Amazon budget planner.
Most budget advice starts from a number someone felt comfortable with. This starts from your product's phase — launching, scaling or protecting profit — splits the budget across the eight things campaigns actually do, and forecasts the clicks, orders, revenue, ACOS, TACoS and profit that budget can be expected to produce.
Efficiency should be improving while spend grows. Falling TACoS is the proof.
Review count and organic rank are not in any advertising report, so they have to come from you. Leave them blank and the product is treated as launching, which is the safer assumption.
Suggested: Profit
At this budget TACoS lands at 20.0% against a 45% contribution margin — advertising inside what the product earns, which is what the profit phase means.
Total revenue includes organic. Without it there is no TACoS, and the Profit phase is measured on TACoS against your margin.
Sums to 100% (must equal 100)
| Goal | % | Monthly | Daily | Clicks | Orders | Revenue | ACOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | 32% | ₹96,000 | ₹3,200 | 4,364 | 369 | ₹2.9 L | 32.6% |
| Ranking | 22% | ₹66,000 | ₹2,200 | 2,143 | 153 | ₹1.2 L | 53.9% |
| Research | 13% | ₹39,000 | ₹1,300 | 2,086 | 95 | ₹75.8K | 51.4% |
| Discovery | 10% | ₹30,000 | ₹1,000 | 1,948 | 76 | ₹60.7K | 49.4% |
| Brand Defence | 7% | ₹21,000 | ₹700 | 2,386 | 388 | ₹3.1 L | 6.8% |
| Brand Attack | 5% | ₹15,000 | ₹500 | 455 | 15 | ₹11.8K | 127.1% |
| Remarketing | 6% | ₹18,000 | ₹600 | 1,364 | 124 | ₹99.1K | 18.2% |
| Brand Awareness | 5% | ₹15,000 | ₹500 | 852 | 17 | ₹13.3K | 113.0% |
| Total | 100% | ₹3,00,000 | ₹10,000 | 15,597 | 1,236 | ₹9.9 L | 30.4% |
| Ad type | % | Monthly | Daily | Revenue | ACOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Products | 61.4% | ₹1,84,200 | ₹6,140 | ₹4.6 L | 39.9% |
| Sponsored Brands | 27.9% | ₹83,700 | ₹2,790 | ₹2.1 L | 39.7% |
| Sponsored Display | 10.7% | ₹32,100 | ₹1,070 | ₹1.4 L | 23.0% |
Not a separate choice — each goal states the ad types it runs on, so this split is arithmetic once the goal split is set. Discovery and Research are Sponsored Products only; Remarketing is Sponsored Display only; Performance and Ranking run Exact across SP and SB together.
At 45% contribution margin, profit goes negative once blended ACoS crosses 45.0%. This forecast is 30.4%. In the Scale phase that is expected to run high — the spend is buying rank and share, not immediate profit.
How it is worked out.
Clicks = Budget ÷ CPC → Orders = Clicks × Conversion Rate → Sales = Orders × Average Price → ACOS = Budget ÷ Sales
- Phase
- Launch, Scale or Profit. It decides what good looks like — a launch is allowed a TACoS that would be alarming on a mature product — and preselects a sensible split across the eight goals.
- Goal allocation
- Budget split across exact performance, ranking, broad expansion, auto discovery, brand defence, retargeting, conquesting and awareness. Each goal has different expected CPC and conversion behaviour, so the forecast is computed per goal and summed rather than averaged.
- CPC and conversion rate
- Taken from your own account, not from a benchmark. These two do more to move the forecast than the budget does, which is the point of entering them honestly.
- SP / SB / SD split
- Derived from the goals rather than entered. A ranking campaign runs on SP Exact, SB Exact and SBV at once, so 'what share to Sponsored Brands?' has no strategic answer on its own.
- TACoS ceiling
- The share of total revenue the phase says advertising should stay under. Exceeding it is the signal that the plan is buying growth the business is not carrying.
A forecast is not a promise. It compounds three estimates — CPC, conversion rate and average selling price — so treat the output as the shape of the outcome rather than its precise value, and re-run it against actuals after the first month.
With real numbers.
₹3,00,000 a month on Amazon India, Scale phase, ₹22 average CPC, 6.5% conversion, ₹799 average selling price, 39.11% contribution margin, ₹15,00,000 total monthly revenue.
| Monthly budget | ₹3,00,000 |
|---|---|
| Daily budget | ₹10,000 |
| Expected clicks | 15,597 |
| Expected orders | 1,236 |
| Expected ad sales | ₹9,87,624 |
| Blended ACOS | 30.38% |
| Blended ROAS | 3.29× |
| TACoS (against ₹15,00,000 total) | 20.00% |
| Break-even ACOS | 39.11% |
| Expected contribution after ad spend | ₹86,260 |
Blended ACOS = 30.38%, against a break-even of 39.11% — ₹86,260 of contribution left
The plan works: 30.38% sits comfortably under the 39.11% break-even, leaving roughly nine points of margin on advertised sales. TACoS lands at 20% against the Scale phase's 25% ceiling, so advertising is a growing but not dominant share of the business. Move the CPC to ₹28 and the same budget buys 3,500 fewer clicks — which is why the CPC field matters more than the budget field.
What the number means.
Two numbers decide whether a budget plan is sound, and they answer different questions. Blended ACOS asks whether the advertising itself earns; TACoS asks whether the business can carry it.
| Range | Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| ACOS under half break-even | Under-invested | The plan is profitable and small. If impression share is low, the constraint is budget rather than efficiency and there is volume being left on the table. |
| ACOS at 50–80% of break-even | The target zone | Profitable with room to absorb a bad week. The example above sits here at 30.38% against 39.11%. |
| ACOS at 80–100% of break-even | Thin | Defensible during a launch, uncomfortable as a plan for a mature product. A small CPC rise erases the margin. |
| ACOS above break-even | Buying volume at a loss | Legitimate when you are deliberately buying rank or defending a listing, and only then. The planner flags it rather than hiding it. |
| TACoS above the phase ceiling | Too much of the business | Every campaign can look acceptable on ACOS while advertising quietly becomes the thing holding revenue up. This is the check that catches it. |
Re-run this after the first month with your actual CPC and conversion rate. The gap between the forecast and what happened tells you more about the account than either number alone.
Where this goes wrong.
- 01
Starting from a budget rather than from a target
A number you are comfortable spending is not a plan. Working backwards from the revenue you want, at your real conversion rate and CPC, usually produces a very different figure — and shows immediately when the target is not reachable at any budget.
- 02
Using a benchmark CPC instead of your own
CPC moves the forecast more than the budget does. At ₹22 a ₹3,00,000 budget buys 15,597 clicks; at ₹28 it buys about 12,250 — the same money, a fifth fewer chances to convert. Published category averages will not tell you which you have.
- 03
Planning one ACOS for the whole account
Brand defence, ranking and discovery campaigns have genuinely different jobs and different expected efficiency. A single account-wide target either strangles discovery or lets brand campaigns look better than they are.
- 04
Ignoring TACoS while every campaign looks fine
ACOS is per campaign and TACoS is per business. An account where every campaign is comfortably profitable can still have advertising consuming an ever-larger share of total revenue, and only TACoS shows it.
- 05
Treating the forecast as a commitment
It compounds three estimates. The value is in comparing plans and in seeing which input the outcome is most sensitive to — not in the third decimal place of the revenue figure.
- 06
Setting a daily budget the account cannot spend
A monthly figure divided by thirty assumes even delivery. Campaigns that exhaust budget by noon and campaigns that never spend their cap both break that assumption, and the second is far more common than sellers expect.
The rest of the set.
Where the real numbers live.
- Amazon PPC optimization and audit
A plan is worth what the execution is. This is how to find the part of the spend that produced nothing.
- Budget Allocation Audit
The backward-looking twin of this page: where the budget actually went last month, against the same seven-tier framework.
- Amazon settlement calculator
The contribution margin this planner needs comes from here — fees, FBA and returns on a real price and category.
A plan is a hypothesis. The reports say what happened.
Forecast the month here, then check it against the account you actually ran. The Budget Allocation Audit reads your export and shows where the money went against the same framework this planner allocates it with.
Questions people actually ask.
How much should I spend on Amazon ads per month?
Work backwards rather than picking a figure. Decide the revenue you want from advertising, divide by your average selling price for the orders needed, divide by your conversion rate for the clicks, and multiply by your CPC. That is the budget. If the resulting ACOS is above your break-even, the target is not reachable profitably at your current conversion rate and the fix is the listing, not the budget.
What is a good starting budget for a new Amazon product?
Enough to buy a statistically meaningful number of clicks per keyword rather than a round number of rupees. At a 6.5% conversion rate you need roughly fifteen to twenty clicks on a term before its lack of orders means anything, so a launch budget that spreads thinly across forty keywords learns nothing about any of them. Fewer targets with real click volume beats broad coverage on a small budget.
How do I split the budget between Sponsored Products, Brands and Display?
Not directly, which is why this planner does not ask. A ranking campaign runs on SP Exact, SB Exact and Sponsored Brands Video simultaneously, so the SP/SB/SD split is an output of what you are trying to do rather than a decision in itself. Allocate across the eight campaign goals and the ad-type split falls out of it.
What is the difference between ACOS and TACoS in budget planning?
ACOS asks whether the advertising earns: spend against the sales it produced, judged against your break-even. TACoS asks whether the business can carry it: the same spend against total revenue, organic included. A plan can pass the first and fail the second — every campaign profitable, while advertising becomes an ever-larger share of everything you sell. The planner shows both against the phase's ceiling.
Why does the forecast change so much when I adjust CPC?
Because CPC is the first term in the chain and everything downstream multiplies through it. Clicks are budget divided by CPC, orders are clicks times conversion, sales are orders times price — so a 25% rise in CPC removes 20% of the clicks and, with them, 20% of the orders and revenue. It is the single input most worth getting right from your own reports rather than estimating.
Should my ad budget change between launch and scale?
The amount matters less than what you are willing to accept for it. A launch is buying rank and reviews, so a high ACOS and a high TACoS are the price of entry and the planner's launch phase allows for that. A mature product is buying profit, so the same numbers would be a warning. Changing phase changes the ceilings and the goal split, not just the total.