Why Google Shopping CPCs keep rising, and what to do about it
Google Shopping cost-per-click (CPC) continued to rise through 2025. Shoparize internal data across 21 EU markets and 25,000+ merchants shows an aggregate year-over-year increase of roughly 30% in FY2025, with the largest jumps recorded in Q4.
Broader market data points in the same direction. SMEC’s benchmarks show median Google Shopping CPC in Europe rising from roughly EUR 0.28 in April 2025 to around EUR 0.36 in April 2026. CPC was still up year over year in each of the recent quarters, although the pace of growth was lower than it was in mid-2025.
The smec dataset does not show the equivalent performance decline. Median return on ad spend (ROAS) stays broadly in line with the previous year, while average order value trends higher across much of the same period.
This is the environment Shopping teams are now operating in. The channel continues to generate demand, but the cost of capturing it has moved up. The questions that follow are practical: where margins still hold, which parts of the channel remain worth scaling, and how growth should be funded.
Why Google Shopping CPCs keep rising
More bidders with different economics
European Shopping auctions now include more large cross-border players than they did before.
smec points to Temu holding roughly 40% of the e-commerce market share across Europe, citing data from the European Commission and Eurostat. After the US tariff changes in May 2025, Temu and Shein increased ad spend in Europe; Temu rose 40% month over month in France and 20% in the UK, while Shein rose 35% in both markets in April 2025.
Moreover, in March 2026, JD.com’s Joybuy entered EU Shopping auctions, and within 31 days, more than 10% of monitored advertisers had already seen it as an account-level competitor.
A single Shopping query now brings together advertisers with different economics. Some can afford to stay aggressive for longer, which makes the same query more expensive to compete for.
This pressure shows up in broader search data. WordStream’s 2025 report shows CPC increasing across 87% of industries, with an average year-over-year rise of 12.88%. The pattern is familiar: commercial visibility now costs more.
More Shopping spend now runs through Performance Max
A significant share of e-commerce spend now runs through Performance Max alongside standard Shopping campaigns. Tinuiti reports that advertisers using both formats allocated 62% of Shopping spend to Performance Max and generated 61% of Shopping revenue through it in Q4 2025.
This makes competition less predictable:
→ budget allocation is less explicit,
→ inventory overlap is higher,
→ coverage expands faster than it did in a purely Shopping-led setup.
What to do as Google Shopping CPCs rise
Improve feed quality
As click prices rise, weak structures become more expensive to carry. Product titles, attribute completeness, product grouping, and market prioritisation move closer to the revenue line, so require closer attention.
Add a second traffic source
A more expensive Google Shopping environment raises the value of additional routes into the same demand. Comparison shopping placements widen coverage beyond a single auction. Shoparize.com alone reaches 2M+ monthly shoppers actively researching and comparing products, representing a separate traffic source and, by definition, incremental.
Move part of Shopping to pay-per-sale
Google Shopping continues to perform, and CPC inflation is now part of the market. As media costs move up, the setup around the channel needs to become more resilient.
CPC can remain where margins still support it; another part of the activity can run on a pay-per-sale basis, a form of CPA pricing where cost is tied to completed transactions rather than clicks. This gives the business another way to expand through Shopping without tying more growth to costs that keep climbing.
Shoparize Managed Ads as an incremental revenue layer
Managed Ads is Shoparize’s flagship product. More than 25,000 merchants across 21 EU markets use it to generate incremental revenue through Google Shopping.
How it works:
→ Shoparize funds the advertising
→ Shoparize launches, runs, and manages the campaigns
→ The merchant pays only for confirmed sales
Managed Ads runs on a separate Merchant Center ID. Google recognises the merchant’s own campaigns and Shoparize’s campaigns as the same business, deduplicates bids at the merchant level, and keeps the strongest bid from that merchant in the auction.
As a result, Managed Ads does not increase the merchant’s own CPCs or cannibalise the existing Shopping setup. The merchant keeps CPC campaigns where they continue to work well; Managed Ads adds a separate pay-per-sale layer alongside them.
Ready to add incremental revenue through Google Shopping? Get started with Managed Ads today.
