Promoted Listings ROI: your true ACOS and ROAS

The Promoted page shows what your eBay Promoted Listings spend is actually returning, worked out from your real ad-driven orders rather than an estimate. It covers the last 90 days and helps you see where the ad fee is paying off, and where it is quietly eating the profit margin it was meant to grow.

What the page measures

Every row is built from orders where eBay charged a Promoted Listings fee. From those, DashVue calculates:

• Ad spend: the total Promoted Listings fee charged across your ad-driven orders in the period, plus how many orders that covers.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): the revenue those ad-driven orders brought in, shown as a multiple of what you spent on ads.
• ACOS: ad cost divided by ad sales, shown as a percentage. A lower ACOS means your ads are costing you less relative to the sales they bring in.
• Sales from ads: the share of your total revenue that came from ad-attributed orders, so you can see how reliant your sales are on promotion.

Net profit figures on this page are calculated after cost of goods sold, all eBay fees (including the ad fee itself) and postage, so the return you see is a true, after-cost number rather than a raw revenue figure.

Where the ad fee is eating your margin

Alongside the headline numbers, DashVue flags any ad-driven orders where the Promoted Listings fee was bigger than the profit margin it was spent to win. That is ad spend working against you rather than for you. When this happens, the fix is usually to lower the ad rate on those specific listings, or to exclude them from promotion altogether.

A per-listing chart plots the ad fee you paid against the net profit each listing actually made, so a listing whose profit bar sits below zero is one where the ad spend is losing you money outright, not just underperforming. A sortable, searchable table of every promoted listing sits underneath so you can dig into individual items rather than only reading the blended totals at the top of the page.

How to read it

1. Start with ROAS and ACOS together rather than either one alone. A high ROAS with a high ACOS can still mean thin margins once other costs are counted.
2. Check the ad spend versus return chart for any listing sitting below zero profit and treat those as priorities.
3. Use the margin warning as your action list: it has already done the comparison between ad fee and profit for you.
4. Cross-check the “sales from ads” share against your overall order volume. If it is high, your business is more exposed to ad fee changes.
5. Remember the 90-day window and the Standard-only scope when comparing these numbers to eBay’s own campaign dashboard, since eBay’s totals may include Advanced spend that DashVue does not show here.