How much a month of Meta Ads and Google Ads together costs

The question most online store owners actually ask

Not "how much does Google Ads cost" or "how much does Meta Ads cost" separately, but "what does the month cost if I run both". It's the right question, because an online store that wants serious results rarely gets there on a single channel. Google captures existing demand, Meta creates it. Together they cover the whole customer journey, from first contact to purchase.

The short answer, for a Romanian online store in 2026, a realistic combined monthly budget rises with ambition and margin but always has the same structure, media spend (the money that goes to the platforms) plus campaign management. Below we break down each part and how to calculate your own figure.

The two parts of the monthly cost

A paid media monthly budget always has two distinct parts. Many people confuse them, and the confusion leads to wrong expectations.

1. Media spend, the money that goes to Google and Meta

This is what the platforms actually consume for impressions and clicks. It goes entirely to Google and Meta, not to whoever manages the account. It's the variable part you control through the daily budgets set in your campaigns.

2. Management, the cost of running campaigns properly

Whether you work with an agency, a freelancer, or in-house, managing two channels at once has a cost. The common models on the Romanian market are a commission as a percentage of media spend (often around 10-20%), a fixed monthly fee, or a mix. For detailed figures per model, see how much Google Ads costs in Romania in 2026 and how much Meta Ads costs in Romania.

The core rule, media spend is the investment that produces sales, management is the investment that keeps media spend from being wasted. Cutting the second to grow the first is the most common mistake.

How to split a combined budget between Google and Meta

Don't split 50/50 by reflex. The right distribution depends on what each channel solves for your business.

Google Ads catches people already searching for your product. Intent is high, conversion is faster, but volume is limited by how much people search. For an online store, Google money goes to Shopping, branded Search, category Search, plus remarketing.

Meta Ads reaches people who aren't searching for you yet. It creates demand, fuels discovery, and retains customers through visual remarketing. For visual products (fashion, beauty, home and deco) Meta produces the most new demand.

Practical split for eCommerce

• Meta Ads, 50-60% of media budget, for discovery and remarketing
• Google Ads, 40-50%, for Shopping, branded Search and search remarketing

This split isn't fixed. Early on, it's often smarter to put 70-80% on the channel that has already proven it works and 20-30% on the second as a test. For the full logic of distribution, read how to allocate ad budget across channels.

How the two channels complement each other

The reason to run them together rather than in turn is that they feed each other.

• Meta creates awareness. People see the product, don't buy immediately, but remember it.
• Some of them later search the brand or product on Google. Branded Search catches them there, at a low cost per click.
• Anyone who lands on the site without buying enters remarketing audiences on both platforms.

In practice, Meta fills the top of the funnel, Google harvests the bottom. If you stop Meta, branded search volume on Google drops too. The two channels aren't competing for the same budget, they're different stages of the same buying journey.

How much budget produces results that matter

Below a certain threshold, algorithms don't get enough data to calibrate, and money goes into the learning phase without producing stable results. On the Romanian market, the rough per-channel thresholds are:

• Google Ads. enough to consistently produce the conversions the algorithm needs to exit the learning phase, that is the 30-50 monthly conversions multiplied by your own cost per conversion
• Meta Ads. per active ad set, enough to produce the roughly 50 optimization events per week the algorithm needs

So a combined budget that is too small, split across both channels, risks being too thin on each. If total budget is small, it's often better to be present seriously on one channel than weakly on two. As media spend grows, both channels have enough fuel to produce volume and solid optimization data.

How to measure whether it's worth it

When you run two channels, each platform will claim the same sales. Meta tells you it contributed, Google says the same, and the sum of reported cost per acquisition will look higher than reality. The only correct picture comes from real sales tracked in GA4 or your CRM, not from platform reports.

The metric you watch at business level is return on ad spend (ROAS) calculated across the whole mix, plus total cost to acquire a new customer across both channels combined. These figures tell you whether the month was worth it, even if you can't perfectly attribute each sale to one channel.

What you can do today

Before deciding the combined monthly budget, calculate the maximum cost per acquisition your margin allows. Start from gross margin per order, subtract the profit you want to keep, and what remains is what you can spend to bring in a new customer. Multiplied by the number of customers you want per month, that gives your starting budget, not a generic rule copied from someone else. For an overview of online advertising costs in Romania, see the resource how much online advertising costs.