The feed is the keyword list
Shopping ads match searches to your product titles and attributes in Merchant Center, not to keywords you type.
Ecommerce PPC management: bid on margin, not ROAS
Ecommerce PPC management means running Google Shopping, Performance Max, Search and Meta ads for an online store so each sale pays back its product cost, shipping, fees and returns. The target that matters is break-even ROAS, which is 1 divided by your margin per order: a store keeping 30% of each sale needs at least $3.33 in revenue for every $1 of ads. Eloari manages ecommerce ad accounts for a flat fee from $900 a month, month to month, with every account in your store's name.
- ROAS targets set from your real margin, product by product.
- Returns and refunds taken out of the numbers Google bids on.
- Tracking installed and verified before any spend begins.
- Flat fee from $900 a month, never a percentage of spend.
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01 — What is different
What makes PPC different for an online store?
A store doesn't buy leads; it buys orders, and every order has its own margin. U.S. online sales reached $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, 17.1% of all retail sales and 12.2% more than a year earlier (U.S. Census Bureau, August 2026).
Six things only an ecommerce account has:
Every product has a margin
A $20 phone case and a $900 mattress can't share one ROAS target.
Sales get returned
An estimated 19.3% of online sales were returned in 2025 (NRF and Happy Returns), and Google counts the sale anyway unless you correct it.
Repeat buyers inflate the report
Ads take credit for customers who were coming back on their own, unless you separate new from returning.
Two campaign types share products
Performance Max and Standard Shopping can serve the same item, and since late 2024 the higher Ad Rank wins.
One quarter decides the year
U.S. shoppers spent $257.8 billion online from November 1 to December 31, 2025 (Adobe Analytics).
ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue the platform credits to ads, divided by what the ads cost. Break-even ROAS is the ROAS at which an order pays its costs and nothing more. Contribution margin is what is left of a sale after product cost, shipping, payment fees and returns. Merchant Center is the Google account that holds your product feed. Performance Max is the Google campaign that spreads one budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps.
02 — Click prices
What does a click cost for an online store?
From under a dollar to more than $50, depending on what the product is worth over time. In October 2026 the top U.S. bid for "phone case" was $1.97 and for "running shoes" $2.07, while "mattress online" reached $21.37 and "fresh dog food delivery" $55.31 (Google Keyword Planner). Subscriptions and big-ticket items pay more because one buyer brings more money.
U.S. monthly searches and the high end of Google's top-of-page bid, Keyword Planner, October 24, 2026:
| Shopper search | Monthly searches | Top-of-page bid (high) |
|---|---|---|
| fresh dog food delivery | 4,400 | $55.31 |
| dog food delivery | 4,400 | $38.41 |
| mattress online | 1,300 | $21.37 |
| vitamins online | 8,100 | $14.17 |
| buy standing desk | 140 | $12.31 |
| skin care products | 49,500 | $7.69 |
| engagement rings | 673,000 | $6.58 |
| candles | 246,000 | $5.58 |
| protein powder | 368,000 | $2.82 |
| phone case | 246,000 | $1.97 |
| car parts online | 18,100 | $1.94 |
| brooks running shoes | 165,000 | $0.83 |
Recurring products pay the most per click: the delivery searches cost 10 to 20 times "protein powder," because advertisers price in months of repeat orders. Searches for a brand you resell, such as "brooks running shoes" at $0.83, are cheap clicks with thin margins. The price you can afford is your average order value × the share of clicks that buy × your margin.
Top-of-page bid is Google's estimate of what advertisers have paid to show above the organic results; we show the high end of the range. Brands appear only as public search data; Eloari has no relationship with them. For service businesses, see how much Google Ads costs.
03 — Break-even ROAS
What ROAS does an ecommerce store need to break even?
Break-even ROAS equals 1 divided by your contribution margin. A product that keeps 25% of its price after every cost breaks even at a ROAS of 4.0; one that keeps 50% breaks even at 2.0. There is no good ROAS for ecommerce in general, only a good ROAS for your margin.
| Margin kept per order | Break-even ROAS | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 20% | 5.0 | $5 of sales per $1 of ads just to stand still. Usually reseller or low-margin goods. |
| 30% | 3.33 | A "3x ROAS" report loses money on every order. |
| 40% | 2.5 | Room to buy new customers at break-even and earn on the repeat order. |
| 50% | 2.0 | Own-brand products; can bid on wider, colder searches. |
A worked example, with assumed costs for illustration. A product sells for $80. It costs $32 to make, $8 to ship and $2 to pack, and the Shopify Payments Basic card fee is 2.9% + $0.30, or $2.62 (Shopify, U.S., 2026). That leaves $35.38, a 44% margin, on an order that stays sold.
| Step | Number | How we got it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Margin on a kept order | $35.38 | $80 − $32 − $8 − $2 − $2.62. |
| 2. Loss on a returned order | $20.62 | Shipping both ways, packing and the fee, assuming the item goes back on the shelf. |
| 3. Expected profit per order | $24.57 | 80.7% kept × $35.38, minus 19.3% returned × $20.62 (NRF online return rate, 2025). |
| 4. Break-even ROAS | 3.26 | $80 of credited revenue ÷ $24.57. Not 1.67, the figure product cost alone suggests. |
Set a Target ROAS of 2.0 on this product, because it looks safely above the 1.67 that product cost alone suggests, and Google can hit that target while every order loses about $15 of profit. A margin-based target closes that gap between the report and the bank account. Your own return rate replaces the national one.
04 — What Google is told
How do returns and repeat customers change your bids?
Smart Bidding chases the conversion value you send it, so send it what you keep. Google Ads lets a store restate a conversion's value after a partial return, or retract it entirely after a full refund, matched by order ID (Google Ads Help, October 2026). A retraction can't be undone, so retract only refunds that are final.
| What happens | What Google sees by default | What to send instead |
|---|---|---|
| Order fully refunded | A sale at full value, forever. | A retraction: count and value removed. |
| One item of three returned | The full basket. | A restatement to the kept value; the count stays. |
| Returning customer reorders | A new sale credited to the last ad clicked. | New-customer value higher than repeat value, using the customer acquisition goal. |
| Low-margin item sells | Revenue, same as a high-margin item. | Separate campaigns or ROAS targets by margin tier. |
Google's customer acquisition goal has two modes: new customer value bids more for first-time buyers (it needs value-based bidding and a purchase goal), and new customer only bids for them alone (Google Ads Help, October 2026). For how purchases are counted in the first place, see Google Ads conversion tracking setup.
05 — Campaign types
Performance Max, Shopping, Search or Meta: which does a store need?
Most stores need two or three, each with its own job. Since October 2024, when one product sits in both Performance Max and Standard Shopping, Google serves the campaign with the higher Ad Rank instead of always choosing Performance Max (Google Ads Liaison, via Code3, 2024). In April 2025 Google announced a channel report showing where Performance Max money goes.
| Campaign | What it does | When it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Shopping | Product ads in Shopping results, with your bids and search-term control. | Thin margins, a short catalog, or when you need to see exactly which searches buy. |
| Performance Max | One budget across seven Google channels, driven by the feed and the conversion value. | Clean conversion values and enough sales for the system to learn. Check the channel report monthly. |
| Search (text ads) | Ads on searches for your brand and for problems your product solves. | Protecting your brand name and buying high-intent searches the feed doesn't cover. |
| Meta Advantage+ sales with catalog ads | Shows products from your catalog on Facebook and Instagram to people who haven't searched yet. | Products people buy on sight, and creative you can refresh every few weeks. |
Meta renamed Advantage+ shopping campaigns to Advantage+ sales in 2025. To decide which platform to fund first, read Google Ads vs Facebook Ads; for the Meta side alone, Facebook Ads management.
06 — The setup
How should an online store set up its ad account?
Fix the feed and the numbers before the budget. A product missing a required attribute, such as ID, title, link, image link, price or availability, can't show in Shopping ads or free listings, and Google requires the GTIN for every product that has one (Google Merchant Center Help, October 2026).
| Step | Where | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Clear the feed | Merchant Center | No disapproved products, GTINs filled in, titles that use the words shoppers search. |
| 2. Verify the purchase tag | Store, Google Ads, Meta | One purchase per order, with the order value and order ID, checked with a test order. |
| 3. Write down the margin | Your books | Contribution margin by product or category, returns included, so every ROAS target has a reason. |
| 4. Group products by margin | Campaigns | High, middle and low margin in separate campaigns or listing groups, each with its own target. |
| 5. Separate new from returning | Customer lists, acquisition goal | Upload past buyers so the account can tell a new customer from a reorder. |
| 6. Feed returns back | Conversion adjustments | Restate or retract refunded orders on a fixed schedule. |
| 7. Plan the holidays by September | Budget, offers | Stock, offers and budget set before Cyber Week. |
If shoppers click and don't buy, the problem may be the product page, not the ad; our landing page optimization page lists what to check.
07 — Seasonality
When does an online store's ad budget matter most?
November and December. U.S. consumers spent $44.2 billion online during Cyber Week 2025, the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, up 7.7%, and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday alone (Adobe Analytics, December 2025). Clicks get more expensive as every store raises its budget at the same time.
Three rules for the season. Raise budgets only where the margin survives the discount: 20% off the $80 product above cuts its margin from 44% to about 31%, and the break-even ROAS rises from 2.3 to about 3.2 before returns. Judge December campaigns after the January refunds, not on December 31. And a store without clean conversion data by October enters the most expensive weeks of the year with Smart Bidding guessing.
08 — Watch
Retargeting: the campaign that flatters your ROAS
Retargeting usually shows the best ROAS in a store's account because it reaches people who already visited, many of whom were coming back anyway. In a published field experiment, retargeting ads lifted purchases by about 11% over a matched control group (Johnson, Lewis and Nubbemeyer, "Ghost Ads," Journal of Marketing Research, 2017).
Retargeting Ads: 5 Myths That Waste Your Budget. Eloari, October 2026 (12 min). Exclusions, list windows and the holdout test are written out on our retargeting ads page.
09 — Who runs it
Jonatã Ariel Silveira
President, Eloari Management Group · Meta Business Partner
Accounts are run by the founder, not passed to a junior after the sales call. Eloari's founders currently manage more than $100,000 per week in advertising spend across client accounts, in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
10 — Pricing
How much does ecommerce PPC management cost?
Typical U.S. agency pricing is a flat retainer of $1,000 to $5,000 a month for small and mid-sized accounts, or 10% to 20% of ad spend, most often 15%, plus setup fees of $2,500 to $10,000 (Eloari, main page, October 2026). Eloari charges a flat fee from $900 a month, with no setup fee, no percentage and no markup on media.
| Tier | Monthly fee | Suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $900/mo | Ad spend under $5,000/mo |
| Growth | $1,500/mo | Ad spend $5,000–$20,000/mo |
| Full | $2,500/mo | Ad spend $20,000+/mo |
A percentage fee earns the agency more in December, when clicks cost the most and margins are thinnest; a flat fee doesn't move. At $4,000 of ad spend, $900 is about 22% of what is put to work; at $20,000 on the Growth tier, $1,500 is 7.5%. The fit is best for stores spending $2,000 or more a month where a customer is worth several hundred dollars over time. You pay Google and Meta directly, own every account, pixel and conversion history, and can leave with thirty days' notice.
11 — Related
Related pages for store owners
The pages that rank for "ecommerce PPC management" (HawkSEM, Shopify, SmartSites, October 24, 2026) don't work out a break-even ROAS, subtract returns or show dated click prices by product. This page does.
12 — Questions
Ecommerce PPC questions
What is ecommerce PPC?
Pay-per-click advertising for an online store: Google Shopping, Performance Max, Search and Meta ads that send shoppers to product pages. You pay for each click, and the goal is orders that make a profit after ad cost, not only revenue.
What is a good ROAS for ecommerce?
Any ROAS above your break-even, which is 1 divided by your contribution margin after product cost, shipping, fees and returns. At a 30% margin you need more than 3.33; at 50%, more than 2.0. A single industry-wide "good ROAS" ignores your margin.
Is Performance Max good for ecommerce?
It can be, once it is fed accurate purchase values and enough sales to learn from. Since late 2024 it no longer wins automatically over Standard Shopping for the same product; the higher Ad Rank serves.
Should my online store run Google Shopping or Facebook ads first?
If people already search for what you sell, start with Google, which captures existing demand. If your products sell on sight and few people search for them by name, Meta can create the demand. With budget for one channel only, start with Google.
How much should an online store spend on Google Ads?
Most U.S. businesses need at least $2,000 to $3,000 a month for paid search to produce reliable data (Eloari, main page). Set the budget from your break-even ROAS, not from a percentage of revenue.
Do I need GTINs for Google Shopping?
Yes, for every product that has one. Google's product data specification requires the GTIN for all products with a known GTIN; products without one use brand and MPN instead.
How do returns affect my Google Ads results?
By default, not at all: Google keeps counting the refunded sale. Restating or retracting refunded orders by order ID removes that revenue, so Smart Bidding stops chasing products that come back. U.S. online return rates were about 19.3% of sales in 2025 (NRF).
13 — Next step
Start with the review.
Send access to your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, or just tell us your store, your best-selling products and roughly what you keep per order. We will tell you what we would change, whether or not you hire us.