TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale)
Ad spend divided by total revenue, organic and paid combined. The honest measure of how dependent a brand is on ads.
Why it matters
TACOS divides your ad spend by every dollar the brand earned on Amazon, not just the ad-attributed dollars. If you spent $5,000 on ads and did $50,000 in total sales, TACOS is 10%. Because the denominator includes organic sales, TACOS shows something ACOS structurally cannot: whether advertising is building a business that eventually sells without it.
In practice
The pattern to watch is TACOS falling while total revenue rises. That is the signature of ads doing their real job, driving the sales velocity that lifts organic rank, after which organic sales carry a growing share of the total. Rising TACOS on flat revenue is the opposite signal: you are buying the same sales at increasing cost, usually because a competitor entered the auction or your conversion rate slipped.
Because it is a ratio of two whole-account numbers, TACOS is also far harder to game than ACOS, which makes it the better metric for judging an agency or partner over a quarter.
Related terms
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