% Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend
The share of sales going to marketing you pay by contract, not through an ad platform.
What it means
% Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend is the share of Total SalesTotal SalesYour true top line and the anchor for every efficiency metric. taken by the fixed entries on Cost Settings that you ticked as Ad Spend — an agency retainer, an influencer contract, a sponsorship, a placement fee. Fixed means a set amount for a period rather than a rate that follows sales.
What Meta and Google charge you never reaches this line. That arrives on its own through the connected accounts as Ad SpendAd SpendRead it next to ROAS and sales; spend only helps if the return holds.. This column is only what you typed in and flagged.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Fixed Custom Expenses Ad Spend is the fixed entries carrying the Ad Spend tick, charged for the days that overlap your date range.
Total Sales is Gross Sales plus shipping and tax, less discounts and refunds — the same denominator MER uses.
Worked example. March bills €9,000 of fixed entries in total. A €3,000 agency retainer and a €1,500 influencer contract are ticked as Ad Spend. Against €90,000 of Total Sales, this reads 4,500 ÷ 90,000 = 5%.
% Fixed Custom Expenses reads 9,000 ÷ 90,000 = 10%, and the remaining €4,500 shows up as % Fixed Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend at 5%. The flagged and unflagged shares always add back to the fixed total.
Because MER divides by the same Total Sales, the two are addable. MER at 22% next to this at 5% means at least 27 cents of every euro went to marketing — and only 22 of them appear in any ad account.
It answers the question
How much marketing are you paying for that no ad platform will ever report? That gap is invisible in Ads Manager and it keeps billing on the days you spend nothing.
Why it matters
Ad platforms only report what ran through them. A retainer, a sponsorship or an ambassador contract is marketing money by any honest reading, and it's the part that carries on when campaigns are paused. Left out, every efficiency number you have flatters you.
It's also the difference between Ad Spend and True Ad SpendTrue Ad SpendAd Spend including the custom expenses ad spend configurations. When this column is empty, the two match and one of them is wrong.
What good looks like
There are no bands here and there shouldn't be — the right share depends entirely on whether you run marketing in-house or on contract, and neither answer is better.
Read it against MER instead. Together they give you marketing as a share of sales, which is the number that actually matters, and either one alone understates it. Then watch the direction: a retainer that's flat in euros still climbs in this column every time sales dip, so a rise here is a question about the month before it's a question about the contract.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Check what is actually ticked | Open Cost Settings and confirm every fixed marketing entry carries the Ad Spend flag | The split between this and the excl. Ad Spend column corrects | Same day | Re-flagging rewrites past periods too, so the trend you were reading moves under you — and True Ad Spend and True NCPA move with it. |
| Fast End retainers that stopped producing | Close out contracts whose output you can't point at in the numbers | The daily charge stops from that date | 1 month, or whatever the notice period is | The work stops with the fee. If the retainer was running your platform campaigns, Ad Spend efficiency usually slips before the saving shows up here. |
| Slow Move retainers onto a share of sales | Renegotiate flat fees as a percentage so the cost moves with the month | This share falls; slow months hurt less | 1 quarter | The cost leaves this line for % Variable Custom Expenses Ad Spend rather than disappearing, and a strong quarter now costs more than the retainer would have. |
| Slow Grow sales without adding contracts | Get more out of the marketing partners you already pay | Falls with every point of growth | 1–2 quarters | Growth usually needs more platform spend, so MER gets worse while this gets better. Read the pair, not the winner. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
This column is one half of your marketing cost. Read alone it looks small, and that is exactly how it gets missed.
MER measures only what the connected ad accounts charged. This measures what they didn't. Add them and you have marketing as a share of sales; read either alone and you're understating it by the size of the other. A store whose MER improved while this quietly grew hasn't got more efficient — it has moved the cost somewhere MER can't see.
The two split the same fixed cost base into marketing and everything else. When this one is the larger of the two, your fixed commitments are mostly bets on growth, which can be stopped at a notice period. When the other one dominates, your fixed base is infrastructure, and it stops far more slowly.
Common misreads
It isn't. Platform spend arrives through the connected accounts as Ad Spend and never touches this column. This is only the fixed entries you typed into Cost Settings and ticked.
More often it means nothing has been ticked. A retainer entered without the Ad Spend flag still counts in your costs, it just lands in the excl. Ad Spend column and never reaches True Ad Spend.
Then it counts twice — once from the connection and once from your entry. Everything measured against Total Sales gets worse by that amount, and the error is nearly impossible to spot later. Enter only what no platform reports.
Also called
Off-platform marketing spend · non-platform ad cost · retainer share of sales
See yoursYour flagged fixed marketing cost as a share of sales, beside the euro total and the unflagged half of the same list.
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