What is AOV?

AOV (average order value) is the average amount a shopper spends per order. It is not the same as the item price: multi-packs, bundles and shoppers buying two of something all lift AOV above the price on the listing.

Worked example

Suppose 20 orders produced 30 units and £600 of sales. AOV is £600 ÷ 20 = £30, while the average unit price is £600 ÷ 30 = £20. A tool reporting one when you meant the other will misprice every bid built on it.

Where AOV sits in the maths

AOV is one of only three revenue levers, and it feeds the bid directly:

Sales = Traffic × CVR × AOV
RPC   = CVR × AOV                  (revenue per click)
ACoS  = CPC ÷ RPC = CPC ÷ (CVR × AOV)

Two consequences follow. First, raising AOV lowers ACoS at an unchanged bid in exactly the same way that raising conversion rate does, because both raise revenue per click. Second, since target CPC is revenue per click multiplied by target ACoS, the same keyword justifies a higher bid on a higher AOV product. Two sellers competing on one search term can rationally sit at very different bids without either being wrong.

AOV is mostly a catalogue property

Price and pack size are set by the listing, not by the search term or the placement, so AOV varies far less across placements and hours than conversion rate does. That is why placement modifiers are anchored on relative conversion rate rather than on placement ACoS: the AOV term is close to constant across placements and largely cancels, while conversion rate is where the real difference lives. The standard construction is to set the base bid to the worst converting placement's economics and lift the better placements from there.

AOV does vary by product, which is why bid ceilings are computed per product rather than per account.

Reading it without tripping over the grain

• Order grain. An order containing two different ASINs contributes to both, so per ASIN AOV and account AOV answer different questions and will not reconcile by addition.
• Currency. Averaging across marketplaces requires converting to one currency first, or the number is meaningless.
• Promotions. A discount lowers AOV and the referral fee together, so the net effect on margin is smaller than the headline discount suggests.

Moving it

The honest levers are pack size, bundles and a higher priced variant inside the same listing, all of which raise AOV without needing more traffic. Because AOV multiplies straight through revenue per click, a durable increase raises the bid every keyword can afford, which usually shows up as more impressions won rather than as a lower ACoS.