Cost-per-click on Google's Shopping and Performance Max campaigns rose 15 percent year-over-year between June 2025 and June 2026, while the average return on ad spend fell 46 percent on Performance Max and 43 percent on Standard Shopping over the same period, according to Channable, the Utrecht-based multichannel e-commerce and feed management platform.

The findings, published this month, are drawn from an analysis of 1.38 billion euros in verified Google Ads spend across more than 10,000 European e-commerce advertisers. Channable, which says it is trusted by more than 17,000 brands and agencies worldwide, released the data alongside the launch of its e-commerce Google Ads Benchmark, a tool that lets brands compare their own Google Ads performance against median figures for their industry and country.

The pattern documented in the analysis is simple to state, yet consequential in its scale. Clicks became more expensive. Conversions became harder to win. And the combination pushed the cost of simply staying visible in Google's advertising auctions upward at a pace that outstripped what many advertisers had budgeted for.

What the numbers show

According to Channable, the average cost-per-click across combined Google Ads channels increased 15 percent between June 2025 and June 2026, translating into a 0.06 euro rise across all campaign types. Over the same twelve-month window, average ROAS on Performance Max campaigns contracted by 46 percent, while Standard Shopping campaigns saw a 43 percent contraction.

Cost-per-acquisition moved in the same direction. Channable's data shows a 1.44 euro rise in average CPA on Performance Max campaigns, and a steeper 1.94 euro rise on Shopping campaigns. Conversion rates on Performance Max slipped by 0.11 percentage points over the period, a modest-looking figure that nonetheless compounds with rising click costs to produce the sharper ROAS contraction.

Seasonal spending patterns add another dimension to the picture. Ad spend in the fourth quarter of 2025 ran 47.9 percent higher than in the first quarter of the same year, according to Channable, while cost-per-click across combined Google Ads channels was 9.1 percent higher in Q4 than in Q1. For advertisers finalizing second-half budgets now, the gap between those two figures carries a direct implication: a budget calibrated to Q1 competition levels is unlikely to stretch through the fourth quarter without running short.

Where the pressure concentrates

Channable's data breaks the cost increases down by industry and by country, and the variation across both dimensions is substantial.

Electronics and Tech, along with Health and Beauty, emerged as the most expensive verticals on Performance Max, both carrying an average cost-per-click of 0.56 euros over the trailing 365 days. Fashion and Apparel sat at the opposite end, with a CPC of 0.39 euros, a gap the company describes as a 44 percent difference between the least and most expensive categories.

Sports and Leisure recorded the steepest ROAS deterioration of any vertical tracked. According to the underlying figures, the category's return on ad spend fell 90 percent on Performance Max and 142 percent on Shopping campaigns, even as the category posted comparatively strong average ROAS levels of 659 percent on Performance Max and 645 percent on Shopping in the trailing-year snapshot. The scale of that year-over-year decline, set against an otherwise healthy absolute ROAS figure, illustrates how quickly efficiency in a single vertical can erode even when the category's underlying returns remain above the cross-industry median.

Baby and Pets registered the lowest cost-per-acquisition across both campaign types among the eight verticals Channable tracks, at 9.90 euros on Performance Max and 8.95 euros on Shopping. Home and Garden sat at the opposite extreme for CPA, reaching 26.72 euros on Performance Max and 21.74 euros on Shopping, the highest figures in either table.

Geographic variation followed a comparable pattern, with newer e-commerce markets showing the sharpest increases. Hungary posted a cost increase of 42.1 percent, more than double the European average, while the Czech Republic recorded a 34.8 percent rise. Both figures reflect what Channable describes as the rapid entry of new advertisers into markets that previously carried lower floor prices in Google's ad auctions.

At the country level, Norway carried the highest Performance Max cost-per-acquisition among the seventeen markets in Channable's country breakdown, at 28.05 euros, while Poland's Performance Max CPC of 0.20 euros ranked among the lowest alongside Spain at the same figure. Sports and Leisure again stood out on the upside for absolute returns, posting a Performance Max ROAS of 659 percent and a Shopping ROAS of 645 percent, the highest readings in either industry table even as the category suffered the steepest year-over-year decline described above.

Three forces behind the increase

Channable attributes the cost increase to three structural forces operating simultaneously.

The first is the rapid entry of new advertisers into markets that previously carried low floor prices. Hungary and the Czech Republic, cited above, exemplify this dynamic: as more advertisers compete for the same auction inventory in markets where competition had been comparatively thin, prices rise faster than the European average.

The second is the continued expansion of Performance Max as a campaign type, which Channable says consolidates auction competition. Performance Max pools budget and targeting decisions across Google's Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps surfaces into a single automated campaign structure, concentrating competitive pressure in ways that separated campaign types historically did not.

The third force is what Channable frames as a widening gap between advertisers who maintain clean, optimized product data and those who do not, a gap the company says becomes especially visible during the fourth quarter, when Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas fall within a single twelve-week commercial window.

The data quality argument

Channable's central argument connects the cost increase to feed and catalog quality rather than treating it as an inevitable market condition applying equally to every advertiser.

According to the company, the brands absorbing the CPC increase least well share a common characteristic: they are optimizing their campaigns without optimizing the data that feeds those campaigns. When product listings contain incomplete attributes, incorrect categorization, or missing signals, Google's algorithm has less structured information to work with. Quality Scores fall as a consequence, auction competitiveness drops, and advertisers end up bidding more for visibility that better-structured data would have earned at a lower cost.

Stefan Hospes, co-founder and chief product officer at Channable, framed the distinction directly. "The brands feeling this most acutely treated Google Ads as a budget line when they should have approached it as key data infrastructure," Hospes said. He added a specific point about how the same 15 percent CPC increase can land very differently depending on preparation: "A 15% CPC increase is painful if you're bidding on the same listings as last year. It's manageable if your feed is optimised, your budget is structured for Q4, and your product data is working as hard as your campaigns."

Hospes also addressed the fourth-quarter timing directly, describing it as a moment that separates advertisers who planned ahead from those who did not. "Q4 is the moment that separates brands that planned for it from brands that didn't," he said. "This data tells you exactly what's coming. The only question is whether your budget, your feed quality, and your campaign structure are ready for it."

Methodology and scope

Channable's benchmark report analyzes 1.38 billion euros in verified Google Ads spend from more than 10,000 European e-commerce advertisers, covering the period from June 2024 through June 2026. According to the company, all data included in the analysis is fully anonymized, with account identifiers, business names, and campaign-level details removed prior to aggregation.

Each reported segment requires a minimum of ten independent merchants, and no single business is permitted to account for more than 25 percent of any given segment, a threshold designed to prevent the figures from being skewed by a small number of unusually large advertisers. Only verified advertisers operating in the European Union and European Economic Area are included in the dataset, and Channable says multi-account operators are merged during processing to prevent the same underlying business from being counted more than once. The company also states that its benchmarks use the median rather than the average across each segment, a methodological choice intended to reduce distortion from outlier spenders within any given industry or country grouping.

The benchmark itself, now publicly accessible, includes median figures for cost-per-acquisition, click-through rate, conversion rate, and ROAS broken down by industry, in addition to the cost-per-click data highlighted in the initial findings.

Context for the marketing community

The Channable findings arrive alongside a broader pattern of rising search advertising costs that PPC Land has tracked across multiple benchmark sources over the past two years. WordStream's May 2026 benchmark study, covering more than 13,000 US campaigns, found average cost-per-click reaching 5.42 dollars, though that same study marked the first year-over-year decline in cost-per-lead since before 2020, a divergence from the pattern Channable documents in the European e-commerce segment specifically. The contrast is notable: while overall US search advertising showed signs of stabilizing efficiency even as costs climbed, Channable's e-commerce-specific European data shows returns actively contracting alongside rising costs, suggesting the dynamics affecting product-feed-driven Shopping and Performance Max campaigns differ from the broader search advertising market that WordStream's benchmark captures.

Google's own bidding infrastructure changes compound the timing question the Channable data raises. Google Ads is preparing a bidding target optimization change that takes effect August 17, 2026, altering how budget-limited campaigns running Target CPA or Target ROAS strategies deliver against their stated targets. Campaigns that have converted well below their stated cost target, sometimes for many months, will begin drifting toward that higher stated figure once the change takes hold. Google made the Bid Target Adjustment Tool available on July 6, 2026, giving advertisers a narrow window to review and adjust their targets before the automatic shift begins. The overlap between that change and the cost pressures Channable documents means advertisers reviewing Q4 budgets face two distinct sources of potential cost inflation arriving within weeks of each other, rather than a single, isolated pressure point.

Auction dynamics in Europe's Google Shopping environment have also shifted in ways relevant to the Channable data. Google Shopping data covering roughly 500 European advertisers showed Temu's competitive presence in the auction halving since March 2026, with SHEIN's presence dropping close to zero by late June, both retreats tied to the European Union's new customs duty structure for low-value imports that took effect July 1, 2026. Whether the reduced competitive pressure from those two large-volume, price-sensitive advertisers offsets or is outweighed by the broader cost increases Channable documents is not addressed directly in either dataset, since the two analyses cover overlapping but distinct advertiser populations and measurement windows.

The consolidation trend within Performance Max that Channable cites as one of its three structural forces mirrors developments PPC Land has covered throughout 2026, as Google has continued layering new bidding and budgeting capabilities, including Smart Bidding Exploration and promotion mode, onto the campaign type. Each addition expands what a single automated campaign structure controls, a pattern consistent with Channable's observation that Performance Max concentrates auction competition in ways that separated campaign types historically did not.

For an industry where Q4 concentrates a disproportionate share of annual e-commerce revenue into a compressed twelve-week window, the practical significance of the Channable findings lies less in any single statistic and more in the combination of rising costs, contracting returns, and a widening performance gap between advertisers with strong product data infrastructure and those without it. Whether that gap narrows or widens further as Q4 2026 approaches is a question the current data cannot answer definitively, though Channable's own commentary suggests the company expects the divide to become more pronounced rather than less.

Timeline

  • June 2024: The measurement window for Channable's benchmark report begins
  • June 2025: The twelve-month year-over-year comparison period begins for the headline cost-per-click and ROAS figures
  • 2025 Q1: The baseline quarter against which Channable measures fourth-quarter spend increases
  • 2025 Q4: Ad spend runs 47.9 percent higher than Q1 2025, and combined-channel cost-per-click runs 9.1 percent higher than Q1, according to Channable
  • May 2025: Channable acquires Producthero, a Google CSS and Shopping specialist
  • June 2026: The twelve-month year-over-year comparison period ends; the underlying data collection window closes
  • July 12, 2026: Channable publishes its e-commerce Google Ads Benchmark and the accompanying cost and ROAS analysis

Summary

Who: Channable, the Utrecht-based multichannel e-commerce and feed management platform serving more than 17,000 brands and agencies, published the analysis. The data covers more than 10,000 European e-commerce advertisers running Google Ads campaigns.

What: Channable's analysis of 1.38 billion euros in verified Google Ads spend found a 15 percent year-over-year increase in cost-per-click across Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, alongside a 46 percent contraction in average ROAS on Performance Max and a 43 percent contraction on Standard Shopping. Cost-per-acquisition rose 1.44 euros on Performance Max and 1.94 euros on Shopping. The company launched its e-commerce Google Ads Benchmark alongside the findings.

When: The measurement window covers June 2024 through June 2026, with the primary year-over-year comparison spanning June 2025 to June 2026. Channable published the findings and launched the benchmark tool on July 12, 2026.

Where: The data covers Google Ads advertisers operating across the European Union and European Economic Area, with country-level breakdowns spanning at least seventeen markets including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and several Central and Eastern European markets such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania.

Why: Channable attributes the cost increase to three structural forces: new advertisers entering previously low-cost markets, the consolidation of auction competition within Performance Max as a campaign type, and a widening gap between advertisers with optimized product data and those without. The company frames the fourth quarter, when Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas fall within a single twelve-week window, as the period when that data-quality gap becomes most consequential for advertiser returns.