Total ACOS = ad spend ÷ total sales (organic + ads). Tracks whether advertising is lifting the whole pie or just shifting attribution.
At a glance
Total ACOS.ad_spend ÷ total_saleswheretotal_sales= ad-attributed sales plus organic sales from Amazon Selling Partner. The strategic metric, ACOS measures campaign efficiency; TACOS measures whether advertising is growing the whole business or just cannibalising organic. Healthy TACOS is 8-15% for most categories; falling TACOS while ACOS holds = ads are lifting organic, the goal state.
| The formula | SUM(ad_spend) ÷ (SUM(ad_attributed_sales_14d) + SUM(organic_sales)). Numerator from Amazon Advertising Reports API; organic-sales denominator requires Amazon Selling Partner (SP-API) Order Reports to compute total sales, then organic = total minus ad-attributed. |
| Reports API endpoint | Two: (a) Amazon Advertising POST /reporting/reports for ad spend and ad-attributed sales (14d window); (b) Amazon Selling Partner Reports API (GET_SALES_AND_TRAFFIC_REPORT or order data) for total marketplace sales. Both must be connected to this account. |
| ACOS vs TACOS framing | ACOS uses ad-attributed sales as denominator (campaign efficiency); TACOS uses total sales (business-wide effect). TACOS is always lower than ACOS because the denominator is bigger. The gap = the share of total sales that is organic. |
| Attribution model | Numerator: last-click within Amazon ecosystem, 14-day click default (Amazon Advertising). Denominator: full marketplace sales for ASINs in scope (Selling Partner). |
| Brand vs non-brand keyword scope | Numerator includes both. Branded ad-spend can have a negative-leverage effect on TACOS (you’re paying for traffic that would have converted organically anyway), one of the most common diagnoses for stuck-high TACOS. |
| Sponsored Products vs Brands vs Display vs DSP | Numerator can be filtered by ad type. SP-only TACOS is the tightest read; including SB and DSP correctly captures upper-funnel spend that lifts organic but costs more per attributed sale. |
| Currency | Account currency only. Both Amazon Advertising and Selling Partner reports must agree on currency, which they do per marketplace. Multi-marketplace = separate accounts. |
| Amazon-only attribution gap | Same as ACOS, no DTC visibility. TACOS is strictly the Amazon-marketplace efficiency view; it does NOT capture customers who clicked an Amazon Ad and bought on the merchant’s Shopify or BigCommerce site. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (default 30 days vs the prior 30 days). Both reports lag ~1-3 hours; today’s TACOS is provisional for ~24h. |
| Alert trigger | >15% (warn) / rising 3 weeks running (critical). The 3-week rising signal matters because TACOS movements are slow; one bad week is noise, three weeks is a trend. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Amazon Ads data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US home-goods seller, same account as the ACOS example. The 30-day window covers 14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26.| Metric | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Total marketplace sales (SP-API) | $620,400 | All ASIN orders in window across all sales channels on Amazon |
| Ad-attributed sales (Advertising API, 14d) | $126,200 | From the ACOS example above |
| Organic sales (derived: total - ads) | $494,200 | 79.7% of total revenue is organic |
| Total ad spend | $26,800 | All Sponsored + DSP combined |
| ACOS | 21.2% | spend ÷ ad-attributed sales |
| TACOS | 4.32% | spend ÷ total sales |
| Prior 30D TACOS | 4.85% | trending down |
| 30D-prior-2 TACOS | 5.20% | trending down for 3 cycles |
- TACOS at 4.32% is excellent and falling. The ads spend 126,200 attributed sales (ACOS 21.2%) but the total marketplace took $620,400. Ads represent 4.3% of revenue but probably influence far more, this is the goal state for a mature seller. Falling TACOS over three cycles means ads are increasingly efficient at lifting the whole business.
- ACOS held at ~21% but TACOS dropped from 5.2% to 4.3%. That gap is the signal. ACOS-stable + TACOS-falling = organic sales are growing faster than ad spend, which usually means earlier ad spend is paying off in halo effects (better organic search rank, more reviews, returning customers). This is the rare “compound interest” mode every Amazon seller wants.
- A category benchmark of 10-15% TACOS is healthy for established brands. Below 5% TACOS is exceptional and either means a strong organic flywheel or chronic under-investment in ads (you’re leaving growth on the table). Above 15% TACOS is a warning, ads are propping up sales without lifting organic.
- The Branded ACOS contribution is masking a TACOS truth. Branded campaigns spend 2,800 as wasted spend), TACOS becomes
($26,800 - $2,800) ÷ $620,400 = 3.87%, the “true incremental TACOS”. The 0.45-point gap is the cost of brand defence. - Watch for rising TACOS while sales are flat. That’s the danger pattern, you’re spending more to hold the same revenue. The 3-week rising trigger exists precisely because one bad week of TACOS is noise; three weeks is a regime change (competitor pressure, organic-rank loss, or paid spend chasing diminishing returns).
- TACOS down + ACOS down + sales up = the goal. Pure compounding.
- TACOS down + ACOS flat + sales up = ads lifting organic. Healthy.
- TACOS flat + ACOS up + sales up = scaling beyond efficient frontier (still growing the pie but ads getting less efficient).
- TACOS up + ACOS flat + sales down = ads holding the line; organic is the problem (rank loss, BSR drop, review velocity).
- TACOS up + ACOS up + sales flat = the alarm. Spending more for the same outcome.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with TACOS |
|---|---|
| Amazon Ads ACOS | The campaign-efficiency twin. ACOS-stable + TACOS-falling = ads are lifting organic. The most informative pairing on the dashboard. |
| Amazon Ads Total Spend | The numerator. TACOS rising on flat spend = sales falling. TACOS rising on rising spend = scaling without lift. |
| Amazon Ads Total Revenue | Ad-attributed sales (the ACOS denominator). Compare to total marketplace sales for the organic share. |
| Amazon Selling Partner Total Sales | The TACOS denominator. The full marketplace revenue figure that makes TACOS meaningful. Both must be connected for TACOS to render. |
| Branded vs Non-Branded Spend | The branded share inflates ACOS but distorts TACOS. Strip branded to see incremental TACOS. |
| Sponsored Brands Halo Effect | The mechanism by which TACOS falls below ACOS, SB campaigns are top-of-funnel and drive organic discovery. |
| Amazon SP Organic Sessions | Independent check on the “organic is growing” hypothesis. Falling TACOS without rising organic sessions = something else is happening. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Amazon Ads Console: Amazon Ads Console > Campaign Manager does not natively show TACOS, the Console only shows campaign-level ACOS. To see TACOS in Amazon’s own surfaces you must go to Brand Analytics > Brand Metrics (Seller Central, requires Brand Registry) which exposes a similar “ad spend share of total sales” view. Amazon Ads Console > Reports gives the spend numerator; pair it with Seller Central > Reports > Business Reports > Sales and Traffic for the total-sales denominator. Amazon Ads Console > Recommendations sometimes flags TACOS-style guidance (“Increase ad spend to grow market share”) which is Amazon’s own efficiency signal. Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual TACOS calculation in Seller Central:| Reason | Direction of divergence | Why it happens |
|---|---|---|
| Timezone. Amazon Advertising and Seller Central both use PT (Pacific). Vortex IQ aligns to PT for Amazon Ads. | None when both use PT. | Both Amazon backends are in Seattle. |
| Report-generation latency (1-3 hours per side). | Today’s TACOS is provisional for ~24h. | Both reports batch-build hourly; the most recent hours catch up on the next refresh. |
| ACOS calculation timing. The 14-day click window means the numerator continues to land for 14 days. The total-sales denominator is fixed once the day closes. | Today’s TACOS will fall over the next 14 days as more ad-attributed sales get credited. | Amazon re-attributes nightly; this card re-pulls every 4 hours. |
| API rate limits. Selling Partner API is more rate-restricted than Advertising; large catalogues may have stale partials. | Stale by up to 1 refresh cycle (~4h) in extreme cases. | Selling Partner reports are the bottleneck for TACOS freshness. |
| ASIN scope. If you sell ASINs outside the advertised set, total sales include those non-advertised ASINs and TACOS looks artificially low. The card uses all marketplace sales for the connected account. | TACOS may look better than reality for diversified catalogues. | This is intentional; the strategic question is “what share of total business is ads”, not “what share of advertised-ASIN business”. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
amazon_sp.amzn_sp_total_sales | TACOS denominator, the marketplace total. Must equal the SP-API total to within ~1%. | Refresh-lag misalignment; usually corrects within 4 hours. |
amazon_sp.amzn_sp_organic_sessions | Falling TACOS should correlate with rising organic sessions. | If TACOS falls but organic sessions don’t rise, you’re seeing returning-customer benefit, not new-organic. |
google_ads.gads_roas | No relationship. Separate ecosystems. | Don’t try to compute a cross-platform TACOS; the audiences are mostly disjoint. |
shopify.total_revenue | The other half of the merchant’s revenue picture (DTC). Amazon Ads has zero visibility into DTC sales. | Some Amazon-Ad-influenced shoppers buy on the DTC site; Amazon never sees those, neither does this card. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
ACOS vs TACOS, which one matters more? Both, but they answer different questions. ACOS = campaign efficiency (am I spending too much per ad-attributed sale?). TACOS = strategic effectiveness (are ads growing the whole business?). A campaign manager optimises ACOS daily; a brand owner watches TACOS quarterly. The most informative pairing: ACOS-stable + TACOS-falling = ads are lifting organic, the goal state. Why is my TACOS so much lower than my ACOS? TACOS uses total marketplace sales as the denominator (ad-attributed + organic), while ACOS uses only ad-attributed sales. For a healthy seller, organic typically dwarfs ad-attributed sales (often 70-85% organic), so TACOS is a fraction of ACOS. ACOS 25% with 80% organic share means TACOS = 25% × 20% = 5%. The bigger the gap, the less your business depends on ads. My branded ACOS is 5% but my TACOS includes that branded spend, why? Yes, branded spend is in the TACOS numerator. Some practitioners strip branded spend from TACOS to get “incremental TACOS”, what proportion of total sales is paid for by ads that might be incremental. Whether to strip is a judgement call; we present blended TACOS by default and split using Branded vs Non-Branded Spend. My TACOS keeps rising even though sales are flat, what’s wrong? Two common diagnoses: (a) Organic rank loss, your ASINs are slipping in non-paid search, so you’re spending more on ads to hold the same total. Check Best Sellers Rank trend in Selling Partner. (b) Diminishing-returns spend, you’ve scaled ad spend past the efficient frontier; each new ad dollar buys less incremental sale. Both call for pausing or pruning campaigns, not adding budget. Why doesn’t TACOS reconcile between Amazon Selling Partner and my own P&L? P&L revenue includes refunds, cancellations, and any non-Amazon channels. TACOS uses gross marketplace sales (gross of refunds), pre-fee, single channel. For CFO-level reporting, divide ad-spend by net P&L revenue, that gives a “true” TACOS that’s typically 3-6% higher than Amazon’s number. Multi-marketplace, how do I aggregate TACOS? You don’t, in any meaningful way. Each marketplace has its own currency, its own ad spend, its own organic share, its own competitive density. Run one TACOS per marketplace, compare in local currency, and use share of total revenue as the cross-marketplace summary. Can I trust today’s TACOS? Less than the 30-day rolling. Amazon’s 14-day click attribution window means the numerator continues to grow for 14 days; the denominator is also still settling for refunds/cancellations for ~72 hours. Today’s TACOS is provisional and will typically fall over the next two weeks as more ad-attributed sales land. The 30-day rolling is the actionable read. DSP vs Sponsored, do they show the same TACOS? The blended hero TACOS includes both. DSP-only TACOS is usually higher because DSP is upper-funnel awareness with weaker direct attribution; the trade-off is DSP’s halo on organic discovery, which TACOS does capture (the denominator includes organic lift). DSP’s case is best made via TACOS, not ACOS. My TACOS is 18%, what’s the playbook to set a target? Target TACOS depends on lifecycle stage. Launch phase: 25-40% (TACOS will be ugly because organic isn’t established yet). Growth phase: 12-20% (you’re investing for share, organic flywheel is building). Mature phase: 5-12% (organic dominates, ads are efficient defence + selective offence). Decline phase: 3-8% (most spend is brand defence, organic is doing the heavy lifting). Usetarget_TACOS = (gross_margin × (1 - net_profit_target)) × (ad_attributed_share) as a starting heuristic.