The one number
Cost per delivered order = ad spend ÷ orders that were actually delivered, per campaign, per week.
It is always higher than the cost per purchase your dashboard shows, and it is the one your bank account agrees with.
A weekly method in six steps
- Tag every order with its source
Put UTM parameters on every ad link (source, campaign, ad) and save them with the order.
- Follow the order to the end
Keep one status per order: confirmed, shipped, delivered, returned, in your store system or one shared sheet.
- Join spend and delivered orders weekly
For each campaign: what you spent, how many orders it brought, how many were delivered.
- Add your margin
Profit per delivered order after product cost, shipping and returns tells you the most you can pay for one.
- Decide once a week
Scale what brings delivered orders under that ceiling, fix or stop the rest, and don’t judge a campaign on a single day.
- Send better signals back
Both platforms accept events from your own server (Meta Conversions API, TikTok Events API), so you can report the orders you confirmed yourself.
Example (made-up numbers)
| Ad spend | 10,000 EGP |
|---|---|
| Platform purchases | 100 |
| Delivered orders | 62 |
| Cost per purchase | 100 EGP |
| Cost per delivered order | ≈161 EGP |
The sheet, column by column
One row per week per campaign is enough: week, campaign, spend, orders, confirmed, delivered, returned, revenue kept, and cost per delivered order. Nine columns, filled every Sunday.
If you sell on WhatsApp too, add a column for where the conversation started, otherwise every WhatsApp sale looks like it came from nowhere.
Name campaigns so the sheet stays readable
Pick one pattern and never break it, for example platform-product-audience-hook: tt-serum-broad-beforeafter. Six months later you can still tell what a row means.
Put the same words in the link: utm_source for the platform, utm_campaign for the campaign name, utm_content for the specific video. Then the order carries its own history.
When the platform and your sheet disagree
They will disagree, and that is normal: the platform counts a checkout, your sheet counts money that stayed. Do not try to make the numbers match. Use the platform to compare ads with each other, and use your sheet to decide how much to spend in total.
If the gap between them grows week after week, something changed after the click: a page, a confirmation flow, a courier, or a product that is not what the ad promised.
The weekly half hour
Fill the sheet, look at cost per delivered order per campaign, and write one line next to each decision: keep, cut or change, and why.
Then do the only hard part: act on it the same day.
When the numbers are too small to mean anything
With ten orders a week, one good day makes a campaign look twice as strong as it is. Before you move budget, ask how many delivered orders the decision is standing on. Under about thirty in a week, treat the gap between two campaigns as noise unless it is very large.
The way out of that is not more maths, it is longer windows. Compare four weeks against four weeks instead of Monday against Tuesday, and let a new video run until it has spent enough to be judged at all.
Three numbers that say more than ROAS
Cost per delivered order tells you what a real sale costs you. The delivered share, out of every hundred orders, tells you how much of your work is being lost after the click. And the money you keep per delivered order, after the product and the delivery, tells you whether growing is worth doing at all.
A campaign with a lower ROAS and a much better delivered share is usually the better campaign. No dashboard will ever tell you that, because it cannot see the part that happens at the door.
What a weekly report should look like
One page. The four counts, cost per delivered order, what changed last week, and what changes this week. If it takes longer than five minutes to read, it will not get read.
Whether you do this yourself or someone does it for you, the test is the same: after reading it, can you say what you are spending more on next week, and why?
Where to start
This week, add UTM tags to every live ad and a delivery status to every order. Next week you will see your first real cost per delivered order.