What Should TACoS Be on a New Product? Mine Launch Near 20–29% and Settle Under 18%

You don’t choose your launch TACoS. You inherit it.

A new product has no organic sales to speak of, so advertising is buying nearly every order you get. That ratio is what TACoS measures, and at launch it is simply going to be high. The job isn’t to hit a number on day one. It’s to drive that number down as organic starts carrying some of the weight.

Here’s what that actually looks like across twelve products on my own Rowdy Rooster Woodworks account.

The numbers

Four products launched in the last hundred days run TACoS between 19% and 29%. Five established ones run between 6% and 18%. Roughly two to three times the advertising support per dollar of total revenue, purely as a function of age.

The part worth stopping on

Look at the ACoS column.

It doesn’t separate them at all. My mature products hold both the highest ACoS on the list at 55.4% and the lowest at 30.1%. A new product sits at 24.8% and another at 45.7%. Handed only that column, you could not tell which products were four months old and which had been selling for the better part of a year.

TACoS sorts them almost perfectly. ACoS is noise on this question.

That’s not a knock on ACoS — it answers a different question. ACoS asks whether a campaign is efficient. TACoS asks how much of your business is being carried by advertising (the fuller comparison). Product maturity is a question about the second thing, so only the second metric can see it.

The clearest case on my list is a product with a 55.4% ACoS and a 12.7% TACoS. Read the ACoS on its own and it looks like something to cut. Read the TACoS and the business is fine — advertising is a small slice of what that product earns, because after months on the market it earns plenty without ads.

So what should yours be?

Not a number I can give you, and be suspicious of anyone who does. What I can give you is the shape:

• At launch, expect it high and don’t panic. Mine start around a quarter of revenue.
• Expect it to fall as reviews accumulate and organic rank builds. That fall is the actual evidence your launch is working — more reliable than a good ACoS week.
• Watch the direction, not the level. A new product at 25% and falling is healthy. A two-year-old product at 25% and rising is a problem, even though the number is identical.

You’re stuck with a high number in the beginning. What you control is whether it comes down.

What this data can’t tell you

Three of my twelve products aren’t in the table. Their ad spend sits inside Sponsored Brands campaigns, or they haven’t graduated enough targets to carry their own per-product spend, so I can’t attribute cleanly and I’d rather leave them out than guess.

The four oldest products show “215+ days” because that’s where my data begins, not when they launched. They’re older than that; I don’t know by how much.

And one of those mature products may be distorted by how Vine units are accounted for. I’ve left it in because the pattern doesn’t depend on it, but I’d rather say so than present it as clean.