Noon Sponsored Ads: ACOS, ROAS and What Noon Actually Bills You

There are two advertising numbers on every Noon account and they do not agree. Ad Manager tells you what your campaigns spent. The settlement report tells you what Noon actually charged you for advertising. They differ whenever a credit or subsidy is applied, and neither of them, on its own, tells you what advertising cost a specific product. This guide is about getting to that last number, because it is the one that decides whether a SKU is worth advertising at all.

Where ads show up, and why there are two views

Noon Ad Manager (admanager.noon.partners) is the campaign console. Per campaign and per day it reports spend, impressions, clicks, attributed orders and attributed revenue. It is the only place campaign performance exists; there is no advertising export in Noon's seller export list.

The settlement report (the transaction view under Payment and Fees in Seller Lab) is where the money leaves. Advertising arrives there as account-level rows: the Transaction Type is Statement Fee, the order columns read "NA", and the Title names the fee, Advertising Fee. The charge sits in the Non-Order Fee column. When Noon applies promotional advertising credit, a second entry appears alongside it titled Advertising Fee (Subsidy) with the matching amount in Non-Order Subsidy, and the two net to whatever you actually paid, which on a fresh credit is zero.

So a new seller running ads on a welcome credit will see real spend in Ad Manager and nothing in their payout. Both are correct. Ad Manager is measuring effectiveness; the statement is measuring cash. The mistake is to subtract Ad Manager's spend from profit while the credit is paying, which undercounts profit, or to ignore the statement once the credit runs out, which overcounts it.

The rule that keeps this straight: the statement is the money authority. Net profit subtracts what Noon billed. Ad Manager feeds analytics (ROAS, ACOS, which campaign is working), never the profit line. How to read your Noon settlement report, fee by fee shows the advertising rows in context.

The four ratios, defined once

• ACOS (advertising cost of sale) = ad spend divided by attributed revenue. 25% means you spent 25 on ads for every 100 of sales the ads are credited with.
• ROAS (return on ad spend) = attributed revenue divided by ad spend. The same ratio the other way up; ACOS 25% is ROAS 4.0.
• TACOS (total ACOS) = ad spend divided by total revenue for the SKU, organic included. This is the one that tells you whether ads are lifting the whole product or just relabelling sales you would have had anyway.
• Break-even ACOS = your margin before advertising, as a percentage of revenue. If a SKU nets 22% after Noon's fees, refunds and cost of goods but before ads, then any campaign running above 22% ACOS loses money on every attributed sale.

Break-even ACOS is the only one of the four that needs your own numbers, and it is the one that matters. Ad Manager can show you a ROAS of 5 on a product that loses money, if the product's margin before ads was 15%.

A worked example, entirely made up

Numbers invented to show the arithmetic; currency omitted.

One SKU in one month. Net proceeds 6,000 on 75 units. From the settlement report: commission 900, fulfilment 640, shipping credits back 110, two refunds totalling 160. Cost of goods 2,850. Your own inbound freight 150.

Margin before ads: 6,000 minus 900 minus 640 plus 110 minus 160 minus 2,850 minus 150 = 1,410, which is 23.5% of net proceeds. That is the break-even ACOS: 23.5%.

Ad Manager for the same month: campaign spend 1,050, attributed revenue 3,900, attributed orders 48. ACOS 26.9%, ROAS 3.7, TACOS 17.5%.

The settlement report for the same month shows Advertising Fee 1,050 and Advertising Fee (Subsidy) 300, net 750 billed, because 300 of credit was still being used up.

Now the profit line. Net profit this month = 1,410 minus 750 billed = 660. But the decision line is different: the campaign runs at 26.9% ACOS against a 23.5% break-even, so once the credit is gone it loses about 3.4% of attributed revenue, roughly 130 a month at this volume, on every month it continues unchanged. This month it looks fine because the subsidy hid 300 of the cost. Next month it will not.

Three actions follow, and they are the standard ones: raise the price if the listing can carry it (the minimum profitable price formula gives the floor), tighten the campaign to the keywords that convert, or accept a small loss on this SKU because it lifts organic sales, which TACOS, not ACOS, will confirm or deny over the following weeks.

Getting to advertising cost per SKU

Ad Manager reports per campaign. Campaigns contain several SKUs. The statement reports per account. Nobody reports per SKU, so you build it, and there is one method that stays honest with the cash:

1. Take the billed amount from the statement for the period. Advertising Fee rows minus Advertising Fee (Subsidy) rows. This is the pool to allocate. While a credit pays, the pool is zero and product profits are untouched, which matches the bank.
2. Take console spend per SKU for the same period. Ad Manager's per-product metrics inside each campaign give spend by SKU; if you only have campaign totals, split each campaign's spend across its products by their attributed revenue within it.
3. Allocate the pool in proportion to console spend. A SKU with 40% of the console spend carries 40% of what Noon billed. Round so the parts sum exactly to the pool; put any remainder on the largest spender.
4. Subtract the allocation from each SKU's margin before ads. That is net profit after ads, per product, on a cash basis.

This is what SKUmargin calls bill-share. Its virtue is that it cannot invent cost: the total across products always equals the statement's net advertising charge, and it self-corrects when a subsidy ends because the pool grows and the shares follow.

Attribution caveats worth knowing

Attributed revenue is Ad Manager's claim about which sales the ad caused. Treat it as directional:

• Campaign product lists drift. A SKU added to a campaign mid-month has partial-month attribution; a SKU removed keeps its history. If Ad Manager's attributed orders for a product do not match the sales you can see, check which campaign it was actually in and when, before assuming a data problem.
• Halo effects are real. Ads on one variant often sell the other. TACOS at the parent-product level catches this; ACOS per campaign does not.
• The window matters. An order attributed today may have been clicked days ago. Month-end cut-offs will always leave some attributed revenue in the wrong month. Compare rolling 30-day windows rather than calendar months when the numbers look odd.
• Refunds are not in Ad Manager. Attributed revenue is gross. Two refunded units out of 48 attributed orders is a 4% haircut on the ROAS you thought you had.
• Credits distort the first months. While a welcome credit or a subsidy is paying, the statement shows little or no advertising cost and every SKU looks better than it will. Run the break-even test on console spend during that period anyway, as if you were paying, so the day the credit ends is not the day you discover the campaign never worked.

One more thing the console will not volunteer: Ad Manager has no view of your margin, so it cannot flag a campaign that is profitable on ROAS and loss-making on cash. Ad Manager optimises for attributed revenue because that is the number it has. Only you have the other half.

A weekly routine

Fifteen minutes, once a week, ideally the day after the Wednesday statement so the advertising rows are fresh:

1. Read the net advertising charge off the new statement. Compare it with Ad Manager's spend for the same days; the gap is your remaining credit or subsidy.
2. Recompute break-even ACOS for each advertised SKU using this week's fees from the statement. Fulfilment charges change with weight bands and promotions, and a break-even calculated in June is wrong by September.
3. List campaigns above their products' break-even. Decide: tighten, reprice, or accept and watch TACOS.
4. Check the top organic SKU. If it is also your top ad spender, ask whether the ads are buying sales you would have had anyway.
5. Note anything you changed, with the date. Ads take a week or two to show a change; without the date you will not know what caused what.

Where SKUmargin fits

SKUmargin books the statement's advertising rows as ads (net of subsidies, so the profit line always matches cash), pulls campaign metrics from Ad Manager every two hours for ROAS and ACOS, and allocates the billed amount across products by console spend. The dashboard's top products carry an Ads column that reads zero while a credit pays and starts moving the day Noon bills unsubsidised spend. It never sums console spend and statement charges together, because they are the same money seen twice. The live demo shows the Ads view on a sample store, and the free Noon profit calculator will give you a break-even ACOS for one SKU in a minute if you have its fees to hand.