Toy & Baby: POAS, COGS and margin benchmarks
Toys and baby products share a store but not a calendar. Toys are a holiday business: Circana's global toys advisor has said the second half of the year accounts for over 60 percent of annual toy sales. Baby essentials sell through the year and are bought again and again. Peak-season click costs, holiday discounting, safety testing, licensing royalties and gift returns in January all shape what a campaign really earns, and none of them show up in ROAS. The pages below cover what a healthy return looks like for each, where the season distorts the numbers, what belongs in cost of goods, and how to plan spend around the peak.
The questions, with sourced numbers
- What's a healthy POAS?
What POAS toy and baby stores need on Google Ads when most toy demand arrives in one quarter and baby purchases follow registries and life events.
3.22 / 3.71Median Google Ads ROAS - Why does optimising for ROAS overspend?
Why toy stores overspend on ROAS at the holiday peak: rising click costs, discounted demand and gift returns that land after the budget is spent.
Over 60%Toy sales in the second half of the year - What counts as COGS?
Product cost, safety testing, retail packaging, dimensional-weight shipping and gift returns: which toy and baby costs belong in COGS for POAS.
51.3%COGS as a share of sales (one company) - How do you scale spend profitably?
How to scale Google Ads for a toy and baby store on profit: build before the peak, cut before the return wave, and run baby essentials separately.
17%Holiday sales retailers expect back
Background reading
- What Is POAS (Profit on Ad Spend)? Full Definition
- ROAS vs POAS: Which Metric Should You Actually Use?
- ROAS vs POAS: The Metric Killing Your Shopify Profits
- How to Calculate Break-Even ROAS (With a Worked Example)
- Shopify COGS Setup: How to Track Cost of Goods Sold
- Google Ads for Shopify: The Complete Profitability Guide
- Wasted Ad Spend in Google Ads: How to Find and Fix It