"What did my ads earn last month" is three different questions when the ads ran on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop, because each platform decides for itself which sales its ads get credit for. Amazon Ads credits a sale to a sponsored ad when the purchase follows a click inside the platform's attribution window. Walmart Connect runs the same cost-per-click model and reports its own attributed sales. TikTok Shop's GMV Max campaigns credit every order for the advertised product, paid or organic, to the campaign while it runs. Put the three console figures next to each other and you are comparing a click-attributed number, a second click-attributed number on a different window, and a total that includes sales you would have made anyway. The workflow below replaces all three with one question the ledger can answer: did the spend on this SKU, on this channel, produce more gross profit than it cost?
Amazon Ads. Sponsored Products are cost-per-click ads, and advertising.amazon.com defines ACoS as ad spend divided by ad revenue, times 100, with the note that ACoS has to sit below profit margin to hold profit. Attributed sales depend on an attribution window that varies by ad product and account type; Amazon's guide to its off-Amazon measurement product, Amazon Attribution, describes a 14-day last-touch model, and the console's own reports state the window applied to sponsored ads. Read the window in the report header before you use the number.
Walmart Connect. Sponsored Products on Walmart, per walmartconnect.com, run on a cost-per-click model, are available to Marketplace sellers, and are managed through Ad Center with a Seller Center login. Walmart's help center describes its attribution rules; the point for this article is that they are Walmart's rules, and the attributed-sales figure in Ad Center follows them, not Amazon's.
TikTok Shop. Per the TikTok help center article on GMV Max attribution, when you run a Product GMV Max campaign, all paid and organic orders for the products in the campaign are attributed to it while it runs, whether or not the buyer engaged with an ad. The examples on that page also show that an ad click followed by a purchase three days later is not attributed. So the console's return figure is a total-sales figure with a campaign label on it. Affiliate creator commissions are a separate deduction; TikTok's help center describes creators earning a commission when a shopper buys through their content.
Illustrative numbers. Take a cork yoga mat, priced the same on all three channels, July. Margin before ads means net revenue minus marketplace fees, fulfillment, and FIFO COGS, from the reconciled books.
Amazon
Walmart
TikTok Shop
Now the correction the console will not make. In the four weeks before the campaign, the mat sold $1,100 a week on TikTok Shop with no ad spend. A month of that is $4,400. Incremental sales in July are at most $8,000 minus $4,400, or $3,600. Gross profit on the increment: $3,600 times 0.22 equals $792. Net of spend: $792 minus $1,600 equals minus $808.
Three consoles, three verdicts: Amazon earned $864, Walmart lost $90, TikTok Shop earned $160 on paper and lost about $808 against its own baseline. The two Amazon figures (25 percent ACoS, 10 percent of total sales) are the two metrics that belong on different pages, and the PPC accounting guide covers how to book the spend so both can be computed.
Crunch, the analytics AI inside ConnectBooks, runs this chain when you ask it what pausing ads on a product did to profit or why ad spend went up without profit following. It reads the reconciled data from Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and eBay, finds what changed across ads, sales, and fees, compares the periods, names the products, and explains. The Walmart side of the ledger comes in through the Walmart integration, which posts settlements with fees split by type, and the profit reports hold the margin-before-ads figure per SKU per channel that step four needs. ConnectBooks also carries a PPC ROI view built on booked ad cost against sales.
There is no cross-platform attribution truth, and no AI on ledger data creates one. A shopper who saw a TikTok creator's video, searched the mat on Amazon, and bought there shows up as an organic Amazon sale and, if a GMV Max campaign was running, may also show up as a TikTok Shop conversion on a different order. The ledger records what settled where. It does not record why.
The TikTok baseline is a model. $1,100 a week before the campaign is a fact; assuming it would have continued is an assumption, and seasonality or a creator post can break it either way.
Walmart and Amazon attributed sales are each platform's claim. An AI can compute gross profit on the claimed sales; it cannot audit the claim.
Shared brand spend stays unallocated. Spreading it by revenue share produces tidy numbers with no basis.
And the AI takes no action in any console. It reports that Walmart lost $90 on this mat in July and recommends what it would try. The bid change is yours.
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