Free calculator

POAS calculator

Profit on ad spend: what each euro of advertising earned back in margin rather than in revenue. The contribution the ads' orders left after goods, shipping and payment fees, divided by what the ads cost. Above 1,00 they made money.

Free, nothing to sign up forLines 14 to 29 of a nouz P&L

POAS, margin earned per euro of ads

1,59x

ROAS

4,21x

what the platform reports

Break-even ROAS

2,65x

where POAS is exactly 1

Break-even MER

2,00x

on your own net revenue

Your ads, over a period

What the ads did

One campaign or the whole account: the arithmetic is the same.

What each order costs

POAS needs a margin, not just revenue, which is the whole difference between it and ROAS.

↑ ↓ to nudge, Shift for ten. Commas or dots both work.

The statement

14Net revenue€25.484,37100,0%
17Cost of goods−€8.664,6934,0%
19CM1€16.819,6866,0%
21Logistics−€3.328,0013,1%
23Payment fees−€769,603,0%
25CM2€12.722,0849,9%
27Ad spend−€8.000,0031,4%
29CM3€4.722,0818,5%

POAS is your ROAS divided by your break-even ROAS: 4,21 ÷ 2,65 = 1,59. Two campaigns with the same ROAS earn different POAS whenever their products carry different margins, which is the reason to steer on this one.

Every euro of advertising came back as €1,59 of margin, so €0,59 was left once the ad was paid for. Above 1,00 the ads make money.

Track POAS on my real margin

An estimate from flat rates. In nouz every order is priced from the costs of its own day.

What this calculator does

What it does

A POAS calculator divides the margin your advertising earned by what it cost: what the orders left after goods, shipping and payment fees, over ad spend. Above 1,00 the ads made money; below it they cost more than they earned. This one shows the platform's ROAS beside it, because the two can disagree.

POAS and ROAS

ROAS counts what the ads sold, POAS counts what they kept.

ROAS divides the revenue the ads brought in by what they cost. It says nothing about whether that revenue carried any margin, which is why a campaign can show a healthy ROAS and lose money on every order it sells.

POAS divides the margin instead: what the orders left after the goods, the parcel and the payment fee, CM2 on a nouz statement, over the ad spend. Its break-even is exactly 1,00, whatever the product, so one number can be read the same way across every campaign.

The two are tied by one identity: POAS is your ROAS divided by your break-even ROAS. A ROAS means nothing until you know the break-even it is measured against; a POAS already includes it.

nouz reports POAS blended, from your own revenue and costs, on Insights, Marketing, month by month with its break-even line at 1,00, because no platform can claim a share of a blended figure.

POASBreak-even ROAS calculatorMER and blended CAC

Where it goes wrong

Four ways a POAS comes out higher than it is.

All four flatter the advertising, and a flattered POAS is how a losing campaign gets a bigger budget.

Gross margin instead of contribution

A margin after the goods alone still has to pay for the parcel and the payment fee. Leave them out and POAS counts money that was spent before the ad got a cent of it.

VAT left in the revenue

The purchase value a platform reports holds the VAT, and none of that VAT is margin. Take it out before computing anything, or every European campaign is credited with the tax it collected for the tax office.

Refunds forgotten

The platform counted the sale and keeps counting it after the refund. Returned orders hand back their revenue and VAT, while the parcel and the fee stay spent, so the margin the ads earned is lower than the checkout said.

The platforms' claims added up

Every platform claims every order it can plausibly see, so their attributed revenue adds up to more than the store took. A blended POAS, all spend against your own books, cannot count an order twice.

ROASCM2CM3

Worked example

Same ROAS, opposite answers

Two campaigns spend €8.000 each and bring in 520 orders worth €33.696 at checkout, so both report a ROAS of 4,21.

The only difference is what they sell: goods at 34% of net revenue in the first, at 55% in the second. Same shipping, same fees, same refunds.

A ROAS dashboard ranks the two as equals. POAS does not: the first campaign earned 1,59 of margin per ad euro, the second 0,92, and the second lost €630 after paying for its ads.

Their break-even ROAS tells the same story from the other side: 2,65 for the first, 4,57 for the second, and a ROAS of 4,21 sits above one and below the other.

In the app

nouz works this out from every order, every day.

A calculator works from flat rates you type once. nouz prices every single order from the cost rules that were in force on that order's own date, and rebuilds the same statement every night from your own orders and your own ad spend.

  • Every cost at the rate of its own day. Product costs, parcels and payment fees per order, so a price change never rewrites last month.
  • Ad spend comes in by itself. Meta, Google and TikTok through their official APIs, plus anything you add by hand or by CSV.
  • The same lines, per product. What is left after product costs, after shipping and payment fees, and after ads, for every product you sell.
See all 34 lines
app.nouz.co/pnl
Lines 15 to 30 of the profit and loss statement in the nouz app, this period against the one before.
Lines 15 to 30 of the P&L in the app: this period against the one before, each margin marked against its target.

Questions

POAS, answered.

Still unsure? Write to support@nouz.co.

What is POAS?
Profit on ad spend: what the advertised orders left after the goods, the parcel and the payment fee, divided by what the ads cost. A POAS of 1,59 means every euro of advertising came back as €1,59 of margin, so €0,59 was left once the ad was paid for. nouz measures it as CM2 over marketing costs, lines 25 and 27 of the statement.
What is a good POAS?
Anything above 1,00 pays for itself; below 1,00 the ads cost more than the margin they brought. How far above 1 a store needs to be depends on what still has to come out of that margin after the ads, which is the overhead the advertising is meant to help pay.
What is the difference between POAS and ROAS?
ROAS divides revenue by ad spend; POAS divides margin by ad spend. Two campaigns with the same ROAS earn very different POAS when one sells products with a thin margin, which is how ROAS alone scales a campaign that loses money. The two are tied: POAS is your ROAS divided by your break-even ROAS.
How do I calculate POAS?
Take the revenue the ads brought in and take out VAT and refunds. Subtract the cost of the goods, shipping and packing, and payment fees. What is left is the contribution, CM2. Divide it by the ad spend. The calculator above does it from figures an ad account and a store's own books already hold.
Should POAS be measured per campaign or for the whole account?
Both, for different questions. Per campaign it compares two campaigns' products on the same footing. For the whole account, blended, it answers whether the advertising as a whole pays for itself, and it cannot be inflated by two platforms claiming the same order. nouz reports the blended figure, from your own revenue and your own costs.
Does POAS include overhead?
No, and it should not. Rent and salaries do not change with one more campaign, so they come out after the advertising, below CM3. POAS answers whether the ads paid for themselves; whether the month paid for everything is the job of EBITDA.

More calculators

Four that go with this one.

Each one is a different question about the same statement. All 32 are free, and none of them asks you to sign up.

All calculators

POAS for the whole store, from your own books.

Insights, Marketing in nouz shows POAS month by month with its break-even line at 1,00, beside MER and the break-even MER, blended from your own revenue and your own costs.

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