Shopping KPI Survey: Ad Spend—What percentage of revenue do you spend on ads?

The Search Monitor recently conducted a survey to aggregate performance metrics for shopping campaigns on Google, Bing and Amazon. 

Shopping engines don’t publish any directional stats, and few research papers have been published on this topic. Therefore, benchmarking and goal setting for shopping campaigns is challenging. That’s why we took on the task of anonymously aggregating the top most requested KPI's, including CTR, Conversion Rate, and ROAS for advertisers running shopping campaigns on Google, Amazon and Bing.

Question:

What percentage of revenue do you spend on ads?

About the stat: Ad Spend Investment is a measure of the percentage of gross revenue that you are willing to spend on advertising.  This stat is calculated as Ad Spend / Gross Revenue.

Highlights

Shopping ads are a powerful, visual, and highly contextual ad unit, which has made them the new storefront. 

Over half (55%) of survey respondents spend 15% or less on shopping ads (as a percentage of revenue).

Setting a budget as a percentage of revenue lets you keep your budget in line with sales and conversion goals.

In order to set realistic budgets, it is important to understand the other metrics covered in this report. Your budget should take into account your conversion rate, CTR, cost per conversion and ROAS.

The data shown here is a great starting point when determining your ad budget percentage. Knowing that 39% of advertisers spend less than 10% of revenue on shopping ads while 16% spend 30% or more is a helpful starting point.