Custom Expenses Ad Spend
The marketing money you enter yourself, kept outside platform Ad Spend.
What it means
Custom Expenses Ad Spend is the total of the entries on Cost Settings you ticked as ad spend, fixed and variable together, for the selected period. It's the marketing cost no ad platform reports: agency retainers, freelancers, influencer fees, affiliate commission, creative production. Ad SpendAd SpendRead it next to ROAS and sales; spend only helps if the return holds. covers Meta and Google only, so nothing counted here is inside it.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Fixed entries carry a daily amount and a date range. Only the days that overlap the period you're viewing are counted, so a monthly retainer shows a fortnight's worth in a fortnight's range.
Variable entries are either a percentage of a base you choose — Total Sales, Meta spend, Google spend, or both channels together — or an amount per order, scaled by how much of the range the entry covers.
Worked example. An agency at €100 a day, ticked as ad spend, across a 30-day period = €3,000. Add an affiliate rule at 4% of €80,000 of sales = €3,200. Custom Expenses Ad Spend = €6,200 for the period, and none of it appears in Ad Spend.
The tick box is the entire distinction. Untick those two entries and the same €6,200 moves to Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend — identical effect on profit, completely different story about what your marketing costs.
It answers the question
What are you paying for marketing that Meta and Google never charge you for? Every entry you typed in and tagged lands here, well away from the ad platforms' own reporting.
Why it matters
It's the gap between what advertising costs you and what the ad accounts say it costs. MERMERWhole-business marketing efficiency across every channel.Under 30% is healthy, ROAS and NCPA are all built on platform spend, so a store carrying a large retainer is more expensive to run than any of those three suggests.
The money still reaches the bottom line, though. Custom ExpensesCustom ExpensesSee the full entry. is the sum of every entry, tagged or not, and Net ProfitNet ProfitThe bottom line you take home. subtracts that total — so this line is already out of your profit even though no efficiency figure on the page has seen it.
What good looks like
There's no healthy euro amount — a retainer that's cheap for a €5m store is ruinous for a €200k one. Two readings work instead. As a share, % Custom Expenses Ad Spend% Custom Expenses Ad SpendSee the full entry. puts it against Total Sales so periods of different sizes can be compared. And against Ad Spend: the ratio between the two is what running your advertising costs on top of the media itself. If that ratio climbs while media spend stays flat, you're paying more to run the same campaigns.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Enter what's missing | Add every marketing cost that never appears in an ad account — retainers, freelancers, affiliate payouts, creative production — and tick each as ad spend | The figure rises and Net Profit falls to something true | An afternoon | Every profit line below it drops, and the drop is retrospective — periods you already reported to somebody change with it. |
| Fast Tag the entries already there | Go through the existing expense list and tick the marketing ones | This line rises, the non-ad line falls, Custom Expenses unchanged | An afternoon | Nothing changed in the business, so anyone comparing the periods either side of the edit reads a jump that never happened. Do it once and note the date. |
| Slow Move a flat retainer onto the result | Renegotiate a fixed monthly fee into a percentage of sales or of media spend | The cost falls in slow periods instead of holding steady | 1 quarter | Strong periods get more expensive, and across a growing year a percentage can total more than the retainer would have. |
| Slow Take the biggest entry to tender | Put the largest line, usually the agency, in front of two competitors before the renewal date | A smaller number for the same work | 1 quarter | A switch costs weeks of handover and performance normally dips through it, so MER gets worse before the saving shows up here. |
The first lever here makes the number bigger. That's the point — an honest line is worth more than a small one.
Read it with
This line and the media it manages move for different reasons. Read them together and you can see which one you're actually paying for.
Paying more to spend less
The fee grew while the media it manages got smaller. Common when a retainer is fixed and budgets were cut, and it's the worst value shape available.
Scaling both
Expected when the cost is a share of spend. Worth a question when it's a flat fee that went up while the work stayed the same.
Wound down together
Both sides shrank. Deliberate retreat and an expense entry that quietly expired look identical here, so check the dates.
More media on the same overhead
You are running more advertising and the cost of running it didn't follow. The best shape on this pair, and also what a missing entry produces.
The split tells you what kind of business you're running. Overhead weighted toward this line is a marketing operation with a shop attached; weighted the other way, it's a shop that advertises. The total is the same either way, which is why Custom Expenses alone never answers the question.
Added together, these two are what advertising genuinely costs you. Kept apart, they explain why your efficiency numbers look better than your profit does — every ratio on the page divides by the platform figure alone, and this line is the part it can't see.
Common misreads
It isn't. Ad Spend is Meta and Google only, which is why MER, ROAS and NCPA are all blind to whatever sits in this line.
Custom Expenses is the total of every entry you made; this is the tagged part of that total. Net Profit subtracts the total once.
It's €0 until somebody enters them. Nothing arrives here automatically, and an untouched Cost Settings page reads exactly like a store with no agency.
Also called
Custom ad spend · off-platform marketing costs
See yoursYour ad-tagged custom expenses for the period, beside the platform Ad Spend they sit outside of.
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