Ad spend against
real margin.
The advertising panel says the campaign pays for itself. The profit and loss statement disagrees. Both are reading real data — they are just not reading the same data.
Why panels and profit disagree
- Attribution windows credit the campaign with sales it did not cause, and miss ones it did.
- ROAS is calculated on revenue. Contribution margin is what is left after cost of goods, fees, shipping and returns — and it varies wildly by SKU.
- Returns land weeks after the sale, and rarely find their way back into the advertising view.
- Marketplace fees and FX are deducted somewhere the campaign report never looks.
The result is familiar: the products that look best in the panel are sometimes the ones quietly funding the loss.
What the review does
- Rebuilds advertising performance against contribution margin per SKU and per market, not revenue.
- Separates campaigns that create demand from campaigns that harvest it, and prices each accordingly.
- Identifies spend that is buying sales the business would have made anyway.
- Where the account structure itself is the problem, restructuring and migration — but only after the numbers say so.
Channels
Amazon Ads across EU marketplaces, Google Ads, and marketplace advertising on Allegro and eMAG. The method is the same everywhere: reconcile first, optimise second.
One caveat, stated plainly
Directory is not an advertising agency and does not want to be one. Advertising is treated here as a cost line to be understood against margin. If what you need is day-to-day campaign management at volume, an agency will serve you better and cheaper.
Next step
If the question is “is our advertising actually profitable”, that is an audit question first.