Meta Ads Benchmarks for E-commerce Brands (2026)

“Is my ROAS good?” is the wrong question. The right one is “good for whom, in which category, in which market?” A 2.4x blended ROAS is a disaster for jewellery and a triumph for snacks.

How to read these benchmarks

These ranges are our illustrative estimates, not measured data from any specific set of accounts, not from a named study, and not a guarantee. They sketch how Meta delivery and unit economics tend to behave by category. Use them to orient, then replace them with your own trailing-90-day numbers as soon as you have them. Your own account is always the better benchmark.

One structural point that most benchmark posts get wrong, and that matters more than any individual number:

• Ratios travel between markets. Click-through rate, conversion rate and ROAS are shaped by category, creative and offer. A jewellery ad converts at a low rate in São Paulo for the same reason it does in Stockholm.
• Money metrics do not travel. CPM, CPC and average order value are set by local auction density and local purchasing power. They vary by roughly five times between the most and least expensive markets. A single global CPM table is worse than no table.

So the ratio tables below are the primary ones. The money tables are explicitly market-scoped.

CTR by category

Two rules of thumb (ours, with no published source). Below about 0.8% cold CTR, suspect the creative before the audience. Above about 2.5% cold CTR with weak conversion, suspect the landing page — the ad promised something the page did not deliver.

Before you act on a low CTR, separate the hook from the body: hook rate versus hold rate explains why a three-second problem and a thirty-second problem need different fixes.

Landing page conversion rate by category

Conversion rate punches above its weight. Moving from median to top quartile — usually a landing page rebuild plus a tightened offer — roughly doubles effective ROAS without touching the ad account at all.

ROAS by category

A warning about the retargeting column: those numbers look wonderful and mean very little on their own, because retargeting largely re-buys demand your prospecting already created. Judge the blended figure. And judge it against your own margin rather than this table — contribution margin CM2 vs CM3 is the gate that decides whether a given ROAS is actually profitable for you.

If the platform number and the bank balance disagree, that is a different problem entirely: why a 4x in Ads Manager can still lose money.

CPM by market

This is the table that cannot be global. Illustrative cold prospecting CPM ranges for e-commerce:

As an unsourced estimate, retargeting CPM often runs around 2.2-2.8x the cold figure in the same market, because you are bidding into a small, contested audience.

Then adjust for category. These multipliers are relative to the market baseline above and do travel, because they reflect how many advertisers compete for the same buyer:

Worked example. A jewellery brand prospecting in the UK: baseline $7-$16, multiplied by 1.3, gives roughly $9-$21 cold CPM. The same brand in India: $2-$4 baseline, times 1.3, gives roughly $2.60-$5.20. Same category, same creative discipline, a four-fold difference in media cost — which is why a CPM target copied from a US case study is actively misleading.

Within a market, CPM also concentrates in the largest metros. As an unsourced estimate, geo-expanding beyond the top-tier cities can cut CPM by something like 30-50%, at the cost of a softer buyer. Test it on your own account before you plan around it.

You do not need a CPC table

CPC is not an independent metric — it falls out of the two you already have:

CPC = CPM ÷ (CTR × 1,000)

A $12 CPM at 1.5% CTR gives a $0.80 CPC. A $12 CPM at 0.9% CTR gives $1.33. Nothing about the auction changed; the creative got worse. Publishing a CPC benchmark separately invites people to optimise a number that is really two numbers wearing a coat — and to “fix” CPC by chasing cheap clicks that never convert.

Average order value

AOV is set by what your market will pay, so it is scoped the same way as CPM. As a worked example, here are illustrative figures for one market — India — in dollars, with the local-currency figure alongside:

For a US or Western European brand, expect AOV several times these figures in the same category — and note that CPM rises alongside it, which is why blended ROAS bands stay broadly comparable across markets even when every absolute number changes.

The reliable lever is the same everywhere: bundle pricing and a free-shipping threshold set just above your own median AOV. Both push order value up without touching acquisition cost, which is why they are usually the cheapest margin available.

How to actually use this page

Do not aim for the median. Aim for top quartile in your single weakest metric, and ignore the rest until that one moves.

1. Pull your own trailing 90 days by category and campaign type.
2. Find the metric furthest below its band. That is the only one worth working on this month.
3. Bottom-quartile CTR is a creative problem. Bottom-quartile CVR is a landing page problem. Median CTR with poor blended ROAS is usually an account-structure problem — start with How do I check and fix audience overlap on Facebook? Meta enters only one of your overlapping ad sets in each shared auction, so the others can underspend.
4. Re-measure after four weeks, not four days. Early volatility is not a true loser.

If you want this done against your own numbers rather than a table, connect your ad account at app.wittelsbach.ai. The free audit compares your account to category-appropriate ranges and ranks the gaps by what each one is costing you.

Method and sources

“There is no single number — it depends on category and margin.”

Source: Where this guide describes platform behaviour, it follows Meta’s published advertising and Marketing API documentation, which changes without notice — verify anything load-bearing against the current version before you act on it. Every threshold the guide asks you to supply is first-party, drawn from your own account exports and commerce ledger, because no external benchmark can stand in for your own margin structure.