An effective advertising budget is not about spending the most money, but about getting the most out of each click. The focus is on understanding ROAS, ensuring a webshop that both converts and loads quickly, and allowing goals to guide the distribution between channels like Google Ads and Paid Social. When the foundation is solid, you can scale your advertising without wasting budget on traffic that won't convert into sales.
Advertising budget
You can certainly spend more money on advertising, but that doesn't mean you'll get more out of it. In practice, an advertising budget is about two things: choosing the right places to spend the money and ensuring that the traffic lands somewhere that can actually sell. Otherwise, you're just paying for more visits that lead to nothing.
Advertising budget and ROAS
When planning an advertising budget, the conversation quickly turns to ROAS. Not because it’s a magic number, but because it forces you to think in terms of returns rather than gut feelings. If you can’t measure what the budget brings back, you can’t manage it either.
A good rule of thumb is that you typically optimize for one primary intention at a time:
- Sales here and now, where you prioritize stable profit and clear conversions.
- Learning, where you test messages, target audiences, and landing pages to improve next month.
When you try to do both at the same time with the same budget, you often end up diluting the prioritization. Instead, start with the goal and let the numbers determine the pace, channel choice, and how aggressively you ramp up.
The marketing budget for e-commerce is linked to the conversion rate.
A marketing budget for e-commerce lives and dies by your conversion rate. If your webshop isn't converting, advertising dollars can quickly turn into an expensive hobby. This doesn't mean you need to rebuild everything before you start advertising. It means you should prioritize improvements that remove friction in the purchasing flow, so the traffic you buy has a much better chance of turning into sales.
CRO is about continuous improvement and not a one-time project. You work systematically with data, tests, and clear KPIs, so you always know what drives progress. If you want to see how we typically approach this, you can read more about conversion optimization at Mercive.
A budget for online advertising requires a fast webshop.
When load times and heavy scripts slow down the page, you still pay for the click. The user just won't wait for you, and then you lose the session. Speed is therefore a direct part of your online advertising budget because performance affects how much value you get from the same traffic.
In practice, it often proves most effective to focus on a few things at a time:
- Optimization of the theme's code so that unnecessary JavaScript and CSS do not block loading.
- Image optimization, so product and lifestyle images are not larger than necessary.
- Review of third-party scripts to ensure that tracking and widgets do not unnecessarily impact speed.
If you want to dive into what typically moves the most, you can read more about speed optimization and get an idea of where you can start.
Google Ads budget vs. Paid Social budget
Google Ads and Paid Social often serve different purposes in the customer journey. Google Ads typically captures users who are already looking for a solution. Paid Social can create demand and build awareness earlier in the journey. Therefore, budget allocation is rarely a matter of either/or, but rather about a clear division of roles.
A simple way to distribute.
You can make it more manageable by dividing the budget into three categories, which you adjust continuously based on performance, season, and inventory status:
- Campaigns that create new traffic and test new target groups or messages
- Campaigns that reactivate visitors, such as retargeting and email match lists.
- Campaigns that prioritize products or collections with clear margins and a high likelihood of sale
The point is not to achieve a perfect percentage distribution. The point is to have a structure that can be managed, so you know what to adjust when ROAS, CPA, or volume changes.
Shopify and advertising budget: Get the foundation to work
If you run e-commerce on Shopify, your foundation is part of the budget, whether you call it marketing or development. A webshop built for performance makes it easier to scale advertising without everything breaking when traffic increases. Therefore, it makes sense to view the advertising budget, webshop development, and UX as one cohesive growth engine.
If you want an overview of the disciplines we typically combine, you can see our services, and if you want to see concrete examples of results, you can explore our cases.
If you want to discuss how your advertising budget can better align with conversion, performance, and scaling, please write to contact@mercive.com or call at+45 61 60 29 83.
