Digital marketing
Your ecommerce marketing budget: how much, and where?
July 13, 2026 · 7 min · ScaleLab
The two questions every merchant asks — how much should we spend on marketing, and on what — have real answers, but they are functions of your stage and margins, not universal percentages. Here is the framework we use to set budgets, and the allocation patterns that separate compounding stores from treadmill stores.
01Sizing: work backwards from unit economics
Start from what a customer is worth: contribution margin per order times expected orders per customer. That number, against your customer acquisition cost, defines how much you can spend to acquire growth profitably — a budget derived from economics rather than a percentage copied from a benchmark report.
Stage matters more than industry averages: an established store defending a position might spend 5–10% of revenue; a store in growth mode often spends 15–25%, deliberately trading current profit for market position. Neither is wrong — what is wrong is spending growth-mode money with maintenance-mode expectations.
02The allocation trap: 100% performance
Stores that put every krona into performance ads grow fast and then stall: the audiences saturate, CPAs climb, and there is no brand demand, no list and no organic presence to fall back on. Rented traffic stops the day the rent stops.
The durable pattern splits the budget three ways: performance marketing for immediate revenue, owned channels (email, SMS — the highest-ROI spend in commerce) for repeat revenue, and organic/brand investment (SEO, content) that compounds. A common healthy shape is roughly 60/20/20, drifting toward owned and organic as the store matures.
03Where the first budget goes
With a small budget, concentration beats coverage: one paid channel where your buyers actually are, run properly with real creative testing, will outperform three channels run thinly. Add channels when the first one's incremental returns flatten, not before.
And before scaling any of it: tracking. Ad platforms optimize against the signals you send them — a store with broken conversion tracking is paying an invisible tax on every single auction. Measurement is the first marketing spend, not overhead.
04Rebalance on evidence, quarterly
Budgets calcify: last year's split becomes this year's default while the market moves. A quarterly review against contribution by channel — not platform-reported ROAS, which double-counts — is enough to catch both the channel that deserves more and the one quietly decaying.
The discipline that makes rebalancing possible is the 70/20/10 shape: 70% on what is proven, 20% on scaling what shows promise, 10% on experiments. The 10% is not waste — it is how the next proven channel gets found before the current one saturates.