be right.
The useful pattern is ACOS (advertising cost of sales) holding steady while TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) falls. That means ads are working as hard as before and organic sales are growing underneath them. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. A 20% ACOS with TACOS falling from 14% to 10% is a listing that is ranking, not a campaign that got worse.
How to read TACOS
Read TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) as a trend on one product line, not as a single number to hit. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. A new flavor should have an ugly TACOS while you buy visibility. A mature 12-pack with a rising TACOS is losing organic ground and paying to stand still. Do not average a launch and a hero SKU (stock keeping unit, meaning one product listing) into one catalog TACOS and then make one budget decision.
Compare TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) against your contribution margin (revenue minus the variable costs of delivering that revenue). If TACOS is climbing toward the margin left after product and fulfillment costs, growth is being funded out of profit. A 10% TACOS on a 35% contribution margin still leaves room. A 30% TACOS on that same 35% margin does not.
Common TACOS mistakes
- Setting a target TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) for a drink brand's whole catalog when launches and mature 12-packs behave differently.
- Using ad-attributed sales in the denominator, which just recreates ACOS (advertising cost of sales).
- Cutting spend to improve TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) and watching organic rank decay a month later.
Lemonado
See this number in Lemonado
Lemonado reads spend and results together from the platforms you connect, so you can ask for this metric without building a sheet. It can also act on what it finds, inside rules you set.