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Calculate Your Advertising Cost of Sales
Use our free ACOS Calculator to understand how much you're spending on advertising compared with the sales generated from your advertising.
Enter your advertising spend and advertising-generated sales for the same period to calculate your ACOS percentage.
What Is ACOS?
ACOS stands for Advertising Cost of Sales.
It measures your advertising spend as a percentage of the sales attributed to that advertising.
The calculation is:
ACOS = Advertising Spend ÷ Advertising-Generated Sales × 100
For example, if you spend £1,000 on advertising and generate £5,000 in sales attributed to those ads:
£1,000 ÷ £5,000 × 100 = 20% ACOS
This means your advertising spend represents 20% of the sales attributed to your advertising.
Why Calculate Your Business ACOS?
ACOS can help you understand the relationship between what you're spending on advertising and the revenue directly attributed to those ads.
Tracking ACOS over time can help you assess:
- How efficiently advertising spend is generating sales
- Whether advertising costs are increasing or decreasing relative to attributed revenue
- How different campaigns or periods compare
- Whether advertising performance is moving in the right direction
- How advertising costs relate to your wider margins and profitability
It should be considered alongside your other marketing and business metrics rather than used in isolation.
What Is a Good ACOS?
There isn't one ACOS percentage that's right for every business.
A suitable ACOS depends on factors including your margins, products or services, advertising objectives, growth strategy and wider business costs.
For example, a business focused heavily on customer acquisition or growth may be prepared to operate at a higher ACOS than a business focused primarily on short-term profitability.
The important thing is understanding what level makes commercial sense for your business.
ACOS vs TACOS
ACOS and TACOS provide two different views of advertising performance.
ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) compares advertising spend with the sales attributed directly to your advertising.
TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) compares advertising spend with your total sales, not just advertising-generated sales.
Looking at both can give you a broader understanding of how advertising contributes to overall business performance.
This section should internally link directly to your Business TACOS Calculator.
How to Use the ACOS Calculator
Enter your:
Advertising Spend – the amount you've spent on advertising during the period you're measuring.
Advertising-Generated Sales – the sales revenue attributed to your advertising during the same period.
The calculator will then show your ACOS percentage.
Always make sure both figures cover the same reporting period.
Understand Your Advertising Performance
ACOS is a useful metric for understanding advertising efficiency, but it's only one part of the wider picture.
The Advice Centre can help businesses understand and improve their wider marketing performance across Google Ads, social media, eCommerce, SEO and other digital marketing channels.
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