Understanding and optimizing advertising spend is critical for media buying teams. Affise simplifies this process through its Ad Costs tracking feature, empowering media buying teams to effortlessly track, analyze, and control advertising expenses.
Ad Cost Tracking allows you to centralize your advertising costs from any ad network, including Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, and more. With Affise, you can forget about tracking all your ad costs in different Excel or Google spreadsheets, instead you can consolidate them in one convenient platform where you run your affiliate program.
Accurate tracking of ad costs enables you to:
For example, the agency MediaBoost Agency began tracking their ad costs using Affise, resulting in significant efficiency improvements. They saved around 15 hours weekly by eliminating manual data entry in Google Sheets from 3rd party ad tracking software. This reduced their monthly expenses by approximately $1,200, translating to annual savings exceeding $14,000.
Select the entry, click Edit, and update the amount directly in Affise.
Ad costs are visible through different statistical views:
Detailed metrics include ad costs, margins, and ROI, allowing in-depth analysis and timely decision-making.
Using Ad Costs API, a very powerful feature that Affise provides, you can build ad costs tracking integration with literally any platform that has API to provide ad spend data.
This will allow to automatically pull ad costs from the platforms like Google Ads and Meta and push them to Affise ad costs module.
Below you can find a pseudo code for the Meta ↔ Affise Ad Costs integration. You can use it as example to build your own ad costs integration not only with Meta but with any platform that has API for ad spend insights.
To retrieve ad spend data, use the Meta Ads API /insights endpoin
Once you have the spend data from Meta Ads, send it to Affise using the Ad Costs API.
Example API Call to Add Ad Costs to Affise
Customize your statistics by adding Ad Costs to custom columns. For example, I want to include the column ROAS (Return on ad spend). Typically, ROAS is calculated by dividing revenue by ad spend. In order to add the metric in your Affise dashboard, we need to do the following.
Now you can access the ROAS column in the iGaming or Performance Insights report:
By leveraging Affise’s Ad Costs Tracking, MediaBoost Agency saved 15 hours weekly and reduced their monthly expenses by $1,200. Start enhancing your campaign performance today with Affise!
You can read more about ad costs in the following article.
For additional support, reach out to our team at support@affise.com.
Yes, absolutely. While Ad Cost Tracking provides the foundation for understanding your advertising spend, combining it with automation tools can eliminate repetitive tasks and boost your overall efficiency. Many media buying teams find that automating their affiliate marketing processes—such as link checking, fraud prevention, and performance monitoring—complements their cost tracking efforts perfectly. By automating routine operations, you free up valuable time to focus on analyzing the ROI data from your Ad Cost Tracking dashboard and making strategic decisions. To learn more about how automation can enhance your performance marketing strategy, check out our guide on automated affiliate marketing strategies.
Once you’ve centralized your ad costs in Affise, the next step is to analyze performance patterns to spot underperforming affiliates or campaigns quickly. Affise offers visual performance reports that allow you to detect traffic drops, conversion anomalies, and revenue fluctuations in seconds—without digging through spreadsheets. By combining your ad cost data with these visual insights, you can immediately see which partnerships are delivering poor ROI and take corrective action. This data-driven approach helps you reallocate budgets effectively and optimize your campaigns faster. Learn how to leverage these visual tools in our article on spotting underperforming affiliates with performance reports.
Scaling media buying operations requires a balance between expanding your reach and maintaining precise control over your advertising spend. As you grow, manual cost tracking becomes increasingly impractical, which is why integrating automated Ad Cost Tracking via API becomes essential. Best practices include centralizing all ad spend data in one platform, using custom columns to track metrics like ROAS, and regularly reviewing performance analytics to identify scaling opportunities. Additionally, efficient team management and onboarding processes become critical as you add more media buyers to your operation. For a comprehensive look at scaling strategies that incorporate these elements, read our detailed guide on how to scale your media buying business strategies.
Written by
Dmitry is a product manager with an interest in technology and affiliate marketing. He is passionate about improving products through a customer-centric, data-driven approach. In his free time, he enjoys traveling and reading.
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