Google Ads dashboards report clicks, cost, and conversions for E-Commerce / Retail accounts, but they rarely show how much of that spend ever reached a real shopper. Lunio's 2026 benchmark data adds an invalid traffic (IVT) layer on top of standard Google Ads metrics, showing exactly where E-Commerce / Retail budgets leak to bots before a single purchase happens. Find out how much of your Google Ads budget is being wasted →
E-Commerce / Retail is the largest advertiser category on Google Ads, and its auction dynamics reflect that scale: dozens to hundreds of retailers compete for the same product queries, which keeps CPCs structurally lower than high-value verticals like legal or insurance but creates relentless volume-based cost pressure. Most accounts now split spend across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Display, Demand Gen and Video, each with a distinct intent level, inventory quality and IVT profile. The table below pulls directly from Lunio's 2026 E-Commerce / Retail benchmark dataset.
| Campaign Type | Avg CPC | IVT Rate | Avg CPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | $0.894 | 4.00% | $10.87 |
| Shopping | $1.030 | 4.57% | $28.61 |
| Performance Max | $0.398 | 6.49% | $15.09 |
| Demand Gen | $0.166 | 6.70% | $123.07 |
| Display | $0.090 | 6.32% | $3.96 |
| Video | $8.280 | 3.66% | $3,977.04 |
Mobile accounts for the majority of e-commerce traffic but a disproportionately smaller share of revenue: mobile drove 71% of sessions versus 21% for desktop, yet desktop still produced 33% of revenue against mobile's 57%, per Store Growers' citation of the Wolfgang KPI Report (2020 data). That gap matters for IVT exposure too, since mobile-heavy inventory in Display and Demand Gen placements is harder to audit for invalid clicks than desktop search traffic.
| Metric | Average | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| CTR | 1.65% | Blended across all Google Ads campaign types, per Triple Whale (Aug 2025–Jul 2026). This is calculated on total clicks, so Demand Gen's 6.70% IVT rate and PMax's 6.49% likely inflate it above what real shoppers are actually clicking. |
| CVR | 6.27% | Lunio's 2026 Search CVR for E-Commerce / Retail, from 49 conversion-tracked accounts. Removing the 4.00% IVT rate from the click denominator would push real CVR even higher than reported. |
| CPA | $10.87 | Lunio's 2026 Search CPA. Spend lost to invalid clicks is already baked into this figure, true cost-per-acquisition on human traffic alone runs lower. |
| ROAS | 3.27 | Per Triple Whale (Aug 2025–Jul 2026), down 3.54% year-over-year. IVT drags blended ROAS down by adding cost without adding revenue, which can make a genuinely profitable campaign look like it needs cutting. |
Campaign-type CPC, IVT, CPA and CVR figures in this article come from Lunio's 2026 monitor-only detection dataset for E-Commerce / Retail, covering account samples ranging from 91 (Search) down to 11 (Display, conversion-tracked). CPM, CTR and ROAS aren't part of Lunio's dataset, so those come from Triple Whale's August 2025–July 2026 benchmark set across more than 21,000 e-commerce brands. Display CPA ($3.96) and CVR (6.75%) are drawn from only 11 accounts and likely reflect retargeting-heavy campaigns rather than cold prospecting, and Video CPA ($3,977.04) from 18 accounts reflects click-optimised Video Action campaigns rather than typical view-based YouTube advertising, treat both as directional. For the full methodology behind Lunio's detection, see the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. Calculate how much you're losing →
Every Google Ads campaign type carries a different intent level, placement footprint and IVT profile, and most e-commerce advertisers run several at once. Understanding where invalid traffic concentrates by campaign type is the first step to protecting Smart Bidding from contaminated signals.
Search is the most transparent, highest-intent placement in Google Ads, and it shows: a 4.00% IVT rate from 91 E-Commerce / Retail accounts, the lowest among standard campaign types, at a $0.894 average CPC. Google's shift toward AI Max for Search changes this picture, though, AI Max exposure runs roughly 35% higher than the standard Search baseline, per Lunio's analysis of AI Max invalid traffic rates, which matters given Google's planned auto-upgrade of eligible legacy Search campaigns from September 2026, right before Black Friday.
Shopping carries a 4.57% IVT rate at $1.030 CPC, the highest standard CPC in the dataset, meaning each invalid click here costs more than a dollar. KURU Footwear's branded Google Shopping campaign ran at 19.85% IVT before auditing, nearly four times the vertical average, showing how concentrated invalid traffic can get on a single high-value campaign even in a controlled, product-feed-driven environment (see KURU's case study).
Performance Max runs a 6.49% IVT rate across 88 accounts, the second-largest sample in Lunio's dataset, at $0.398 CPC and a $15.09 CPA. Because PMax allocates spend across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover without placement-level reporting, advertisers can't see or exclude the specific inventory generating that invalid traffic, which means Target ROAS and Maximize Conversion Value are learning from signals they can't audit.
Demand Gen has the lowest CPC in the dataset at $0.166, but also the highest IVT rate at 6.70% across 57 accounts. Automated audience expansion across YouTube, Gmail and Discover widens reach cheaply, but a disproportionate share of that cheap reach is non-human, the campaign type that looks most cost-efficient on a per-click basis is also the riskiest.
Display shows a 6.32% IVT rate from 23 accounts, consistent with known exposure on the Google Display Network's broader publisher inventory. The sample is small, and Display's $3.96 CPA and 6.75% CVR almost certainly reflect retargeting-heavy accounts rather than cold prospecting.
Video posts the lowest IVT rate in the dataset at 3.66%, but from only 28 accounts, and the $8.280 CPC and $3,977.04 CPA reflect a small, click-optimised sample rather than typical view-based YouTube campaigns. Worth flagging: the verified rate for Google Video Partners inventory overall runs far higher, at 20.62%, per the platform-level figures in the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. E-commerce advertisers scaling Video spend beyond this small sample should expect exposure closer to that partner-network figure.
| Country | Avg CPC | IVT Rate |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $1.150 | 4.20% |
| United Kingdom | $0.520 | 6.62% |
| Germany | $0.560 | 6.49% |
| France | $0.280 | 4.27% |
| Australia | $0.760 | 4.73% |
| Canada | $0.460 | 5.30% |
The UK and Germany are double-risk markets for E-Commerce / Retail advertisers on Google Ads: both combine CPCs high enough to generate material waste ($0.520 and $0.560 respectively) with IVT rates above 6.4%, per Lunio's 2026 E-Commerce / Retail benchmark dataset. For a UK retailer spending £500,000 a year, a 6.62% IVT rate works out to roughly £33,100 in wasted spend annually. France is the most efficient market in the dataset, combining the lowest CPC ($0.280) with one of the lowest IVT rates (4.27%), while the US carries the highest CPC ($1.150) alongside a moderate 4.20% IVT rate, meaning the absolute dollar cost of each invalid click is highest there even though the rate itself isn't the worst in the dataset. For broader country-level context across other verticals, see Lunio's ad fraud data by country.
Blending Lunio's 2026 campaign-type IVT rates by typical e-commerce budget allocation (30% Search, 40% Performance Max, 15% Shopping, 10% Demand Gen, 3% Display, 2% Video) puts the average E-Commerce / Retail Google Ads account at roughly 5.4% IVT, per Lunio's 2026 benchmark dataset. For a mid-market retailer spending $1.5 million a year on Google Ads, that works out to: $450,000 × 4.00% ($18,000) on Search, $600,000 × 6.49% ($38,940) on Performance Max, $225,000 × 4.57% ($10,283) on Shopping, $150,000 × 6.70% ($10,050) on Demand Gen, $45,000 × 6.32% ($2,844) on Display, and $30,000 × 3.66% ($1,098) on Video, a total of $81,215 lost to traffic that never reached a real buyer. At Triple Whale's benchmark ROAS of 3.27, that $81,215 in wasted spend represents roughly $265,573 in lost revenue potential if it had reached real shoppers instead.
Some of that exposure compounds further where e-commerce advertisers feed secondary actions, email signups, wishlist saves, "notify me" requests, into Smart Bidding as conversion events alongside completed purchases. Those actions behave more like lead-gen conversions than transactional ones, and lead-gen conversion signals carry a 32.07% higher IVT rate than transactional signals, per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. Advertisers who blend the two risk teaching Target ROAS from a noisier signal than purchase data alone would provide.
This isn't theoretical. Represent, a premium streetwear e-commerce brand, found a single Performance Max campaign running at a 23.73% IVT rate during a key sales period, more than three times the vertical PMax average, accounting for an estimated £28,826 in wasted spend. After filtering that traffic, Represent's protected traffic converted at 3.67% versus 3.25% for unprotected traffic, a 12.86% uplift, while CPA fell 9.43%. In November 2025 alone, ROI on the Lunio subscription hit 25x.
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Benchmarks tell you what the market pays and converts at on average, but they can't tell you how much of your own account's performance is real. The gap between the CPC, CPA and CVR you're seeing and what you'd see with invalid traffic removed is exactly what Lunio measures, campaign type by campaign type, country by country. Treat the figures on this page as a starting point, then find out what they look like inside your own Google Ads account.
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Search campaigns average $0.894 per click, Shopping averages $1.030, and Performance Max runs lower at $0.398, per Lunio's 2026 E-Commerce / Retail benchmark dataset drawn from accounts active through September 2026. CPC varies significantly by campaign type, so a single blended average isn't useful for budget planning, use the figure for the specific campaign type you're running.
Blended across all campaign types, e-commerce advertisers see roughly 1.65% CTR, per Triple Whale's August 2025–July 2026 benchmark data. A CTR that's unusually high for a given placement, especially on Display or Demand Gen, can be a warning sign rather than a win, invalid traffic sources often click at a higher rate than real shoppers, so a spike in CTR without a matching lift in CVR is worth investigating before celebrating it.
Every published benchmark is calculated from total clicks and total spend, so invalid clicks are already baked into the numbers you're comparing against. Google's Ad Traffic Quality systems remove known bots and crawlers (GIVT) automatically before billing closes, but activity caught after billing closes is returned only as a billing credit, never a cash refund, and it may have already fed a contaminated signal into Smart Bidding by that point. Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) that mimics real browsing behaviour routinely passes through both stages, which is why post-filter IVT rates like the 4.00%–6.70% range Lunio measures across E-Commerce / Retail campaign types are non-zero.
Within Lunio's 2026 E-Commerce / Retail dataset, the US runs a 4.20% IVT rate, while the UK (6.62%) and Germany (6.49%) run noticeably higher, more than 50% above the US figure. France, by contrast, sits close to the US at 4.27%. The gap is large enough that advertisers running the same Performance Max or Shopping campaign structure across multiple geographies should expect meaningfully different invalid traffic exposure by market, not just different CPCs.