TACoSTotal Advertising Cost of Sales
TACoS is total Amazon ad spend divided by total Amazon sales (organic + paid). It measures ad efficiency across all sales, organic included.
TACoS = (Total Ad Spend / Total Amazon Sales) × 100What does TACoS actually mean?
Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACoS) is a more honest Amazon profitability metric than ACoS. It divides total ad spend by total Amazon sales, including organic sales that ads helped trigger.
The insight: a great Amazon strategy lifts BSR (Best Seller Rank) through paid traffic, which in turn drives organic sales. ACoS only captures the directly-attributed sales; TACoS captures the full impact. A campaign with a 25% ACoS but 10% TACoS is doing more work than the ACoS suggests.
Mature Amazon brands target a declining TACoS over time, which means organic sales are growing faster than paid sales. A TACoS that climbs over time often signals over-reliance on PPC (organic ranking is decaying) even when ACoS looks healthy.
Example
An Amazon brand spent $5K on ads and did $100K total Amazon revenue ($30K paid-attributed, $70K organic). ACoS = 16.7% on the paid side; TACoS = 5%.
When it matters
TACoS is the better profitability signal for Amazon brands at scale. Watch the trend as well as the number.
Related terms
ACoS
ACoS is Amazon's primary PPC metric: ad spend divided by sales attributed to that spend, expressed as a percentage. Lower is better.
ROAS
ROAS measures revenue generated for every dollar of ad spend. A 4× ROAS means $4 in revenue for each $1 spent.
MER
MER is total revenue divided by total ad spend. It's a blended, top-down profitability metric that's harder to game than platform ROAS.
LTV
LTV is the total revenue or profit a single customer generates over their entire relationship with the business.
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