OTTO advertising costs 2026: SPA, SDA and the Marketing API explained

Sponsored Product Ads, Sponsored Display Ads and Deals cost money before an item has sold. For them, OTTO shows you clicks, spend and a ROAS. Whether anything is left from a sale after advertising is something none of these figures shows. Your OTTO reporting lacks your purchase price, your own shipping costs and the cost of your returns.

This guide shows where the costs of the three ad formats come from, what separates attributed from total advertising costs, and how to set ROAS, ACOS and TACOS against the contribution margin in a worked example. It ends with a decision: hold the bid, lower it or pause the campaign.

Platform overview: OTTO Partner Connect, features and reporting gaps.

Which OTTO ad formats generate costs

Besides product ads, OTTO Advertising also sells newsletters, digital out-of-home, connected TV and parcel inserts. For the per-item calculation, what matters most are the three ad formats you book as a marketplace seller in the partner portal. They differ in their billing model and in where the costs for your analysis come from:

Sponsored Product Ads (SPA)

Sponsored Product Ads promote individual items you sell on OTTO. OTTO generates the ad automatically from your product data. For each campaign you set the duration and budget, and for the promoted items a bid per click; the higher your bid ranks against the competition, the more likely the ad is shown. OTTO currently names 20 cents as the minimum bid; the actual click price depends on the competition in the category.

With automatic targeting, OTTO shows your ads based on context on all three page types; you exclude unsuitable search terms with negative keywords. With keyword targeting you choose the search terms yourself, and the ads then appear on search result pages. OTTO recommends combining both campaign types.

According to the API documentation, the budget applies per day, week, month or for the entire duration and is spent as quickly as possible or evenly. You can reactivate a paused campaign; items and keywords are retained. Once the end date has passed or the campaign has been cancelled, it can no longer be reactivated; you then create a new one.

Sponsored Display Ads (SDA)

Sponsored Display Ads are banner formats that OTTO displays on otto.de and beyond, in a network of, according to OTTO, more than 1,500 web and app properties. Billing is per 1,000 impressions in a real-time auction; the highest bid sets the price. You set the budget as a daily budget. In self service you book SDA in the partner portal, with your own targeting, product-dynamic templates and a retargeting solution for customers who did not buy. Targeting by campaign goal based on user, product and context data is set up by OTTO Advertising as a managed service.

For your calculation this means: SDA costs are not tied to an item by themselves. OTTO's API documentation does not describe a reporting interface for SDA like the one for SPA. You take the costs from the campaign reporting and decide yourself which items, product groups or brands to allocate them to.

Deals

With the Deal of the Week and the Deal of the Month, OTTO highlights discounted items. OTTO bills paid deals per product reference, and only once the deal has actually been displayed; the variants beneath it are included in the price. A paid deal therefore costs you twice: the deal fee as advertising costs, and the discount, which lowers your selling price and with it the contribution margin of every sale during the promotion period.

Attributed and total advertising costs

Advertising metrics are easy to confuse because two questions are on the table at the same time: which costs belong to which item? And which revenue belongs to the ad?

Costs: per item or for the whole period

• Attributed advertising costs are tied to an item. For SPA, OTTO delivers them per promoted item, for Deals per product reference. They belong in the contribution margin of that item.
• Total advertising costs are everything you spend on advertising in the period, so additionally SDA budgets or brand campaigns that you cannot or do not want to allocate to an item. The part without an item reference you deduct one level higher, in the channel's result for the period, just like the pro rata OTTO base fee.

If you only look at the attributed costs, you see items that perform well and overlook the budgets above them. If you only look at the total, you do not know which item carries the advertising.

Revenue: attributed to the ad or total

OTTO itself determines the revenue via ads. The API documentation describes three levels for this:

According to the documentation, the product and brand levels can be retrieved. OTTO calculates the ROAS of the reporting interface with the revenue at product level; the revenue at brand level is shown additionally in the item report. The wider the level, the higher the attributed revenue and with it the ROAS, without anything having changed in the campaign. So always check which revenue sits next to your advertising costs.

Total revenue, by contrast, comes from your own sales data: all orders of an item or of the channel, with or without an ad click. ROAS and ACOS use the attributed revenue, TACOS the total.

In our daily retrieval we also see that a day's costs are final after a few days, while the attributed revenue keeps coming in for several weeks. A ROAS for the last two to three weeks is therefore a preliminary value. Better to decide on bids using weeks that are further back.

Worked example: one item, one month, one SPA campaign

All figures in this example are made up; put in your own values. The item is the same as in the glossary entry Calculating the contribution margin, where the calculation is set out line by line. The EUR 150.00 of advertising from the glossary we leave out; the advertising we calculate afresh here:

• Selling price EUR 59.50 gross, i.e. EUR 50.00 net; shipping free for the customer
• Purchase price EUR 20.00, commission 15% of the gross price (an assumption; the guide to OTTO marketplace fees shows your rate), own shipping EUR 4.50
• 100 orders in the month, 20 of them returns; the amount paid and the commission are refunded, return shipping EUR 5.00 and loss in value EUR 2.00 per return

Add to that two campaigns in the same month (also assumptions):

• SPA for this item: 1,000 clicks at EUR 0.35 each = EUR 350.00 advertising costs. OTTO attributes 35 orders of the item to the ad, i.e. 35 × EUR 59.50 = EUR 2,082.50 at product level. At brand level a further EUR 700.00 with other items of the brand comes on top, EUR 2,782.50 in total.
• SDA for the brand: EUR 200.00, not allocated to any item.

We calculate the attributed revenue gross here, like the selling price. If your source reports it net, use the net selling price as well; what matters is that both sides share the same basis.

The metrics

So the same campaign has a ROAS of 5.95 or 7.95, depending on which revenue sits next to the costs. And advertising's share of revenue is 5.9% or 9.2%, depending on whether you count only the attributed or all advertising costs. Whether the campaign pays off, none of these figures tells you yet.

How much advertising can the item bear?

For that you need the break-even ROAS: the value at which the advertising costs use up exactly the contribution margin of the attributed sales.

• Without returns: EUR 59.50 ÷ EUR 16.57 = 3.59. That corresponds to a break-even ACOS of 27.8%.
• With 20% returns: EUR 59.50 ÷ EUR 10.96 = 5.43, i.e. a break-even ACOS of 18.4%.

The 5.43 applies if the attributed revenue also contains orders that later come back. Whether OTTO removes returns from this revenue again is not described in the API documentation. So calculate with 5.43, the more cautious threshold.

The decision

At product level the campaign reaches a ROAS of 5.95 and thus sits just above 5.43. It pays for itself, but with little headroom: the 35 attributed orders bring 35 × EUR 10.96 = EUR 383.60 of contribution margin before advertising. After EUR 350.00 of advertising costs, EUR 33.60 is left.

From this follows the highest click price the item can bear: 35 orders from 1,000 clicks is a conversion rate of 3.5%, and 3.5% × EUR 10.96 = EUR 0.38 per click. If the click price rises to EUR 0.45 with the same clicks and orders, the campaign costs EUR 450.00. The ROAS drops to 4.63, and with returns the campaign costs you contribution margin: EUR 383.60 − EUR 450.00 = −EUR 66.40.

The brand-level ROAS of 7.95 looks more comfortable. But it is only useful for this item's bid if you also know the contribution margin of the other brand items behind the EUR 700.00. You must not compare it with the contribution margin of this one item: at EUR 0.45 per click, the brand level would still show a ROAS of EUR 2,782.50 ÷ EUR 450.00 = 6.18, above the threshold of 5.43, even though with returns the campaign costs EUR 66.40 of contribution margin.

How to steer campaign type, bids per keyword and search terms after that is shown in the guide optimising OTTO advertising.

The calculation has two limits. First, some of the 35 orders would have happened without the ad; what the campaign really adds is usually less than the attributed revenue. Total revenue and TACOS over time show you this: if total revenue barely drops when you lower the budget, TACOS falls, and some of the sales were there anyway. Second, the costs that are not tied to any item are still missing.

The month with all advertising costs

Per item you calculate only with the attributed advertising costs and without the base fee. For the month, the remaining advertising costs and the base fee are added; if you are not evaluating a full month, the base fee counts pro rata by days. In your real month, the contribution margins of your other OTTO items are added, including those of the brand items behind the EUR 700.00; SDA costs and base fee are then carried by the whole range. This result is still not your company profit either: warehousing, staff, software and taxes come after it.

Advertising costs in profitkonsole

profitkonsole places the advertising costs next to the other costs of your OTTO items:

• SPA: profitkonsole imports costs, clicks and ad revenue automatically every day via the OTTO Marketing API and allocates the costs to the promoted items.
• Deals: are detected from your orders; you enter the amount per deal.
• SDA: you enter budgets manually per month and allocate them to items, product groups or brands. Whatever you do not allocate runs into the result as a general item.

ACOS and ROAS are shown there with the revenue OTTO attributes to the ads at brand level, i.e. including later purchases of other items of the same brand. TACOS uses your own total revenue. So you do not compare the break-even ROAS of an individual item with this ROAS; instead you check the contribution margin per item after purchase price, commission, shipping, returns and advertising. The period result additionally shows the advertising costs not tied to any item, as well as the pro rata base fee. You enter purchase prices and your own shipping costs yourself.

Conclusion

For Sponsored Product Ads, OTTO gives you costs, clicks and the attributed revenue per day and item; for Deals, live reporting; and for Sponsored Display Ads, campaign reporting. What is missing is the link to your own costs. So you do not decide whether a campaign pays off on ROAS alone:

• Know the contribution margin per order before advertising, after returns
• Derive the break-even ROAS from it and compare it with the ROAS at the same revenue level
• Watch TACOS with all advertising costs over time, so that budgets without an item reference do not disappear

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SPA costs daily from OTTO, Deals and SDA added: this is how you analyse ACOS, ROAS and TACOS and see the contribution margin per item.

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