What ecommerce advertising costs across Google, Shopping and Meta - CPC and CPM benchmarks, management fees and how to set a starting budget. This guide is written for Store owners setting paid media budgets, and everything below comes from work we do on live accounts rather than recycled theory. Skim the sections, take the numbers as starting benchmarks for your own market, and treat the checklist items as a work plan you can hand to your team or your agency this week.
What it costs
Typical Google Shopping CPCs run $0.30-$1.50 depending on category; Search on commercial product terms $0.60-$4. Meta CPMs commonly $6-$25 in Western markets. Management fees are usually 10-15% of spend, or $700-$2,500 monthly flat below $20,000 spend.
Treat every range above as a starting benchmark, not a quote. Competition in your specific market, the current state of your website, how much production capacity you already have in-house, and how aggressive your growth target is will all move the number. The useful exercise is to work backwards from revenue: what is one additional customer worth, how many do you need per month to justify the spend, and does the plan on the table plausibly produce them?
How long it takes
Start with 30 days of learning at a budget that can produce at least 50 purchases per month - below that, automated bidding cannot stabilise. Scale in 20-30% increments weekly rather than doubling.
Two things reliably compress timelines. The first is production volume: more genuinely useful pages and more consistent execution per month means faster results, which is why budget and speed are linked. The second is starting condition - a site with clean technical foundations and existing authority moves much faster than a new domain. Be honest about which one you are, then set expectations accordingly with whoever signs off on the budget.
What actually works
Set budget from unit economics: target ROAS = 1 / (gross margin x acceptable acquisition share). Work backwards to a spend the margin can support.
Get the product feed right before adding budget. Titles, GTINs, product types and images drive more Shopping performance than bid strategy.
None of these are clever. They are the boring fundamentals executed at unusual quality and consistency, which is what separates programmes that compound from programmes that plateau after one quarter.
Separate brand, generic and competitor search so brand traffic does not flatter blended ROAS.
Use Performance Max with an asset-group structure that mirrors margin tiers, and exclude your best-selling brand terms if you already own them organically.
Mistakes that cost the most
Judging channels on last-click ROAS alone while prospecting campaigns carry the demand creation.
Scaling before feed and landing page basics are fixed, which just buys more expensive traffic to the same conversion rate.
Spreading a small budget across four platforms instead of winning one.
Every one of these is common enough that we expect to find at least two of them in any audit. Fixing them costs almost nothing compared with the spend they waste, so they belong at the top of the work plan rather than in a backlog.
Your next 90 days
Weeks 1-2: instrument everything first. Tracking, call tracking where relevant, a conversion definition that finance would accept, and a baseline you can defend later. Skipping this step is the single most expensive shortcut available, because without a baseline you cannot prove anything worked.
Weeks 3-8: ship the highest-leverage items from the 'what actually works' list above, in priority order, one at a time so each change stays attributable. Resist the urge to rebuild everything at once - it feels productive and it destroys your ability to learn.
Weeks 9-12: build the compounding layer - content cadence, review velocity, link acquisition, experimentation - and set a monthly review with a fixed agenda. Feed quality improvements routinely produce larger Shopping performance gains than bid strategy changes - which is why feed work should precede budget increases.
If you would like a second opinion before you commit budget, we run free 30-minute strategy calls and will walk through your current setup using the same diagnostic we use with paying clients.
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