Profitability · 4 min read
Mirakl Ads in PerfSell: connecting ad spend with profitability
Your campaigns are generating sales. But what is left after advertising costs? With the Mirakl Ads integration, PerfSell helps you review ad spend alongside your sales and margins.
In this article
You are reviewing the week. Orders are up and campaigns seem to be performing well. To find out whether those extra sales also improve your margin, you still need to open the advertising report, find the store’s sales figures and check that the dates match.
It gets harder when several people are involved: one tracks campaigns, another handles orders and a third monitors costs. Before deciding what to do, you first have to agree on the numbers.
We integrated Mirakl Ads into PerfSell to bring that information together. Your team can spend its review discussing the results instead of piecing together spreadsheets.
What the integration brings to PerfSell
Mirakl Ads lets you promote products on marketplaces that use the platform. You continue to manage your campaigns there. PerfSell helps you analyse their costs and the results available in the reports. Mirakl Ads overview.
Once your account is connected, you can review ad spend by period and store. Product and brand views also show which products receive the most advertising investment.
This lets you compare spending with the store’s activity over the same dates. Rising sales tell a different story when the advertising budget has stayed steady than when it has increased sharply.
A strong ROAS does not tell the whole story
ROAS measures the return on ad spend. When calculated using revenue, it compares sales attributed to ads with the cost of those ads. It does not deduct the cost of goods, commissions or shipping. A high ROAS alone does not mean you are making a profit. Definition and example in Google Ads Help.
Consider a hypothetical example. Over a given period, a store records €10,000 in sales excluding VAT. After the costs already recorded, €2,000 remains before advertising. With €800 in ad spend excluding VAT, that leaves €1,200.
These figures illustrate the calculation; they are not a client’s results. If other expenses are missing, the €1,200 is not yet the business’s net profit.
When your PerfSell account is set up to include advertising costs, the reported spend is deducted from the amount remaining before advertising. If some data has not yet been retrieved, the amount shown remains provisional. A day with no advertising data does not mean a day with no advertising spend.
An attributed sale is not an additional sale
Mirakl Ads may attribute sales to your campaigns under its tracking rules. Those figures help you assess advertising performance, but they are not added to sales already recorded in PerfSell. Doing so could count the same order twice.
Advertising attribution is also separate from allocating costs. To analyse margins, PerfSell divides each day’s ad spend among the orders included in the calculation, in proportion to each order’s share of those sales excluding VAT that day. If there are no corresponding orders, the spend remains an expense for the period.
Allocating a cost does not prove that an ad generated an order. It is a calculation used to analyse margins, not evidence of a campaign’s effectiveness. Recent attributed sales figures can also still change.
Make your team review useful
Choose the stores and dates you will review. Decide who will check for missing data. This avoids comparing a full week of sales with an advertising report that is still incomplete.
You can then look at what has changed: sales, margin before advertising and ad spend. Product and brand views help you decide where to take a closer look.
If a product sells more but leaves less margin, do not immediately assume advertising costs are too high. A lower price, shipping charges or returns could also explain the difference. Check those factors before changing the budget.
The review can then lead to a specific action: reviewing a product’s price, checking a cost or adjusting a campaign in the advertising tool. You know what needs attention and who will handle it.
What if you also advertise on Google or Meta?
The underlying question is the same: how much of your sales revenue is left after advertising costs? Whether you sell through your own website or a marketplace, a campaign report cannot replace tracking your business costs.
With Mirakl Ads, we apply this approach to tracking marketplace sales in PerfSell. The relationship between Google Ads, Meta Ads and a store’s profitability also deserves a closer look. We will cover those topics separately, as the data and attribution rules can differ between tools.
To see how sales, fees and costs are brought together, explore PerfSell.
Already using Mirakl Ads? Tell us how you track performance today. We will look at which stores and data can be connected to your account.
Further reading
Sources used in this article. Illustrative examples are not client results.
