tool 01 / 05
// ecommerce_large_catalog
Your catalog does not have one target ROAS. It has one per category.
Work out the real breakeven ROAS of every category or brand, and find out how much of your spend sits where it mathematically cannot make money.
Why a single ROAS target breaks a large catalog
When you sell thousands of third-party products, every category has its own margin, its own shipping cost and its own return rate. That means every category has a different ROAS above which it starts making money. One target for the whole account forces the platform to overpay for what barely leaves a margin and to stop bidding on what actually does. This is not an opinion: it comes straight out of the arithmetic of your own P&L.
Put your numbers in
Start with your 4-8 biggest categories or brands. They come pre-filled with an example so you can see the maths working: type over it.
your single roas target
your categories or brands
| Category / brand | Avg. order value | Gross margin | Shipping/order | Returns | Spend | Ads revenue |
|---|
What to do with the result this week
Replace the single target with one target per category
Group campaigns into bands with a similar breakeven (3x / 5x / 8x, for example) and set each group’s target on its own number. It is the change that moves the most profit without touching total budget.
Cut on negative contribution first, not on low ROAS
A category with negative contribution per order loses money on every single sale: no ROAS can save it. That is the only thing you switch off without discussion.
Move budget into the SCALE rows before asking for more budget
Reallocating the spend flagged in red towards what is already above its threshold raises channel profit without raising risk or total spend.
Rank your catalog by profitability, not by sales
The best-seller list and the most-profitable list almost never match. Run this same calculation at SKU level on your 200 highest-spend products: that is where the hidden money shows up.
How we do it
At Nash Marketing Labs we classify the entire catalog by real profitability before touching a single bid: every SKU gets a state (scale, hold, fix, switch off) and the campaign structure is built on that classification, not on the platform’s. The calculation is refreshed daily against the client’s backend, because margin moves with cost price and with the competition. This tool is the manual version of that process: applied to your 200 highest-spend SKUs, you get most of the value without us.