Bake in every cost: COGS, fees, shipping

Before you call any campaign profitable, here is the checklist worth keeping, whether or not you ever touch the product. These are the costs most "ROAS" numbers quietly leave out.

• COGS, what the product actually costs you to make or buy.
• Shipping and fulfilment, the cost of getting it to the customer.
• Payment and transaction fees, skimmed off every single order.
• Returns and refunds, at your real return rate, not the hopeful one.
• Agency and freelancer fees, the people who ran the campaign.
• Tooling, the software stack, spread across the accounts it serves.

Most reported ROAS includes none of these. That is precisely why the slide looks great and the bank account disagrees. Each cost on its own feels small; together they are often the difference between a profit and a loss.

Watch it happen on one €80 order:

Sample data, for illustration.

That €30 is what an order actually contributes before a cent of ad spend. If your cost per acquisition is €20, the order nets €10; if it creeps to €31, every sale loses money while ROAS still looks fine. You set these rates once and they apply everywhere:

You can run this as a spreadsheet forever, and plenty of good marketers do. The only catch is keeping it honest and current across three ad platforms every week, because costs drift, return rates change, and fees vary by channel. Miss an update and the honest number goes stale without warning.

So cost tracking is built into Scriptorium. You enter your costs once, and every ROI number downstream, real ROI, break-even, true profit, already has them subtracted. The checklist stops being a weekly chore and becomes a setting.

The checklist is free either way. Save it, and use it with or without the tool. The pillar is ROAS isn't profit, and tomorrow asks where the next euro is best spent in Where's the next euro best spent?.