Profit on ad spend (POAS) measures how much profit your ads bring in for every dollar you spend on them. It's a close cousin of return on ad spend (ROAS), but where ROASMeasures how much revenue is earned for every dollar spent on advertising, helping you evaluate the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. looks at revenue, POAS looks at what you actually keep after the cost of the products you sold.
You work it out by dividing the profit from ad-driven sales by what you spent on the ads:
POAS = profit from ad-driven sales ÷ ad spend
If you spend $100 on ads and those ads bring in orders with $250 of profit, your POAS is 2.5 (often written as 250%).
Why POAS Matters
ROAS can make a campaign look great while it's barely making money. A campaign that sells $1,000 of low-margin products for $200 of ad spend has a 5x ROAS, but if those products only leave you $150 of profit, you lost $50.
POAS shows that right away, because anything above 1 (or 100%) means your ads brought in more profit than they cost. Anything below 1 means the ads cost more than the profit they brought in, before counting any other costs like staff or software.
It matters even more when the ad platform is doing the bidding. With value-based bidding, like target ROAS in Google Ads or value optimization in Meta Ads, the platform tries to get you the most conversion value for your budget. If that value is revenue, it chases big orders. If it's profit, it chases profitable ones.
How POAS Works in Practice
To bid on POAS, the ad platform has to receive profit as the conversion value, instead of the order total. That means your store needs to know what each product costs you, and your tracking needs to work out the profit for each order and send that number.
Once you switch, the conversion value your ad platforms report drops, because profit is only part of each order. Any ROAS target needs to come down to match. As a rough guide, a store with a 30% margin that targeted 500% ROAS on revenue would target about 150% on profit.
POAS on WordPress and WooCommerce
WooCommerce now has a built-in Cost of Goods Sold feature. You turn it on under WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Features, and each product gets a Cost field. That's the missing piece for POAS on a WooCommerce store, since the store finally knows its cost for every order.
What WooCommerce doesn't do on its own is send that profit to your ad platforms. Most tracking setups send the order total, because that's what's easy to get.
How Conversion Bridge Helps
Conversion Bridge's WooCommerce integration has a Purchase value sent to ad platforms setting. Set it to Profit, and each order's profit (the order total minus tax, shipping and product costs) is sent to your ad platforms instead of the total, both from the browser and server-side.
Your analytics platforms still get the order total, so your revenue reports don't change. If any product in an order has no cost entered, that order sends the total instead, so a missing cost never shows up as pure profit. The WooCommerce doc has the setup steps.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's a good POAS? Anything above 1 (100%) means your ads made more profit than they cost. Whether that's enough depends on your other costs. A business with high overhead needs a higher POAS to come out ahead.
Is POAS better than ROAS? For stores with very different margins across products, POAS gives a truer picture. For stores where every product has roughly the same margin, ROAS and POAS point the same way, so switching changes less.
Do I need to send profit to my analytics too? Usually not, since it makes more sense to keep analytics on revenue, so your sales reports stay accurate, and send profit only to the ad platforms that bid on it.