What Is a Good TACoS on Amazon? Benchmarks by Stage (2026)

TACoS is the number that tells you whether Amazon advertising is building your business or just renting sales. It is also the number agencies, investors and AI assistants quote most often, usually without saying where the benchmark comes from. This guide gives ranges with their sources, shows how to calculate TACoS properly for a UK account, and explains how to bring it down without losing sales.

What is TACoS on Amazon?

TACoS (total advertising cost of sale) is your Amazon ad spend divided by your total Amazon sales, organic and ad-attributed together, shown as a percentage.

TACoS = total ad spend ÷ total sales × 100

ACoS uses only the sales Amazon attributes to your ads. Amazon’s own ACoS guide defines ACoS as (ad spend ÷ ad revenue) × 100. TACoS swaps ad revenue for total revenue, so it captures what ACoS can’t: whether the ads are lifting organic sales. If you spend the same on ads and total sales rise, TACoS falls, which usually means the ads have helped you rank.

Amazon’s ads console is built around ACoS, so most sellers work TACoS out from two sources: ad spend from the Amazon Ads console and total sales from Seller Central (Reports → Business Reports → Sales and Traffic, “Ordered product sales”).

How do you calculate TACoS?

Take ad spend for all ad types over a period, divide by total sales for exactly the same dates, and multiply by 100.

Worked example (example numbers). In September a brand spends £3,600 on Sponsored Products, £900 on Sponsored Brands and £300 on display: £4,800 in total. Ads drive £16,000 of attributed sales and the account sells £40,000 in total.

Metric	Calculation	Result
ACoS	£4,800 ÷ £16,000	30%
TACoS	£4,800 ÷ £40,000	12%
Organic share of sales	(£40,000 − £16,000) ÷ £40,000	60%

Three things trip people up:

1. Leaving out ad types. TACoS from Sponsored Products alone looks better than the real number. Include everything, or label it.
2. Mismatched dates. Ad sales use an attribution window, so a short period can mislead. Monthly TACoS is more reliable than weekly.
3. VAT. On Amazon.co.uk, sales figures include VAT. That’s fine for TACoS, as long as you compare it with a margin worked out on the same basis. Our break-even ACoS calculator takes VAT out for you.

Run your own numbers in the TACoS calculator, which also shows profit after ads and the budget at a target TACoS.

What is a good TACoS on Amazon?

A good TACoS for an established Amazon brand is around 8–13%, higher during a launch and lower for mature products with strong organic rank. These are the best published reference points as of October 2026:

Reference	TACoS	Source and sample
Established US brands, $1M–$20M a year	Median 10.6%; middle half 8.1–12.8%	Eva Commerce study, 150 accounts, 27 July–24 October 2026
Horison	12.6% average TACoS across managed accounts	Horison client data
Launch stage (0–6 months)	15–25%	keywords.am guide, April 2026
Growth stage (6–18 months)	10–20%	Same guide
Mature stage (18+ months)	5–10%	Same guide

Treat the stage ranges as rules of thumb: the guide doesn’t publish the data behind them. The Eva figures come from real accounts, but they cover the US only and include the October Prime Big Deal Days. Horison’s own figure is a 12.6% average TACoS across managed accounts.

TACoS by business size

Bigger brands tend to run slightly lower TACoS, but size explains little on its own. In the same Eva study (medians):

Annual Amazon sales	Roughly per month	Accounts	Median ACoS	Median TACoS
$1M–$3M	$83k–$250k	76	28.4%	11.2%
$3M–$8M	$250k–$667k	63	27.2%	10.1%
$8M–$20M	$667k–$1.67M	11	32.1%	9.7%

The largest band has only 11 accounts, so the study itself calls it directional.

TACoS by category

Category matters less than people expect. Eva’s medians range from 8.6% for pet products to 12.0% for beauty, with supplements and health at 11.4%, home and kitchen at 10.4% and food and drink at 9.3%. Your margin and stage move the number far more than your category.

Why your margin sets your TACoS ceiling

Your TACoS ceiling is your margin before advertising: above it, every pound of sales loses money. What you keep is simply:

Margin after ads = margin before ads − TACoS

Worked example (example numbers). A product with a 30% margin before ads (after product cost, Amazon fees and VAT):

TACoS	You keep from each £100 of sales	Verdict
8%	£22	Strong
12%	£18	Healthy
20%	£10	Acceptable only during a launch or push
28%	£2	Ads are eating the profit

This is why one brand’s “good” TACoS is another brand’s loss. A brand with 45% margins can afford 15% TACoS for growth; a brand with 22% margins can’t. Our guide on whether an Amazon agency is worth it uses the same margin-minus-TACoS maths to test whether outside help would pay for itself.

Is a rising TACoS always bad?

No. A rising TACoS is fine when you’ve chosen it (a launch, a ranking push, peak season) and total sales are rising with it. It’s a warning when sales are flat or organic sales are falling. Read TACoS next to ACoS and total sales:

ACoS	TACoS	Total sales	What it usually means
Falling	Falling	Rising	Ads are efficient and organic sales are growing. The goal.
Stable	Rising	Flat or falling	Organic sales are dropping: check stock, the Buy Box, suppressed listings, reviews and rank
Rising	Rising	Flat	Wasted spend: search terms, bids, or a listing that doesn’t convert
Rising	Rising	Rising	A deliberate push. Fine if planned and time-limited

If clicks keep climbing while sales don’t, read clicks up, sales down and fixing what’s draining your Amazon PPC.

How do you lower TACoS on Amazon?

Lower TACoS by cutting wasted spend and by growing organic sales; the second matters more. In order of speed:

1. Negate wasted search terms. Terms with 20 or more clicks and no orders (Amazon’s own suggested threshold for judging a keyword) become negatives. This usually shows in the first few weeks.
2. Move budget to exact-match converters. Harvest terms that sell from auto, broad and phrase campaigns into exact match, where you control the bid. Our Amazon PPC strategy guide covers the weekly routine.
3. Set bids from margin. Use “dynamic bids: down only” on profit campaigns and cap placement adjustments, which can raise bids by up to 900% (Amazon Ads).
4. Improve conversion. Better main images, A+ content, reviews and price raise conversion rate, which lowers ACoS on every campaign and lifts organic rank at the same time.
5. Build organic rank on your main keywords. Ranking campaigns cost more at first. Once a keyword holds a page-one organic position, step its bids down gradually and watch whether organic sales hold.
6. Keep stock in. A stock-out costs both ad and organic sales, and rank can take weeks to recover.
7. Don’t cut ads overnight. Ad sales are part of your sales velocity. Halving spend in one go can lower rank and organic sales, so TACoS falls briefly and total sales fall with it.

Worked example (example numbers). A brand with a 32% margin before ads sells £80,000 a month at a 16% TACoS (£12,800 of ad spend). Six months of negatives, exact-match harvesting and a better main image later, it sells £96,000 a month on £11,520 of ad spend: a 12% TACoS.

	Before	After six months
Total sales	£80,000	£96,000
Ad spend	£12,800	£11,520
TACoS	16%	12%
Profit before ads (32%)	£25,600	£30,720
Profit after ads	£12,800	£19,200

Profit after ads rose by £6,400 a month, half of it from lower spend and half from extra sales. Model the budget side with our PPC budget planner.

What Horison’s accounts show

TACoS is one of the numbers we review with every client each month, because it shows whether advertising is building the brand. Horison’s average is a 12.6% TACoS across managed accounts. Two published examples:

• A seasonal brand grew sales 105% year on year, from $135.98K to $240.16K, at under 10% TACoS after campaigns were split by product and match type, converting search terms were harvested into ranking campaigns and the listing’s SEO, images and A+ content were improved. The chart at the top of this page is from that account.
• A disorganised account was restructured and the listing optimised with converting keywords; sales grew 161% in two months with ACoS down to 18%.

Raz Dita, Horison’s CEO and co-founder, talks through why PPC needs a data-led strategy for profitable growth in episode 1 of The Seller’s Journey podcast.

When to get help with TACoS

If TACoS has risen for three months or more while total sales are flat, or it sits within a few points of your margin before ads, the account needs more than bid changes: usually structure, harvesting and listing work together. Horison is an Amazon Ads Verified Partner and sets TACoS targets from your real margin after VAT and fees. See Amazon PPC management for how we work, or book a free discovery call; every account is quoted individually after it.