What is a good ROAS for ecommerce advertising?

It depends on your gross margin: the thinner the margin, the higher the return you need to break even. Directionally, a sustained 3x to 6x is a healthy working band for most stores. Verified results from Growth Bully accounts include a 6.14x ROAS in a standard month and a 25.61x seasonal peak, which should be read as a ceiling, not a target.

How can a small ad budget produce such a high ROAS?

Concentration. A small budget spent in the days when purchase intent peaks, backed by months of account data and pre-tested creative, harvests the hottest demand available. The 25.61x Bigmat result came from exactly that setup. Expect returns to compress as budgets scale into progressively cooler audiences, which is normal and still profitable.

Does ROAS include agency fees?

No. Return on ad spend measures tracked revenue divided by media spend paid to the ad platform, nothing else. Agency fees, product costs and shipping sit in your ROI calculation, which is the number that tells you whether the whole operation is profitable. You need both metrics, and they answer different questions.

How important is email marketing for an ecommerce store running ads?

Very. For one retailer we manage, email added 18% more revenue on top of the paid advertising engine, at near-zero media cost. Paid campaigns fill the list, email compounds the value of every customer acquired, and the improved lifetime value lets you bid more aggressively on ads than competitors who never built the retention layer.

How long does it take to reach strong ecommerce ad performance?

Plan in quarters, not weeks. The account needs clean tracking and enough purchase data for delivery to optimise, plus a creative testing rhythm that finds winners before you scale them. One store we manage grew from 22% to 73% of orders driven by paid media across a year of continuous work; the seasonal peaks were built on that base.

Ecommerce Advertising: What a 25.61x ROAS Actually Took

A 25.61x return on ad spend looks like a typo. It is not. The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, ran the Christmas paid social campaign behind that number for Bigmat, a retail client, and the result is real, tracked and repeat-audited. What the headline hides is everything that had to exist before the seasonal window opened. This article gives you the full picture, including the honest parts most case studies leave out.

What did the campaign actually deliver?

Over the Christmas trading period, EUR 1,199 of ad spend on Meta produced EUR 30,725 in tracked revenue across 321 orders: a 25.61x return on ad spend. The campaign carried 52% of the online revenue for the period, making paid social the single largest driver of the seasonal result.

One clarification before anything else. EUR 1,199 is the media budget paid to the ad platform for one concentrated seasonal campaign. It is not the total cost of running ecommerce advertising, and it says nothing about what an agency charges. Reading a campaign spend figure as a price is how store owners end up with the wrong expectations on both sides.

The full breakdown lives in our Bigmat Christmas case study.

What made a 25.61x ROAS possible?

Five preconditions, all in place before the first euro of the Christmas budget was spent. Miss any of them and the same budget produces a fraction of the result:

Account history. The pixel and Conversions API had months of clean purchase data behind them, so delivery started smart instead of spending the seasonal window learning who buys.
A genuinely strong seasonal offer. Ads amplify an offer; they cannot rescue one. The campaign gave shoppers a real reason to buy now, not a rebadged catalogue.
Creative tested before the peak. Hooks and formats were competing weeks in advance, so only proven winners carried budget during the days that mattered. Testing during the peak burns the most expensive impressions of the year on experiments.
Concentrated timing. Budget was compressed into the window when purchase intent peaks, rather than dripped evenly across a quarter. Seasonal intent is a wave; you load capacity onto it.
Tracking that captures revenue accurately. Every order tied back to spend through the pixel and Conversions API. A 25.61x you cannot verify is a screenshot, not a result.

Is a 25.61x ROAS repeatable?

Not as a monthly average, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling. It was a seasonal peak: a strong offer meeting maximum intent on a deliberately concentrated budget. Sustained ecommerce performance looks different, and we can show you that too, from the same portfolio.

NJA, another ecommerce retailer we run, delivered a 6.14x ROAS in a strong standard month. More telling is the trajectory: across a year of continuous work, the share of orders driven by paid media grew from 22% to 73%. That is what repeatable looks like: not one spectacular multiple, but paid advertising becoming the store's primary, predictable revenue engine.

Expect ROAS to compress as budgets scale. Small, concentrated budgets harvest the hottest demand; scaling means buying progressively cooler audiences at lower but still profitable returns. The question is never "how do we keep 25x", it is "how much profitable volume can we buy at or above our break-even".

What is the system behind these numbers?

We deliver ecommerce advertising through our Revenue Engine framework: paid media that acquires customers, email and CRM flows that compound their value, and measurement that ties every euro of spend to revenue. The email layer matters more than most stores expect: for the same retailer, email marketing added 18% more revenue on top of the paid engine, revenue that arrives at near-zero media cost.

The point of the framework is that the pieces feed each other. Paid campaigns fill the email list; email lifts customer lifetime value; better lifetime value lets the paid campaigns bid more aggressively than competitors can afford. Stores that run ads without the retention layer are funding customer acquisition for a relationship they never build.

Our retail and ecommerce page covers the vertical in full, and the paid media service page explains how we structure and report the advertising layer.

How do you get your store on this path?

Start with an audit of the five preconditions above: tracking quality, offer strength, creative pipeline, budget timing and account data depth. Most underperforming stores fail two or three of them, and fixing those is worth more than any bidding trick.

If you want that audit done against real benchmark data from live ecommerce accounts, book a strategy call. We will show you where your account stands and what the next profitable euro of spend looks like.