E-commerce advertising that shows up in revenue

There are always two separate sums, and mixing them hides the truth.

• The team — strategy, feed, campaigns, creative, analytics and reporting. From $650 per month per channel, from $1,500 for the full set.
• The ad budget — money that goes straight to Google and Meta. A test usually needs $1,000–1,500 per month.

If an agency quotes a single number, ask for read access to the ad account. Without it there is no way to tell the fee from the media spend.

Three causes visible in almost every account we open.

• Campaigns run apart from the product feed and stock levels, so ads push items that are not there.
• Google and Meta are set up by different people and bid against each other for the same buyer.
• Nobody brings the buyer back: the whole budget chases new customers, although a repeat sale is cheaper.

Four blocks that work as one system.

• Google Shopping and Performance Max on a clean feed, split by margin rather than alphabetically.
• Meta with a catalogue and dynamic retargeting for people who viewed an item and did not buy.
• Email and SMS for abandoned carts, the first repeat order and dormant buyers.
• End-to-end analytics down to the order: we count orders and revenue, not clicks.

When the limit is the site and the checkout rather than traffic, that is separate work — see Shopify and online store growth.

Between 30 January and 28 July 2026 the store made $19.8M in revenue on $1.31M of ad spend — a 15 to 1 return. Account screenshots are in our cases.

Three things produced it: Performance Max on a clean feed, splitting products by margin so the algorithm stopped buying cheap traffic for low-margin items, and passing order value into the account so the campaigns optimised for revenue rather than conversion count.

Per the Meta ad account, the channel produced 63,922 purchases worth $3.9M. The mechanics are plain and repeatable: a product catalogue, dynamic retargeting on viewed items, and a separate new-customer campaign with a cap on acquisition cost.

In the Shopify admin, the week of 7–14 September 2026 shows $1.24M in sales, 67% above the previous week. A jump like that is almost never a new creative — it is demand, stock and a site ready to take the traffic lining up at once.

A repeat buyer costs less than a new one: no auction to win, no case to make from scratch. In this project email and SMS produced $1.23M — $1.13M from email and $101K from SMS.

We set up abandoned cart and abandoned browse, the first repeat after delivery, reactivation of buyers who went quiet, and segments by category and order value.

1. You send the store URL and current numbers: spend, revenue, average order value.
2. Within 24 hours we return an estimate and a plan: which channels, in what order, at what budget.
3. Launch within 5–7 days of sign-off.

Selling through marketplaces works differently — see Amazon, eBay and Etsy.