Contribution After Ad Spend

Contribution After Ad Spend shows the profit left after the cost of goods and your ad spend, period by period.

How It’s Calculated

The first row of cards shows Contribution Profit, Gross Profit and Ad Spend for the date range. With Compare on, each card also shows the change from the comparison period, and the chart adds a line for it.

Each row of the table is one period. The length of the date range sets how long a period is:

• 3 days or less: one row per hour
• Up to 93 days: one row per day
• Longer: one row per month

The columns are:

• Total Sales: gross sales less discounts, plus shipping and tax, less returns. If your prices include tax, tax isn’t added a second time.
• Gross Profit: Total Sales less the cost of the goods sold. It’s the same figure as in Profit & Margin.
• Ad Spend: what your connected ad platforms report you spent in the period. Spend counts on the day it was spent. On an hourly chart, each day’s spend is spread evenly across its hours.
• Contribution Profit: Gross Profit less Ad Spend.
• Contribution Margin: Contribution Profit as a share of Total Sales.
• Kept Contribution: Contribution Profit with the estimated cost of returned goods added back, the way Kept Gross Profit works in Profit & Margin. It’s an estimate.

The chart draws Kept Contribution as a solid line. Periods that ended less than 90 days ago, and the period still open, are drawn dashed, because their returns haven’t all come in. A toggle above the chart switches between line, area and bar.

A totals row under the table adds up each column except Contribution Margin, which it works out over the whole range. Show totals row in the Report settings menu turns it on or off for every report.

Costs You Entered

The columns above use only Shopify’s figures and your connected ad platforms. The costs you entered on the Costs page appear beside them as 3 more columns, each marked as an estimate you entered, and a second row of cards:

• Costs (Estimate): your shipping, payment fee, handling and other expense estimates added together.
• Entered Ad Spend (Estimate): expenses you marked Count as Ad Spend.
• Contribution After Estimates: Contribution Profit less both of the above. The chart draws it as a dotted line.

A cost you haven’t entered counts as zero here. How to Enter Your Costs explains each one.

The P&L also takes your entered costs off its Contribution Profit. It starts from Net Revenue instead of Total Sales. Its figure can differ from this report’s Contribution Profit.

What Counts

• Orders count on the day they were processed, in your store’s time zone.
• Canceled orders, and orders whose payment was voided or expired, are left out.
• Returns count on the day the refund was made, for orders placed in the range or up to 2 years before it.
• Ad spend always covers your whole store. Sales Channel narrows sales and COGS only, so with it set the report compares part of your profit with all of your ad spend. There’s no Segment or Filters control.

What You Need

The report needs a connected ad platform. Without one, ad spend would read as zero on every row, so the page asks you to connect one instead.

While a newly connected platform is still bringing in its first data, the page says it is syncing. A connected platform that still needs a setting chosen shows the connect prompt, not the syncing note. Connect one on Integrations.

Unit Costs

COGS uses each product variant’s Cost per item from Shopify. It uses the cost set today, not the cost when the order was placed.

A unit whose variant has no cost counts as zero cost, so Gross Profit and Contribution Profit are too high where costs are missing. Unit Cost Coverage shows what’s missing.

What Good Looks Like

Contribution Profit should stay positive and grow along with sales. There’s no single right margin, so compare it with your own past.

• Contribution Margin holds as ad spend grows. If it falls each time you spend more, the extra spend is buying less.
• Contribution After Estimates is still positive. A positive Contribution Profit can hide a loss once shipping, fees and handling are counted.

What to Do About It

• Find the campaigns behind a drop. Open Advertising and compare spend and return by campaign.
• Enter your other costs. Add shipping, payment fees, handling and expenses on the Costs page, so Contribution After Estimates reflects what you keep.
• Fix missing product costs. Contribution Profit is too high wherever costs are missing.
• See the full statement. P&L shows the same ideas with revenue, costs and ad spend on one page.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

• Contribution After Ad Spend: open Reports and look under Profitability.
• P&L: revenue, costs, ad spend and contribution profit on one page.
• Profit & Margin: gross profit and margin over time.