Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend
The flat marketing money no ad platform reports for you.
What it means
Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend is the part of Fixed Custom ExpensesFixed Custom ExpensesSee the full entry. whose entries you ticked as ad spend. It's the flat marketing money that never passes through a connected ad account: an agency retainer, an influencer fee, a sponsorship, a paid placement bought for a flat monthly sum. Like every fixed entry, it's charged per day across your date range.
Untick the box and the same euros move to Fixed Custom Expenses excl. Ad SpendFixed Custom Expenses excl. Ad SpendSee the full entry.. Nothing else changes — the tag decides which of the two lines a cost lands in.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
What qualifies. Any fixed expense you marked as ad spend on Cost Settings. Variable marketing costs — an agency on a percentage of sales — are counted separately.
Worked example. Five fixed entries: rent €3,000, payroll €12,000, software €900, an agency retainer €4,200 and an influencer fee €1,500. Only the last two carry the ad-spend tag.
Over a full 30-day month the fixed total is €21,600, of which this line is 4,200 + 1,500 = €5,700. Select ten days and it charges €190 a day, so €1,900.
It answers the question
How much flat marketing money is leaving the business that Meta and Google will never show you? It's the spend that doesn't appear in any channel report because no channel took the payment.
Why it matters
Ad SpendAd SpendRead it next to ROAS and sales; spend only helps if the return holds. is what your connected channels report about themselves. A retainer, a creator fee or a trade sponsorship isn't in it, so every efficiency figure built on that number — including MERMERWhole-business marketing efficiency across every channel.Under 30% is healthy — describes only the part of your marketing that reports itself.
The gap can be large and it is always in the flattering direction. A store spending €30,000 on channels and €5,700 on retainers is spending €35,700 to get customers, and only one of those figures is in the ratio anyone looks at.
What good looks like
There's no published band — it's a euro amount, and a fair one depends on whether you run marketing in-house. Read it two ways instead. As a share of everything you spend on marketing: a growing slice means more of your budget is going somewhere you can't measure by channel. And against what it bought: a retainer that produced the creative behind a working campaign is cheap, and the same retainer producing decks is not. For a size-independent read, % Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend% Fixed Custom Expenses Ad SpendSee the full entry. puts it against Total Sales.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Tag the costs that belong here | Go through the fixed entries and mark every retainer, creator fee and sponsorship as ad spend | This line jumps, usually a long way | 1 week | Your marketing costs rise overnight and nothing about the business changed. Any comparison spanning the change is broken until you note the date. |
| Fast End-date the retainers you've already stopped | Close entries for agencies and creators you no longer work with | The line falls to what you actually pay | 1 week | It rewrites past periods too, so previously reported profit for those months moves. |
| Slow Swap the retainer for a share of sales | Renegotiate the flat fee into a percentage, and re-enter it as a variable ad-spend expense | Marketing cost that falls in a quiet month | 1 month | Strong months cost more, and the cost leaves this line entirely — you lose the flat, predictable number you were budgeting against. |
| Slow Bring the work in-house | Replace an agency retainer with a hire who does the same job | The retainer disappears from this line | 1–2 quarters | It becomes payroll — still fixed, still charged every day, and far slower to reverse than giving an agency notice. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Flat marketing money only makes sense beside the marketing that does report itself. One is the part you can optimise by channel; the other is the part you can only judge by results.
Marketing grew on both fronts
Channel budget and flat fees both rose. The real cost of acquisition moved further from the number your channel reports show.
Money moved out of sight
You shifted spend from channels that report performance to a flat fee that doesn't. Efficiency metrics improve without the spending falling.
More of it measurable
A bigger share of your marketing now sits where you can see returns per channel. Easier to steer, and easier to cut when it stops working.
Pulled back everywhere
Marketing spend fell on both sides. Whether that's discipline or retreat depends entirely on what happened to sales.
The wider figure covers fixed and variable entries together. If the two are nearly equal, all your entered marketing money is flat monthly commitment, with none of it flexing when a month goes badly.
These two add up to your entire fixed base, split into what you spend to get customers and what you spend to exist. Watching the split move is the clearest read on whether your overhead is turning into marketing or the other way round.
Common misreads
Far more often it means nothing has been tagged. The retainer is still being paid — it's sitting in the excluding-ad-spend line, counted as overhead.
It isn't. Ad Spend is what the connected channels report. This line exists precisely because that money never touched one.
The money was always going out. Tagging moved it between two lines and made the real cost of acquiring a customer visible for the first time.
Also called
Fixed marketing costs · retainer spend · off-platform ad spend · agency fees
See yoursYour flat marketing costs for the selected days, beside the channel spend they sit outside.
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