Glossary
POAS (Profit on Ad Spend)
POAS is Profit on Ad Spend: revenue from an ad minus Amazon fees and cost of goods, divided by ad spend. It measures whether the ad dollar produced profit, not just sales. POAS above 1 means the ad was profitable. ACOS, by contrast, only tracks ad spend against ad revenue and can make unprofitable campaigns look healthy.
Why it matters for Amazon sellers
ACOS is the default Amazon metric because it is what the Ads API exposes. But a 20% ACOS on a product with 15% contribution margin is a losing campaign, and a 40% ACOS on a product with 60% margin is a winner. Sellers who optimize for ACOS alone routinely fund campaigns that bleed money. POAS forces the decision into profit terms. To calculate POAS, the system needs unit economics: COGS, Amazon referral fees, FBA fees, and any variable costs. Once those are in place, every bid, budget, and search-term decision can be scored on whether it produced profit on the ad dollar. For brands running a portfolio of products with different margin structures, POAS is the only metric that can compare campaigns fairly across SKUs.
How Profasee handles this
Marko reasons with POAS when you upload COGS and unit economics. The seller-facing settings expose a target POAS alongside target ACOS, so the same bidding engine can be pointed at either objective. For brands with consumables or subscription behavior, POAS can also be adjusted for lifetime value and subscriber economics, not just first-order profit.
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Frequently asked questions
What is POAS on Amazon?
POAS stands for Profit on Ad Spend. It is ad-generated revenue minus Amazon fees and cost of goods, divided by ad spend. A POAS of 2.0 means every ad dollar produced two dollars of profit. POAS is the profit-aware counterpart to ACOS.
How is POAS different from ACOS?
ACOS is ad spend divided by ad revenue. It says nothing about whether the campaign was profitable. POAS includes COGS, Amazon fees, and other variable costs, so it answers the actual question: did this campaign make money? Two campaigns with identical ACOS can have very different POAS.
What do I need to set up to use POAS?
Unit economics: COGS per product, Amazon referral and FBA fees, and any other variable costs. Without those, the system can only reason about spend and revenue, not profit. Most modern PPC platforms let you upload COGS as a CSV or sync it from your ERP.
Related terms
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales)
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) is the ratio of advertising spend to advertising-attributed revenue...
Read the ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales)definition →
TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales)
TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) is the ratio of total ad spend to total revenue on Amazon — ...
Read the TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales)definition →
Contribution Margin
Contribution margin is revenue minus all variable costs — cost of goods sold, Amazon referral fees, ...
Read the Contribution Margindefinition →
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