What is POAS?
POAS stands for profit on ad spend. It is the counterpart of ROAS: instead of revenue, you divide profit after order costs by ad spend.
Two campaigns with the same ROAS can have a very different POAS. One sells products that leave a lot over, the other products that often come back.
POAS or ROAS?
ROAS is easy: revenue is in every ad platform. POAS is harder, because you need to know cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, commission and returns for each order. That data lives in your shop, your marketplaces, your logistics and your accounting, not in Meta or Google.
For steering on profit, POAS is the better number. ROAS stays useful as a quick first look, as long as you know your break-even ROAS.
Which profit do you count?
You will also see POAS calculated on gross profit: revenue minus cost of goods. POAS then comes out higher, because shipping, payment fees, commission and returns are left out. A campaign can then score above 1 and still lose money.
Ecommy calculates POAS on profit after order costs. A POAS above 1 then really means the campaign brought in more than it cost.
How do you calculate it?
Add up the profit after order costs of all orders from a campaign, and divide it by that campaign's ad spend.
Example: a campaign costs €1,000 and brings in €5,000 in revenue. After cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, commission and returns, those orders leave €2,000 together. ROAS is 5 and POAS is 2.0: every euro of ad spend brought in €2 of profit after order costs, and after subtracting that euro, €1 remains.
The hard part is deciding which orders belong to a campaign. For that you need the source of each order, not just the numbers the ad platform reports about itself.
In Ecommy
Ecommy links orders to campaigns and calculates profit after order costs for each order, on your definitions. That puts POAS next to ROAS, per campaign, product and channel.