A few weeks ago I was looking at an Etsy shop's ad report showing a 4x ROAS on one of its best-selling listings, running about $10 a day in Etsy Ads. On paper, that's a strong number. Look at the actual bank deposits for that same stretch, though, and growth didn't line up with the story the dashboard was telling.
The reason is simple once you see it: Etsy's ad reports show revenue attributed to ads, never profit. They don't know your materials cost, they don't know your shipping cost, and they definitely don't remind you that a totally separate fee, Offsite Ads, at 12-15%, might already be attached to a chunk of your "organic" sales. A listing can look like a big ROAS win and still lose money once the real fee stack comes out of it. Most sellers find this out months into scaling a budget on a number that was never telling them the truth.
So I built a spreadsheet that does the math Etsy's dashboard won't. It's a Google Sheets / Excel workbook with five connected tabs: a Fee Calculator that shows real per-listing profit after Etsy's listing, transaction, and payment processing fees; an Ads Spend & ROI tracker that turns daily ad numbers into an actual Net Profit After Ads figure instead of just ROAS; an Offsite Ads tracker that applies the correct 12% or 15% rate automatically; a Monthly P&L dashboard with a profit trend chart; and a Break-Even Pricing calculator that tells you the minimum price and ROAS you need before launching a new ad push. It comes with a 10-page playbook walking through Etsy's full 2026 fee stack, category ROAS benchmarks, and three worked real-number scenarios.
This is built for Etsy sellers doing somewhere between $2,000 and $15,000 a month who are running, or thinking about running, Etsy Ads and want one real number, profit rather than revenue, to make budget decisions from. Doesn't matter if you sell handmade jewelry, printables, or vintage finds; the fee math is the same.
If this sounds like a gap you've been feeling but hadn't quite named, the tracker is up on Gumroad. It's also listed on Etsy if you'd rather buy it there.
The bigger lesson, for me, was that "the dashboard says X" is never the same as "my bank account says X." Any platform's built-in reporting is going to show you the metrics that make the platform look good. Profit tracking is always going to be homework you do yourself.
— Natraj
Originally published on Medium.
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