How much does Google Shopping cost? 2026 data, not 2019

Search for how much Google Shopping costs and you will find the same number on page after page: 0.66 dollars a click.

That number is real. It comes from 671 US accounts that ran Shopping ads between August 2018 and February 2019. It has been copied so often that we found its category figures republished as 2025 benchmarks, with no source attached.

So here is what a Shopping click costs now, where each figure comes from, and what none of them can tell you about your own shop.

The short answer

Merchant Center is free. Free listings are free. Shopping ads cost money only when someone clicks. With manual bidding, you set the most you are willing to pay per click.

The most recent public European figure we could find puts the median Shopping click in ecommerce at 0.36 EUR. That is the middle of a very wide market. Your own price can be a fraction of it or several times it, depending on what you sell, where, and in which month.

What is free, and what you pay for

Google is plain about the free part. “Merchant Center is a free tool,” says its help page, and free listings let your products “appear at no cost” on Google Search, the Shopping tab, Google Images, YouTube and more. In most accounts they are switched on by default.

The paid part is Shopping ads, and in Google’s words you’re “charged only when someone clicks an ad”. An impression costs nothing. And the click often costs less than your bid: Google says you are often charged less, “sometimes much less”, because “you only pay what’s minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the Ad Rank of the competitor immediately below you.”

With manual bidding, your bid is usually a ceiling. What you actually pay is set by the Ad Rank thresholds and the shops ranked below you.

There is no keyword list either. Shopping ads use “your existing Merchant Center product data (not keywords) to decide how and where to show your ads.”

What a click costs: the numbers we could verify

We looked for Shopping figures with a published sample, period and market. Most pages we checked failed at least one, and so do two of the three below: Optmyzr names no market, and smec does not say which period its median covers.

Source	Market	Period	Sample	Shopping CPC
smec Market Observer	Europe, ecommerce	Not stated (page updated 21 September 2026)	650 million EUR of ad spend	0.36 EUR (median)
Optmyzr, Prime Day study	Its platform, market not stated	June and July 2025	22,034 accounts in total (number running Shopping not stated)	0.29 USD
WordStream	United States	August 2018 to February 2019	671 client accounts	0.66 USD (median)

Three sources, three answers. smec and WordStream give medians. Optmyzr calls its figure an aggregate and a population average, not a median. And smec describes its own sample two ways: 650 million EUR on its CPC page, over 450 million EUR a year in its FAQ. It also sells a CSS, and does not say which CSS the shops in its sample use.

The spread inside one source is bigger than the spread between them. In WordStream’s data, the median Shopping click in art and music was 0.34 USD. In office and business needs it was 1.09 USD. Same ad format, three times the price.

One average hides which end of the range you are standing at.

Shopping versus Search: a comparison across years

You will also read that Shopping clicks are about 87% cheaper than Search. The version we found pairs WordStream’s 0.66 USD from 2019 with a Search figure of 5.26 USD from WordStream’s 2025 report.

WordStream’s latest Search figure is a median of 5.42 USD, from 13,474 US search campaigns between April 2025 and March 2026, across 23 industries. Attorneys pay 9.87 USD a click in it. Even its retail-looking category, “Shopping, Collectibles & Gifts” at 4.14 USD, is a Search figure.

When one source measures both in the same market and period, the gap shrinks. smec’s European ecommerce medians are 0.36 EUR for Shopping, 0.41 EUR for Performance Max and 0.43 EUR for Search. Shopping comes out about 16% cheaper than Search. Not 87%.

Compare numbers from the same source, or do not compare them.

Where the sources disagree

In the US, Tinuiti reported that Shopping CPC fell 1% year on year in both Q3 and Q4 2025, while clicks grew 15% or more. In Europe, smec reported Shopping CPC up about 13% year on year in Q4 2025. Same quarter, opposite directions. By Q3 2026, smec’s figure had cooled to around 2%.

They are not the same measurement. Tinuiti compares the same clients year on year, all under its own management, and only programmes that “remained active and maintained a consistent strategy”. smec reports medians across the European ecommerce accounts in its data, and does not say whether its year-on-year figure compares the same accounts. Tinuiti’s Shopping figure also includes Performance Max Shopping listings, while smec reports the two separately.

And Tinuiti names a US cause. Amazon left US Shopping auctions on 23 July 2025. Tinuiti says that likely weakened CPC growth there, and Amazon returned to Shopping auctions outside the US in August.

Neither is wrong, and neither tells you which one your shop resembles. A claim that Shopping costs are rising or falling needs a market and a method attached before it means anything.

What sets your price

Google lists six inputs to Ad Rank: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your ad assets. For a shop, that comes down to five practical things.

Competition. As the gap in Ad Rank between two ads grows, Google says, the higher one “may pay a higher cost per click for the benefit of the increased certainty of winning.” And since you pay what it takes to beat the ad below yours, more shops chasing the same search tends to put a stronger ad below you.

Category. The WordStream spread above: three times, cheapest to dearest.

Country. Location is part of “the context of the person’s search” in Google’s list. We found no current, public Shopping CPC per European country with a stated method, so we will not invent one.

Season. Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder of Optmyzr, puts Black Friday click costs “up 29% to 46% from the week before.” Optmyzr’s study of more than 4,200 accounts and 22,800 campaigns over the 2025 holidays found the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday had the highest click costs and the highest conversion rates. A week later, Standard Shopping CPC was still 10.2% above its pre-sale level, while conversion rate had fallen 7.3% below it.

Black Friday has the highest click prices. The week after is the one Optmyzr says “quietly costs the most”: prices still up, conversion rate down.

Q4 is not the only peak either. smec saw a sharp trough in January 2026 and a pronounced peak in June 2026, particularly in Search and Shopping.

Product data. With no keywords, your feed does the job keywords do elsewhere. Google says products with high-quality images “are more likely to show for relevant search queries”, and that retailers who added correct GTINs “have seen a 20% increase in clicks on average.” That figure is Google’s own, with no published method, so read it as a direction and not a promise. Field by field: Google Shopping feed optimization.

How to set a starting budget

There is no correct starting budget. There is a budget your margin can carry, and finding it is arithmetic. Two rules from outside:

• Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your gross margin. That is Vallaeys’ rule, from the same Optmyzr piece. At a 40% margin you break even at a ROAS of 2.5.
• Target ROAS needs volume. For Search and Shopping campaigns, Google requires at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days, counted at the conversion tracking level.

A worked example. These are round numbers chosen to make the sums easy. They are not benchmarks. 0.40 EUR sits near the European median above, and 2% is deliberately cautious: smec put European Shopping and Performance Max conversion rates at about 3.0 to 3.5% in Q1 2026, and WordStream’s 2019 US median was 1.91%.

	Example
Cost per click	0.40 EUR
Conversion rate	2%
Average order, excl. VAT	60 EUR
Gross margin	40%
Cost per sale (0.40 / 2%)	20 EUR
Most you can pay per sale (60 x 40%)	24 EUR
ROAS (60 / 20)	3.0
Break-even ROAS (1 / 40%)	2.5
Clicks needed for 15 sales	750
Monthly budget for those clicks	300 EUR
Average daily budget (300 / 30.4)	about 9.87 EUR

The daily figure uses Google’s own method: divide the monthly budget by 30.4. For most campaigns, Google may spend up to twice the daily budget on a given day, and no more than 30.4 times it in a month.

Now move one number. Drop the conversion rate to 1.5%, and each sale costs 26.67 EUR. That is above the 24 EUR your margin allows.

Same click price, and the campaign now loses money on every sale.

The click price is one of four numbers, and the other three are yours. Bidding: target ROAS for Google Shopping.

What the numbers mean for a small European shop

Most Shopping cost data you will find is American, and much of it comes from agencies and tool vendors measuring their own clients. Tinuiti manages over 4 billion USD a year. Optmyzr’s two studies above cover more than 4,200 and 22,034 accounts, and do not say how large those accounts are.

The median is not your number. A median across 650 million EUR of spend shows the middle of the market, not your category in your country.

Target ROAS has a floor. Google wants 15 conversions in the past 30 days, counted across your conversion tracking rather than one campaign. If your Shopping campaign has to earn them alone, the example above needs 300 EUR a month. Below that, you pick a different strategy.

A few sales swing the result. With 15 sales a month, one extra order moves ROAS from 3.0 to 3.2. Google itself suggests reporting values for 4 weeks or one to two conversion cycles, whichever is longer, before setting a target ROAS. At small volume, a good week is not a trend.

The costs besides clicks

Feed tools. Often optional: Google says Merchant Center can “automatically add product information through your online store at sign-up”. On Shopify, Google’s own Google & YouTube app is listed as “Free to install. Additional charges may apply.” The paid feed tools we checked on 25 September 2026 start at about 5 USD a month for a Shopify app covering up to 500 products. The entry plans of two standalone feed platforms were 39 USD and 54 EUR a month, with custom pricing at the top end.

An agency or freelancer. A comparison of eight North American agencies’ published prices, made by ppc.io in March 2024 and including itself, found fees of 10 to 20% of ad spend, or flat or minimum fees of 1,000 to 4,000 USD a month. Small sample, North America only, and more than two years old. We found no European equivalent with a stated method.

The CSS. In 21 European countries, among them Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, Google’s help page is blunt: “only CSSs can place Shopping ads.” You can use Google Shopping, Google’s own Comparison Shopping Service, or another one. Google Shopping’s share never appears as its own invoice line, because it sits inside the click price, so it gets its own section.

The CSS part of your click price

Google Shopping “bids on behalf of merchants it represents like any other CSS.” The European Commission requires it to be independently profitable in the EEA, and Google explains how, under the heading “How do I know how much CSSs bid in the auction on my behalf?”:

“Google Shopping currently ensures profitability by deducting a fixed percentage margin from each merchant bid before entering it into the auction.”

The margin, Google adds, “is included in the CPC paid by the merchant.” Google confirms the margin but does not publish its size. Around 20% is the figure commonly cited in the industry, and it cannot be read off an account.

So with a margin of around 20%, a bid of 1.00 competes as roughly 0.80 through Google’s own CSS, and as the full 1.00 through a CSS that charges a fixed fee instead of a margin.

Three limits:

• In Performance Max, it only touches Shopping inventory. Not Search text ads, Display, YouTube or Gmail. In Tinuiti’s US sample, video and non-Shopping inventory took 39% of Performance Max spend in December 2025. More in Performance Max versus Standard Shopping.
• With automated bidding, the gain can show up as more traffic at the same budget rather than a lower average CPC. Measure Shopping impression share before and after. Not CPC.
• It changes how much of your bid reaches the auction. It does not change your conversion rate or your margin.

An independent CSS charges its own fee instead. We looked at the twelve providers we found behind Danish Shopping ads. On prices we checked on 21 September 2026, the lowest published starting prices were 29 EUR a month, or 31 USD a month billed yearly. The highest was 75 GBP per shop per month, and five of the twelve publish no price at all. How the arrangement works is in what is a CSS partner.

Our own price, as an independent, Google-approved CSS:

	Paid monthly	Paid yearly, founder offer
1 to 4 shops	20 EUR per shop a month	140 EUR per shop a year (11.66 EUR a month)
5 shops or more	16 EUR per shop a month	112 EUR per shop a year

Prices exclude VAT. No binding, and 60 days to get your money back. For a single shop that is from 11.66 EUR a month. The rest is on the pricing page.

What this article cannot tell you

• Your CPC. It depends on your category, your country, this month’s competitors and your feed. Every figure above is a median or an aggregate, and averages hide the spread.
• A figure for your country. We found no current, public Shopping CPC per European country with a stated method.
• Whether a benchmark fits your size. Most samples come from agencies’ and tool vendors’ own client bases, and what holds for them does not always hold at a tenth of the budget.
• The size of Google Shopping’s margin. Google confirms it and does not publish it.

The only way to learn your own click price is to run a small campaign and read it off.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Shopping free?

Partly. Merchant Center and free listings cost nothing. Shopping ads are paid per click, and only when someone clicks.

How much does a Google Shopping click cost?

In European ecommerce, smec put the median at 0.36 EUR when it last updated its figures on 21 September 2026. Yours can sit far from that, depending on category, country and season.

Is Google Shopping cheaper than Search ads?

A little, compared like with like: 0.36 EUR against 0.43 EUR in smec’s European data. The often quoted “87% cheaper” mixes years and samples.

How much budget do I need to start Google Shopping?

Enough for the clicks your margin can pay for. Target ROAS needs 15 conversions in 30 days across your conversion tracking. If Shopping has to earn them alone, the example numbers above came to 300 EUR a month. Yours will differ.

Do I pay for impressions on Google Shopping?

No. Google charges Shopping ads per click, “only when someone clicks an ad.”

Why did my Shopping CPC jump in November?

Black Friday, most likely. Frederick Vallaeys of Optmyzr puts click costs 29% to 46% above the week before.